Wes Anderson in a Box: Framing The Grand Budapest Hotel
I know this is a blog about photography, but it’s also a blog about the way that we create and interpret imagery. I find Wes Anderson’s films a perfect focal point for this discussion about image, storytelling, and framing. Both because of what people seem to inherently understand about Anderson’s unique aesthetic, and also because of what people regularly misrepresent or ignore.
I’m not going to introduce Wes Anderson because if you’re reading this, you know his films. We all have our favourites- often the films which got us started with his 50s toned, highly symmetrical movies (mine is Rushmore). Today I’ll be talking about 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and later about 2021’s The French Dispatch, because these films present (to me) a progression of Anderson’s use of the cinematic frame as a storytelling device.
Note on history of format and aspect ratio
35mm motion picture film- that is, the film itself- wasn’t a particularly revelatory technology. Industrial processing for 70mm photographic roll film was already established, and filmmaker WK Dickson found that by splitting the roll in half you got two 35mm rolls which were ample enough to capture the image rendered by lenses of the time.
Like many stories in early film history, Thomas Edison stuck his head in, forcing Dickson to spend the next five years attempting in vain to establish a new standard. But in the end and to this day, the economics of 35mm film have kept it as the standard, first capitalising on 70mm film industrialization, and later on its own mass production before any other format had the chance to get off the ground.
Traditional spherical lenses project a circular image. We cut the sides off for convenience and to avoid the outside edges of the image circle, which tend to be blurry. The most judicious use of the image circle (beyond simply leaving it circular) is to square it, which remains the standard in some large format photography. This square is, however, at odds with human perception. Every person experiences vision differently, but with two round eyes spaced apart, we can fairly assume that most people see the world significantly wider than square, and the history of aspect ratio is the economics and technology of rendering a cinematic image that better resembles our own eyes.
Early widescreen was limited by lens and film fidelity. You can only cut so far into your image before degrading the quality, widescreen had some success in using larger format 70mm film, but the most common ratios sat around 4:3. A slightly wider square, which was codified as the Academy Ratio after sound was added to movies.
The 4:3 academy frame was wider than square, without significantly reducing the amount of film (and ergo fidelity) used by each frame. Throughout the 1930s and 40s the Great Depression cut into discretionary spending, 70mm film was considered too expensive to use, and further widescreen advances lay dormant.
By the 1950s, the mainstream adoption of television forced filmmakers to innovate. Widescreen implementations which were as simple as changing the matte in a projector were only possible by letterboxing already small tv screens.
In 1952, 20th Century Fox bought rights to a military technology which allowed for wide angle viewing from inside tanks via oval lenses, and coming out with The Robe a year later– the first film shot in ‘scope’ format. Anamorphic lenses squeeze the image on the way into the film plane, allowing twice as much width to fit into a piece of film. The image is in turn desqueezed by the projector, turning a 4:3 frame of 35mm film into a 1:2.9 image. In 1954 Vistavision was established as a more economical way to widen screens, flipping 35mm negative sideways to give an aspect of 1:1.5 which could be further cropped to 1:2 and the modern television standard 1:1.85 (16:9).
Aspect Ratio in The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a nesting doll of narratives. We open to the shrine of a dead author, a visitor holds a book (The Grand Budapest Hotel), and turns to the author’s picture on the back cover. We match cut to the author in an office in 1985, the author tells us about the way stories fall into your lap once the world knows your an author. The aspect ratio changes to 1:1.85 (16:9).
The film is going to pull this menouvre on us often, and it’s keen to make us aware that multiple threads of storytelling are going to take place. It also wants us to know that these stories are being buffed a little with a polish of nostalgic recollection. When our author calls the hotel, “a picturesque, elaborate and once widely celebrated establishment” we cut again to 4:3, and a bright pink hotel reveals itself against an obvious matte painting and a foreground of dimensionless buildings. This part of the story, the filmmaking insists, is literally flattened by layers of recollection as the author character declares, “The incidents that follow were described to me exactly as I present them here, and in a wholly unexpected way.”
Through the remainder of Grand Budapest the moving frame lines serve to remind us not only that there are multiple timelines, but that each timeline is filtered through its own series of storytellers. Wes Anderson’s visuals get flack for being so easily identifiable, but they have an in-text justification in Grand Budapest, where the further removed our author gets from the action, the more the world takes on qualities of the fanciful and make-believe.
Throughout the film, danger is framed by windows- the Zubrowkan army enter the film via a train window, they are spied through a window in the hotel, and Dmitri’s henchman Joplin pursues Deputy Kovacs, first visible through a bus window: Danger abounds, but the existential threat of war seems almost out of scope with the limitations of the story. In the scene of Gustave’s death the frame is robbed of its intense colour, too raw still for Zero the storyteller (Agatha’s death is given no screen time, only narration over imagery of their wedding.)
Why?
So the movie is a nesting doll of different narratives which get progressively distorted through storytelling. It’s a study in the stories we tell, the people and places, we remember, and how we remember them. But also. Why?
Why 4:3 (1.375:1 for pedants), 1.85:1, and 2.35:1? Each time period in the film lines up with the mainstream adoption of that aspect ratio, and so the changing aspect ratios can be considered another part of the set design, which changes dramatically from timeline to timeline. As the browning halls of the 1968 Hotel are rendered in brilliant pinks and reds when we flash back to 1932, so too does the ceiling of the cinematic frame literally grow taller. The perspective literally grows wider and- perhaps- more nuanced- with the historical perspective. Does the film suggest that we’re so far removed from the 30s that what we can perceive is literally cut off on the sides? It’s for you to decide.
It may seem quite contrived to suggest that the narrowing aspect ratio represents a neglecting of the edges of our historical perception, but evidence for this can be found in the text. Our dual protagonists, Zero and Gustave, are a refugee and a bisexual, respectively. Theirs are stories which have been sidelined throughout history, and positioning them in this historical context- even in what remains a comedic romp for most of its runtime. Asks us as audience to consider what stories and characters like Zero and Gustave have been sidelined.
Wes Anderson’s movies draw attention to their own filmmaking to the point of easy categorisation and parody. But too often I believe people categorise as an easy out from analysis.
The estrangement effect has roots in Chinese theatre and Russian Formalism, but was codified into Western theatre by Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s aim for the estrangement effect (verfremdungseffekt) was that breaking the illusion, and reminding the audience that they were viewing a piece of fiction would force them to engage with the underlying politics. Wikipedia’s description is quite elegant:
“By disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances and “fictive” qualities of the medium, the actors attempt to alienate the viewer from any passive acceptance and enjoyment of the play as mere “entertainment”. Instead, the goal is to force viewers into a critical, analytical frame of mind that serves to disabuse them of the notion that what they are watching is necessarily an inviolable, self-contained narrative. This effect of making the familiar strange serves a didactic function insofar as it aims to teach the viewer not to take the style and content for granted, since (proponents argue) the theatrical medium itself is highly constructed and contingent upon many cultural and economic conditions.”
“Disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances” may not be Wes Anderson’s obvious aim, but the fact that his films are so readily categorised and broken down may at least hint that the estrangement effect is in place. And what are the politics of The Grand Budapest Hotel? It concerns two fringe identities in the face of encroaching fascism.
It is in this way that Grand Budapest is tidily packaged in that thematic dichotomy can be found in the visual aesthetic, and the two feed back into one and other: The rose-tint of nostalgia against the cultural trauma of fascism.
It can seem counter-intuitive, when one of the major criticisms levied against Anderson’s films is that they hide lack of substance behind beautiful aesthetics. But if we consider that the opposite may be true, can the lush aesthetics of The Grand Budapest Hotel, especially during the aesthetic rug-pull of the tawdry 1968 hotel, be hiding its politics precisely within its visuals? The set designs of Grand Budapest Hotel took inspiration from ski resorts rendered in photochrom, a method of colouring black and white photography by hand. They appear stunning in their subtle pastel palettes. But at the same time, the colours they claim to represent are entirely fabricated- left to the artistic choices of the colourist. The hyperreality throughout The Grand Budapest Hotel reminds us that all is not what it seems, and the centering of characters who would have been sidelined by fascism and other historical oppressions serves to challenge our romanticised notions of pre-war Europe.
Which brings us back to the box. The shape of the box in which the Grand Budapest Hotel plays out literally changes shape throughout the movie. Within, it helps guide us through jumps between time periods, but outside of the box, the changing shape serves to remind us that it is the box that we are watching. That this is a fictionalised, romanticised and nostalgic rendition of a far different reality. I think, if you’ve been willing to follow me this far, the characteristic Wes Anderson visuals and irreverent humour do credit to this film. They make the film appear beautiful and whimsical, but in doing so, challenge the viewer to contemplate what parts of a story remain too painful to tell, what has recollection- and history in turn- brushed outside of the frame?