The other night a friend told me they thought the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, seemed like a parody of a Wes Anderson movie. Sure, his trademarks are all there: an overabundance of colour; comic snap-zooms to pick up on an un-noticed detail; his obsession with typography and hand-written notes; an erudite narrative track over a piece of dainty baroque music; a parade of art-house faces, some of whom are unrecognisable, and so on. A veritable surfeit of Andersonness but what about this particular film makes it seem so much more over-the-top than his previous work?
I think it’s this: the picture is square. Apparently to visually demarcate the story’s major time periods, Anderson used three different aspect ratios: 2.35:1, the standard ‘blockbuster’ movie ratio; 1.85:1, equivalent to the widescreen 16:9 of a high-definition TV or iPhone 5; and, lastly, the ratio most of the trailer shots are in, 1.33:1 – the boxy shape of movies before Cinemascope and other wide ratios gained traction in the 1950s, allowing filmmakers to put the whole wide world up there on the screen.
Ten years ago Gus van Sant shot Elephant, his film about a Columbine-esque massacre, in the 1:33:1 ratio; he was hardly the first director to use the format in the 50 years since the so-called “widescreen revolution,”* but the film’s nightmarish atmosphere – its claustrophobia-inducing mood—is generated primarily through the constricted frame. (Some overseas home-video markets, including ours, were lumped with a 16:9 version; it’s a considerably less gut-wrenching experience.) In the decade since, 1.33:1 has been employed by directors as varied as Kelly Reichardt (with Meek’s Cutoff), Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank), and Miguel Gomes (Tabu), with each of them making alternately artful and emotive use of the format.
That’s the thing about this old-timey ratio: it exacerbates whatever’s in the frame, gives it no wiggle room, no space to spread out. Widescreen ratios opened up the frame; the Academy ratio, as it’s also known, lops off the sides and closes things up again. So it’s no wonder that The Grand Budapest Hotel – its fanciful, vaguely exotic title itself near-parody – might strike some viewers as jokingly ostentatious: Anderson’s already fussed-over compositions are put into an even smaller box, like insects pinned down in one of his character’s science-fair projects.
Anderson’s films always nod to previous works – the influence of Orson Welles on the look of The Royal Tenenbaums (particularly The Magnificent Ambersons and that perennial, cross-genre reference point, Citizen Kane), for example, has been well-documented – but less mention has been made of Anderson’s stylistic choices in a more generic sense. The cinematographer of the Powell & Pressburger film The Red Shoes, Jack Cardiff, shot that picture in the Academy ratio because, he said, there was no more perfect way to frame a pirouetting ballerina. Hopefully The Grand Budapest Hotel, with its poster teasing innumerable doll’s-house shots, has the director showing us something completely new in an old way.