Thursday, September 11, 2014

Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951–1997


See James Dean, Robert De Niro, and More in These Vintage Hollywood Contact Sheets


Contact sheets, though, add another layer of interest. Not only do we see the movie being made; we see the photographer at work, too. If he or she’s been shooting fast, the repetitions almost constitute a stop-motion echo of the movie itself—kind of a rough draft, or even a proto-GIF. You can see, and almost hear, the ratchet-click of the hand and eye at work, shooting and winding, shooting and winding, as the lens roves the set—and gradually noses in on the one frame that captures it all. (This even before the photographer has marked up the sheet in grease pencil, flagging the best frames and excising the clunkers.) It’s a lesson to anyone who does anything creative: Even when you have the most beautiful subject in the world, it takes a whole bunch of tries to get anything right.



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