silver nitrate notes

12 Angry Men and the Shrinking Room

9 may 2012

Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) made 12 Angry Men in nineteen days, on a single soundstage, for under $350,000. It was his first feature. He had been directing live television for years and the film inherits the discipline of that work: rehearsed performances, long takes, blocking that gives every actor a clear physical relationship to every other.

What Lumet and his cinematographer Boris Kaufman (1906-1980) did with the room is the technical achievement worth talking about. The film takes place almost entirely in one jury room. The danger of such a setup is monotony. Lumet and Kaufman's solution was to make the room shrink.

In the first act, the camera is above eye level. Wide-angle lenses, around 28mm, are used for groups and conversations. The ceiling of the room is rarely visible. The space feels generous, even airy. Then, slowly, over the film's ninety-six minutes, the lenses get longer. The 28 becomes a 35, then a 50, then by the climax a 75 or longer. The camera also drops, gradually, until the final scenes are shot from below the table line. The ceiling becomes oppressive. The walls feel close. The men, photographed in long-lens close-ups, are pressed flat against each other in the depth of the frame.

I have not been able to confirm whether Lumet planned this lens-and-angle progression in pre-production or whether Kaufman developed it on the set. The result is the same. By the time Henry Fonda is alone with Lee J. Cobb in the film's final extended exchange, the cinema we are watching has nothing to do with the cinema we started with. The room has not changed. The way the camera describes the room has changed.

Kaufman is sometimes underwritten in histories of the period because his American work was overshadowed by his earlier collaborations with Jean Vigo (Zéro de conduite, L'Atalante) and his Oscar-winning On the Waterfront (1954). But 12 Angry Men is the film of his I return to most often. The technical premise is so simple, the execution so total, that it functions as a tutorial on what cinematographers can do that nothing else in the medium can do.

Lumet wrote about the lens progression in his book Making Movies (1995). It is the best book on directing by a working director, and the chapter on 12 Angry Men alone is worth the price of the book.

[ « prev: Frankenstein · next: L'Atalante » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Lumet, Sidney. Making Movies. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
[2] Rapf, Joanna E. (ed.). Sidney Lumet: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
[3] Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. University Press of Kentucky, 2nd ed. 2001.
[4] AFI Catalog of Feature Films, entry for 12 Angry Men.