silver nitrate notes
a personal log of classic black and white cinema
navigation
currently watching
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Dreyer). second viewing this month, on the Norwegian-print restoration.
recent updates
14 apr · published Toland piece
09 apr · archive tidied
02 apr · april watch log added
27 mar · fixed broken Murnau link
14 mar · new guestbook entries
visitors
072,700
mailing list
new posts by email. two to four a year.
King Kong and the Empire State Composite
18 jun 2014
Merian C. Cooper (1893-1973) and Ernest B. Schoedsack directed King Kong (1933) at RKO on a budget of around $670,000, which was high for the studio in the depths of the Depression. The film made back its cost in its first weekend and saved RKO from bankruptcy. The cinematographer of record was Eddie Linden, with J.O. Taylor and Vernon Walker on effects photography. The stop-motion animation that made the film possible was Willis O'Brien's, working from sketches by Marcel Delgado.
What O'Brien had done, and what he perfected on King Kong, is a technique now called rear-projection composite with stop-motion foregrounds. The Kong puppet, eighteen inches tall, was filmed frame by frame against a painted glass background. A screen behind the puppet showed rear-projected footage of live actors. The camera captured both layers at once. To modern eyes, the joins are visible. To 1933 audiences, the joins were not.
The Empire State Building sequence is the famous one. Kong climbs the building. Fighter planes attack him. O'Brien's animation of the ape's movements is the technical achievement; Walker's effects photography of the planes is the atmospheric one. Each plane was a small model suspended on wires in front of a painted sky matte. The plane-on-Kong compositions were built by superimposing three separate passes: Kong on his matte, plane on its matte, and a third pass of hand-painted muzzle flashes. The three passes married in the laboratory.
The sexual politics of the film are more complicated than the blonde-in-ape-arm posters suggested at the time and more straightforward than modern academic readings often propose. Kong is an exoticised monster photographed in the vocabulary of 1933 American racial anxiety; Fay Wray's Ann is what he is photographed wanting. The film is an artifact of a particular moment in American popular culture. That it also happens to contain, in O'Brien's animation, one of the great technical demonstrations of what stop-motion cinema could do, is why it survived the moment.
| film | King Kong (1933) |
|---|---|
| directors | Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack |
| cinematography | Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker, J.O. Taylor |
| animation | Willis O'Brien |
| stars | Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot |
| studio | RKO Radio Pictures |
| runtime | 100 min |
| format | 35mm, 1.37:1 |
[ « prev: The Lady Vanishes · next: Rome Open City » ]
» leave a comment in the guestbook
sources
[1] Goldner, Orville and George Turner. The Making of King Kong. A.S. Barnes, 1975.
[2] Vaz, Mark Cotta. Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper. Villard, 2005.
[3] Morton, Ray. King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon. Applause, 2005.
[4] O'Brien, Willis. Interview in American Cinematographer, March 1933.