Talking About the Movies

With Frank Beaver

CREATIVE GEOGRAPHY

One of the most engaging and best acted films in this doldrums-period of movie releases is the Michigan-located domestic comedy The Upside of Anger.

In the film's narrative the incomparable Joan Allen portrays a venting, drown-your-sorrows-in alcohol mother of four teenage girls. She is trying to deal with her daughters' lives and the pain inflicted by her husband's sudden disappearance from their posh life in one of Detroit's posh suburbs. The family lives in an area where the homes are grand but reserved edifices, set along plush, tree-lined streets. Surely Birmingham: (that's where the film's writer-director-co-star, Mike Binder, grew up).

We also know this is supposed to be a Detroit setting because the film's downtown locations, e.g., the WRIF (Baby!) Radio studios, are always seen immediately following a panoramic long-shot of the city's riverfront skyline, with the unmistakable Ren Cen dominating the scene.

There are other tell-tale signs: when one of the daughters suddenly falls ill, the mother rushes by automobile to the hospital. Tracking cutaway shots to highway signs (I-94, the I-275 bypass) indicate that the car is headed west. One might presume to University Hospital in Ann Arbor. In another scene of some length the film's romantic hero, Kevin Costner, wears a Mr. Stadium Cleaners tee-shirt with the subscript "Ann Arbor, MI Since 1982."

When a film appears to have been shot in and around a geographic area with which the filmgoer is familiar, a distracting thing happens. At least it happens to me. I begin hunting the screen for further provincial images that will signify that this is a film story taking place where I live, or thereabouts.

But in the case of The Upside of Anger there were no more—no cutaway to the gigantic Uniroyal tire by the highway, no People Mover tracking across the cityscape, no Dutch-angle shot of the University Bell Tower.

They weren't really needed because the scant half-dozen or so cutaway shots actually taken in the Detroit area and adroitly inserted among staged scenes had effectively performed that unique cinematic trick known as "creative geography."

In its simplest form creative geography can occur when a character in an exterior shot is seen entering a building, and the interior scene, which immediately follows, has been filmed—for economic or practical reasons—inside another building.

In a 1907 one-reel melodrama, Rescued From An Eagle's Nest, director Edwin S. Porter gave away the trick of creative geography in a scene that showed the hero (about to rescue a baby that has been carted away by an eagle) being lowered by rope over the edge of a cliff; this shot was followed by one from a low angle looking up toward the hero as he continued his descent to the cliff's ledge. Although the action of the two shots cut together perfectly, the scene's geographic continuity did not. Porter had filmed the first shot in an actual outdoor setting and the second in a studio with the cliff's wall having been painted on canvas scrim. Even the most naïve of early filmgoers couldn't have been fooled by that attempt at creative geography.

A particularly clever variation on the use of creative geography occurred in the short film adaptation of August Strindberg's one-act play The Stronger. The drama is that of a woman who encounters her husband's mistress at a sidewalk café, and in a cathartic monologue relates how she has adapted herself to some of the mistress' ways (and avoided others) in order to gain a stronger hold on her husband.

To reinforce the thematic idea of the wife's persona having evolved into her rival's, the filmmakers had the actress Viveca Lindfors portray both characters. To achieve the illusion of two women sitting opposite one another and conversing at a café table, the film's two-shots were framed by reverse-angle, over-the-shoulder camera compositions, with the back of a stand-in representing the non-facing character. In individual close-ups of Lindfors, the use of contrasting makeup and costuming created the impression of two very different people, physically and emotionally.

Although filmed in geographic halves, The Stronger, when edited, projected entirely credible spatial and relational unities that also worked symbolically to enhance the plot's dramatic intentions.

In a recent conversation with a former Michigan student who was involved in the making of The Upside of Anger, I learned that most of the film's staged scenes had not been shot in downtown Detroit or in one of its suburbs, but in a London, England, suburb, Ealing, home to the famed Ealing Studios. I was impressed; the creative geography scheme worked for me and I liked the film a lot—not because of its setting but because of its collection of spirited characters, and because of terrific performances by the seven principal actors.

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.