Notes on PINK FLOYD THE WALL By Richard Patterson & David W. Samuelson From AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER October 1982
PINK FLOYD THE WALL is a nightmarish vision of life as experienced by an English rock musician. It is a unique film in many respects. A major studio release that is reported to have cost $10 million, it does not have a conventional plot or even any conventional dialogue. It is an adaptation of a rock album, but the rock group Pink Floyd never appears on screen. It is a highly personal, semi-autobiographical statement, and yet it is a collaborative work involving several individuals with distinct styles and personalities.
The film is structured around a series of scenes depicting Pink, a rock star ensconced in a hotel room and undergoing what might be called a nervous breakdown. The film explores his consciousness with flashbacks and fantasy sequences using animation as well as live action, much of which has a surreal quality. Although the film may be disorienting to a viewer expecting a conventional story or plot, there is a logic to the structure. In terms of the information conveyed in the flashbacks there is a general chronological progression starting with the death of Pink’s father in World War II progressing through Pink’s childhood to his marriage and his career as a rock musician. Images from the flashbacks and fantasies recur throughout the film often in the form of variations which augment the significance of the initial image.
The wall, which is the central image of the film, represents the alienation which isolates Pink from others and from his own emotions. It had been built up gradually throughout his life by various forms of repression until Pink has reached a point of total isolation. His violence as he destroys the furnishings of his hotel room seems to be a desperate attempt to break through the wall. There is an animation sequence in which the wall is destroyed but the overall impact of the film is not a sense of liberation but of imprisonment. The climax of the film is a vision of a rock concert as a fascist rally with Pink as the leader of faceless masses of followers. This vision expresses both Pink’s contempt for his audience and his own self-loathing. It is followed by an animated fantasy sequence of a trial in which Pink essentially places his life on trial and his conflict with society is acted out internally.
Pink Floyd is a rock group consisting of Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Rick Wright, and David Gilmour. The group was originally formed in 1965 and was the first group in England to use light shows as part of their concerts. They have enjoyed a popularity and longevity perhaps rivaled only by The Rolling Stones and The Who, with their 1973 album “Dark Side of the Moon” selling over 17 million copies. Their concerts have become increasingly theatrical and spectacular with extensive use of slides and film as well as lights and special effects. They have also scored several films including ZABRISKIE POINT and LA VALLEE.
The album “The Wall” was released in 1979 and has sold almost 12 million copies. All the lyrics for the double album were written by Roger Waters as an attempt to come to terms with the alienation he felt from his audiences. Self-examination led him through the personal relationships in his life back to his childhood experiences and the result was a series of autobiographical songs expressing his sense of the repressive forces which shaped his personality and resulted in the isolation he felt. Even from the beginning, he saw the potential for a film in the material, and as soon as he had demo tapes of the songs he began discussions with Gerald Scarfe about animated sequences to be used first in concerts and ultimately in a film. Scarfe is a cartoonist and satirist whose drawings have been featured in Punch and the London Sunday Times. He had done an animated film for the BBC and an animated sequence for the concerts based on Pink Floyd’s 1975 album “Wish You Were Here.” He began work almost immediately on a sequence illustrating “The Trial,” one of the songs for The Wall album.
The staging of The Wall concert was the most spectacular of all Pink Floyd’s concerts requiring over 100 tons of equipment. It included a hotel room set, three gigantic inflatable figures designed by Scarfe (a woman, a schoolteacher, and a pig), a Spitfire fighter plane which crashed in flames on the stage, and 420 massive cardboard “bricks,” which were gradually assembled during the concert into a 30 foot high wall separating the group from the audience. Three synchronized projectors were used to project animated sequences first onto a circular screen at the rear of the stage and then onto the wall. The Wall concert was presented a total of 20 times to an estimated 500,000 people in 3 or 4 different cities.
Alan Parker describes in detail the evolution of the film from the concert in his article. Initially it was thought that the concert itself could be filmed. Pink Floyd had done a successful concert film in 1972, but The Wall concert did not lend itself to filming for a variety of reasons. Among these is the fact that the content of the songs cries out for subjective and surreal imagery. The animated sequences developed for the concert had this quality but photography of a real event-even one as unusual as the concert-could not hope to achieve the same degree of surrealism. Eventually the idea of using any concert footage at all was dropped, and the film developed into the highly subjective exploration of an individual psyche on the brink of madness by means of animation and carefully designed live action photography.
Since Gerald Scarfe had been involved in the visualization of the material from the beginning, he had the primary responsibility for designing the film. He drew illustrations for each sequence which were developed into extensive storyboard sketches used for planning both live action and animation. In some cases the same imagery was developed as both live action and animation for different parts of the film.
There are about 15 or 20 minutes of animation in the film which Scarfe designed and directed. Two extended sequences used for the concert were incorporated into the film, but the art work had to be adapted to the anamorphic format and rephotographed. In some instances it was possible simply to extend the black limbo surrounding the art to fill the anamorphic frame. In other instances additional art had to be created as, for example, in a scene where a wife of a teacher is beating him. By adding door jambs on either side of the scene so that the action appeared to be viewed from an adjacent room, it was possible to extend the art to fill the wider frame. Other sequences designed originally for the film rather than the concert were, of course, in the wider format.
Because no major animation work had been done in England in an anamorphic format, it was necessary to adapt a camera specifically for filming animation for PINK FLOYD THE WALL. Kent Houston and Chris King of Peerless Camera Company, who shot the animation, used a macro Panatar lens which was capable of focusing down to a 6½ wide field and devised a motorized focus control to permit follow focus on computerized moves up to about a 36 field. They discovered that the lens introduced a degree of distortion which resulted in a slight cropping of the artwork towards the center of the frame, but they compensated for this by providing the artists with field charts representing the distorted field. The artists were able to allow for the cropping and as King puts it, “It was never an effective problem in terms of what people were going to see on the screen, but I think because there isn’t really a Panavision lens designed to shoot animation, there are probably one or two things that could be improved in the system to give us a much more even field of focus from edge to edge. But by and large the results were very satisfactory.”
Some of the sequences involved multiple passes for shadow effects and backlit diffusion effects. “There was one sequence,” says King, “in the ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ sequence with the warlord where the dove was metamorphosed into a bird which becomes a bomber and flies through the sky over London. Eventually it turns into a warlord and bombers fly out of its belly. There are various explosions and effects in that setup over the top of London. We had a lot of mixes from one scene to another and they became very drawn out where we were doing shadow effects and then a lot of small neon effects for explosions and for glowing eyes. Each one of these effects was a separate run. We had the complication of having to use very large artwork with field sizes up to 29 to 30 inches across and there were multiple movements of the camera, the table top and peg bars at the same time with dissolves. I think as far as my experience of animation shooting goes it was the most difficult shoot I’ve done in all my life.”
One of the many things that originally attracted Scarfe to animation was the ability to metamorphose one image into another and many of the images in PINK FLOYD THE WALL are constantly changing before your eyes. Animation is also used to transform live images into abstractions or animated images.
For the live action sequences Scarfe’s designs were supplemented by the work of production designer Brian Morris and director of photography Peter Biziou. Brian Morris, whose recent credits include QUEST FOR FIRE and YANKS, was originally trained in theater design and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had previously worked with Parker on a BBC Television film and two short subjects. BUGSY MALONE was his first feature and his more recent credits include THE LIFE OF BRIAN and TIME BANDITS.
The key to the style for the live action sequences was achieving a degree of surrealism which was compatible with the animated sequences. From the outset Biziou realized he was going to have to create very strong images. “I was going to go for very strong contrast. I would be using, for instance, arcs with clear glass for hard shadows, this kind of thing. I decided to let myself be affected by the mood and words of the Floyd’s music and apply as much dramatic effect as possible (no filtration) because the 35mm squeezed neg was going to 70mm and through opticals. The Samcine Inclining Prism was also invaluable.” Much of the film was shot from extreme low angles to contribute towards the surreal effect.
Biziou describes an example of the way in which photography, art direction and animation combined to create a nightmarish effect. “The camera pulls back from a medium closeup of Pink in his armchair to a very wide angle and we discover either the room is very large or he’s very small. Then the shadow of his wife appears on the wall. She is walking towards him and growing in size and very smoothly her form becomes Gerald Scarfe’s animation which continues growing into a gross figure that is persecuting Pink. Brian Morris had to build a very large room and cheat the perspective. We kept Pink and all the furniture the same normal size so that as the camera pulls back you are given the impression that he’s totally alienated in this very, very large room.”
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Thank You Zoyd!!