I just now saw the Michael Caine movie Get Carter, and was stunned by what a perfect storm of visual ugliness it was. The movie portrays the activities of the criminal underground in the North of England in 1970. It’s shot in a semi-documentary style, with real locations, crowd scenes full of locals, and seemingly a lot of natural light. It’s an economically depressed area. Everything is old and damaged. There’s trash everywhere. Surfaces all look sticky. Everyone’s hair looks like Seinfeld when there wasn’t enough pressure in the showers: lank and waxy. Women’s makeup looks like tempera paint, and the men all have shining sweaty faces. The beach is a brownfield and the water is opaque black. The sky is never blue. Clothes are poorly fitting stiff polyester slabs. Interiors are cluttered, with peeling walls and stains, even in the ‘nice’ places. Dancers in the disco stand in place and spasm, but nobody seems to be having fun. Maybe it’s because of the grimy carpets. The color is all washed out browns and greys. All in all, Newcastle looks like a real shithole populated by gurning freaks. This is on top of the subject material about mobster pornographers, betrayal, and murder.
I lived through the 70’s. I don’t remember it looking this bad. Would these all have been conscious choices of the cinematographer and director? Would this have stood out as particularly ugly to an English filmgoer of the early 70’s, or did normal life look like this back then? I’d have thrown myself off a parking ramp staircase if life was really as dismal as this movie portrays. The whole aesthetic was horrible.
Anyway, can anyone explain the visuals here from a technical or creative standpoint? Anybody have examples of uglier movies? The only other one I can think of is Pink Flamingoes, which was trying to be ugly and offensive.
(Snowboarder Bo) No. But it seems like surrealism or other ‘experimental’ works should be in a separate category from major motion picture releases. I mean, there’s ‘trying to make things look bad’ and then there’s ‘things just happen to look bad already’. I get the sense that the filmmakers for Get Carter were happy to capture some ugliness and didn’t try to pretty things up. The use of long lenses and minimal lighting probably added to the effect. But I don’t think that they went out of their way to make those locations look worse than they really were. Or maybe they did; that’s partly what I’m curious about. Would those characters have been good-looking or fashionable at the time? Would the blue cinder block house with shag carpeting and a mirror wall and a green-lit fountain have been chic? Or would it all have been cheap and tawdry even then?
I’ve never seen the movie but noticed it was on Netflix or Hulu or something and I’ve been meaning to watch it soon. Since I haven’t seen it I can’t say, but I thought Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel had a very ugly look to it, and it was a very ugly story of a very dark person, I did enjoy it though.
I don’t know if Taxi Driver or The French Connection could be called uglier than Get Carter, but they’re certainly in the running.
While I’m thinking about it, one could nominate the cult comedy classic Slap Shot as well. I grew up in the place where it was filmed (Johnstown, PA) and the whole wintry, corroded dying-steel-town aesthetic of the film’s visuals was spot on.
Meanwhile, just this Spud’s opinion, having not been to Newcastle back in the day, but I’m pretty sure the look of Get Carter was a conscious and careful choice by the director (Mike Hodges) and was meant to embody the moral rot of pretty much the entire cast.
Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia (1983) is pretty ugly. Ditto Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). In fact, now that I’ve gone there, Harmony Korine has several “ugly” films, including Gummo and Trash Humpers.
actually a lot of 70s films were grungy and ugly … even if they were portraying an earlier time peroid … i think some of it was the film and cameras in use then …
No, it was mostly post-nouvelle vague naturalism. Particularly in Britain you had your Ken Loach doing pure anti-Hollywood movies, avoiding any trace of glamour.
Sure - a couple that’d give it a run for its money, anyway.
Edna the Inebriate Woman (like, daaaank)
Combat Shock
The Panic in Needle Park
Bad Boy Bubby
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
The Blockhouse
not quite in the same category, but I wouldn’t call The Conversation sexy
How Awful About Alan
Pretty Woman
Los Olvidados
When Dwarves Started Small
Hour of the Wolf
The Warriors
Even Dwarfs Started Small isn’t an ugly movie in the OP’s sense. Some of the action is ugly (and some is gut-bustingly funny), but the Lanzerote “prison” setting is quite picturesque, even in B&W, so I don’t think it meets the OP’s criterion of “visually ugly”.
It’s an interesting thing. Two movies I thought of were Monster and Precious, because in both of those movies they deliberately de-glamorized the characters. So I figured the directors and set designers had probably also made an effort to make the rest of those movies unattractive as well.
But I checked and I was surprised to discover that wasn’t the case. While the characters were unattractive, the settings were not. They weren’t sparkly bright but they were no worse than average for a movie with an urban setting. As is usually the case, the settings looked better than their real life equivalents do.
I don’t know if this was a deliberate decision; that they figured it would make the characters stand out more. Or if it was perhaps the absence of a decision; that while the filmmakers intentionally made the characters unattractive, they forgot to put the same effort into the settings and those ended up looking like typical movies settings - ie better than the reality they were supposed to be portraying.
Watch the 1984 version of George Orwell’s 1984. They wanted to depict Orwell’s dystopian England as he described it, so it truly is a depressing mess.
The wonderful thing is, they shot it on location, in Britain, during the precise time the story is alleged to take place. They didn’t have to build the sets or go out of their way to find ugly, depressing locale in then-present-day London.
I would bet most interiors are actually sets, so if they look grimy, peeling, run down, stained, then it was likely a deliberate choice. Given the subject matter, I could see why they’d do that to set a tone.
Yeah I didn’t mean to sound like I was knocking it, it’s a great piece of cinema and I was surprised how good Keitel was in it, having not seen him in much up to that point other than like Reservoir Dogs.
Solondz does de-glamorize his characters. But I don’t feel I can make the same comparison with his movies. Solondz’ movies generally have middle-class suburban settings where you wouldn’t expect to see the same kind of visual ugliness you’d see in impoverished settings like Monster or Precious had.
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