The way Michael Mann frames characters in wide shots in Manhunter tells its own story, one of alternate hope, change, wariness, and uncertainty – also a power play between characters respective height and positioning against the horizon.
Vimeo user and writer / director Michael McLennan has created a new video entitled Mann On The Horizon, Introducing each element he wishes to examine, then using a split screen method to illustrate this idea through several juxtaposed scenes. The first, and the opening of the film, is one of the most beautifully arresting of director Mann and DoP Dante Spinotti’s compositions, and deceptively simple. Will Graham (William Petersen), the burned-out forensic profiler, is residing by the beach when his former boss Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) comes calling, hoping to draw him back to catch a killer “on a lunar cycle“. He’s desperate. They sit, on a piece of bleached driftwood, facing away from each other, negative space between them, the shot dominated by two horizontal lines that mark the delineation between sand, sea, and sky. Graham’s head is dipped slightly below the level of Crawford’s, a subtle illustration of the struggle going on, the pulling of a thread back into the monster’s lair. The mid-point curve of the branch exactly hits the horizon, and separates the two.
The complex villain, Francis Dollahyde (Tom Noonan) and blind co-worker and unexpected, complicating love interest Reba McClane (Joan Allen) are also framed deliberately against the horizon, the morning after their hook-up. As McLennan says:
“It’s a morning after, but she doesn’t know he’s a killer, and he’s caught in the tension between his feelings and his inclinations. The romantic qualities of the image contrast with the tension of a long take from a long lens, but don’t disregard the horizon position. As uncomfortable as Graham is buried below the horizon at this moment in the narrative, his nemesis is even more uncomfortable above it.”
