Once Upon a Time in Hollywood brings together the panoramic image of its characters with series, adverts and films that are part of their work. Changes in texture and format make it possible to recognise the different screens that organise their lives.
A city surrounded by circulating images
Rick Dalton makes a living by appearing in images that other people watch from their homes or in a cinema. The film presents that relationship from the outset, when a television interview introduces the actor and his stunt double. The audience receives a manufactured introduction for another audience within the fiction. The questions, framing and attitude of those being interviewed belong to a recognisable professional publicity format.
That opening establishes a rule that will continue throughout the film: images can change their status without leaving the same characters behind. Rick can be a man worried about his career, the star of an old series, or a performer trying to remember a line on a new set. Visual texture and aspect ratio help to distinguish these spaces, even though the film also plays with delaying certain revelations.
The main narrative uses anamorphic 35mm for the most part, while the recreation of certain television materials resorts to black and white and a framing closer to that of period televisions. There are also materials in smaller formats. That documented variety prevents the tribute from being described as a homogeneous surface of nostalgia. The film brings together different ways of recording, presenting and consuming images, each linked to a specific situation.
The interest does not end with the grain simply looking old. An opening title sequence organises anticipation for a series; an interview sells a personality; an advert turns an actor into the mouthpiece for a product. The film recognises those functions and incorporates them into the experience of its characters. Hollywood appears as an industry that manufactures both fictional scenes and ways of making the public remember and recognise its performers.
Television preserves and limits Rick's image
Bounty Law allows Rick to continue existing as a recognisable hero even when his professional position has changed. The television material preserves a version of him that circulates outside his present. That persistence can be useful because it gives him fame, but it also ties him to a type of character he struggles to move beyond. The home screen keeps alive a success that no longer guarantees the next job.
When Rick and Cliff watch one of his appearances on television, the film also shows a form of professional camaraderie. Both know the work behind the image and can enjoy the result. The set does not function as a neutral window onto a distant world: it gives the characters back something they have helped produce. The scene brings leisure, pride and an assessment of craft together in the same domestic space.
The recreations of adverts broaden that relationship with public exposure. In the Red Apple advert, Rick has to sustain a voice and expression suitable for selling the fictional brand. The difference between the promotional performance and his reaction outside it makes the effort visible. A familiar face does not convey spontaneous emotion simply by looking at the camera; it may be carrying out a task to which it has an uneasy relationship.
It is worth distinguishing between the theatrical versions and their extra materials. The advert associated with Rick's credits is not the same as all the fake commercials shot for the project. Other segments circulated as extras or accompanied a re-release. Bringing them together without that distinction would produce an imaginary film in which all the materials appeared within the same edit. The television tribute also exists around the feature, but each piece retains its own mode of presentation.
The medium takes part in a memory of work
The cinematography of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood allows those materials to relate to one another without seeming identical. A change in proportions can make us feel as though we are watching a broadcast or a fragment of another work, while the return to the main frame restores breadth to the space inhabited by Rick, Cliff and Sharon. The visual difference organises levels of representation that the viewer can follow even without knowing the names of the cameras or emulsions.
The use of celluloid does not mean that the film lacks digital processes. Production documentation describes work that combines negative, prints and digital finishing. That coexistence is important for understanding Tarantino's defence of celluloid without turning it into a myth of technical purity. The choice of medium expresses an aesthetic and working preference; it does not automatically eliminate all the later tools of editing, colour or compositing.
The film also distinguishes between looking at an image and belonging to it. Sharon goes into a cinema and watches her own work alongside spectators reacting to the performance. Rick depends on others continuing to recognise his face. Cliff takes part in the making of images that rarely present him as a star. The different supports and screens help to represent that unequal distribution of recognition within the same industry.
The tribute thus acquires a concrete dimension of craft. The opening titles, the adverts and the television fragments remind us that film and television are built through performances, repetitions, formats and circulation. Celluloid gives that world a texture, but the people provide its conflict. Rick can be preserved for ever as the hero of a series and, at the same time, fear the next day: the image remains while the career still has to keep finding work.
More context in the guide to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.