Ever since they could fit cameras on wheels,
film makers have been moving them around in every kind of way you could think up,
and even some you probably couldn't.
But more than just visual spice, a good camera move can move the story, too.
So to take a closer look,
these are five brilliant little moments in camera movement.
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In one way or another, we're all reading films.
We extract information and ideas and clues about the plot, the characters,
the people, to construct a mental representation of the story in our heads.
And sometimes that's just about as simple and straightforward as reading actual
words on screen, or listening to the words coming out of a character's mouth.
A little more complex, but nothing a basic primate can't handle, we watch action and
figure out what it is.
Beyond that, we make inferences as to things that are hinted at,
guess at character motivation, put two and two together to figure out the killer.
And we've talked before about how edits can say things themselves,
how there can be information embedded in a cut, but the camera has a voice, too.
Most of the time, that voice is quiet, a whisper we've learned to ignore.
It says, look at this and this, this is important over here, so we look and
we read the this, and we ignore the look at and go on about our day.
If you only ever move the camera for a motivated reason, as commercial cinema
usually does, for a reason that comes from the story, the characters, the plot,
it will disappear behind its motivations, its artifice will become invisible.
Maybe it's a physical reason, a character walks, so you need to follow them.
Or maybe it's a narrative reason,
you turn the camera to reveal some extra information that we need to know.
But, you don't just move the camera of its own accord, until you do.
Sometimes, a film maker moves the camera in a completely unexpected, unmotivated,
unexplained way.
It's not following a character, it's not just showing you something important.
It's almost as if the important thing is the movement itself,
as if there's information embedded in the move.
The camera separates itself from the story and the character and
speaks up loud enough that we begin to hear it on its own, as its own voice,
with things to say about the story that might not be coming from anywhere else.
And it can be really, really powerful.
Our first unmotivated camera movement, and
probably our most familiar is the slow push-in, this move happens all the time.
We even talked at some length about it back in our original
Brilliant Moments Breakdown, but
the slow push in is a perfect first example of the camera's voice being heard.
It's not reframing, just creeping slightly closer, it doesn't just say look, it says
look harder, there's something below the surface, there's more then meets the eye.
It knows how we would read a shot statically and
then asks us to consider it with just a little more importance.
And for a brilliant example, check out this twofer from the beginning of
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
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- About the wife confederacies, Jefferson Davis, yeah.
I didn't know you didn't, he did his duty by her.
- Okay.
- Well, I got him freaking killed.
- (Laugh) - No, I get it, I get it, I get it.
- The President of the Confederacy concenrned his wife's needs and
satisfied them.
- At this point in the film we've seen nothing more than a brief biography of
Jesse James.
We don't even done who Casey Affleck's character is, and yet, without even
a word, we know everything about what's happening here because of how it's shot.
Here, try it one more time with the push-in removed.
- He did his duty by her.
- Well I got him freaking killed.
- (Laugh) - No, I get it, I get it, I get it.
- Less meaningful, right?
This push end says something important is stewing inside this man's head.
While this one says, narrow your focus, this is more than a group of men,
look closer at the one in the middle.
But put them together and they become more than the sum of their parts,
the dual push-ins connect the meaning just as they're connected in motion.
And what comes out of that alchemy is a sense that there's a special moment
happening between the man with the gaze and the object of his gaze.
Some kind of special longing, or interest,
or desire that Casey Affleck feels towards the man in the middle of this frame,
all without a word of exposition, just simple camera talk.
Less common than the creep in is the creep out.
On one hand, graphically, it tends to cause a figure to grow smaller compared to
the world around them as if it is swallowing them up inside it's vastness.
And if we were to anthropomorphize the camera a little bit here,
it's also like it's abandoning the character and us with it,
we back away as if protecting ourselves from their pain or giving up hope.
Most recently, we were totally stunned by a moment in 20th Century Women that
employed this to incredible effect.
Now, this film is still very much in theaters, as of our recordings, so
we can't exactly play the entire scene here, but, if we all put our imagination
caps on and turn to the script, I bet we can conjure up an image of it.
Jamie, frustrated with life struggling to be a teenager and starting to butt heads
with his mother, goes to their boarder Abbie in a moment of (Bleep) it all,
and asks her to take him to a punk club.
And the next scene is simple, short, just one shot.
Dressed up now, they hurry out passing his mother, Dorothea,
on the stairway as she works in the hall, she asked them where they're going, and
he just says out with Abbie, and then leaves.
But what's simple on the surface is given immense depth by the camera.
As Dorothea stops them, asks after her son,
the camera pushes in with the very same creep from our last example.
But, when Jamie blows her off, just says, out with Abbie, it turns around.
Creeps back out instead as Dorothea is rebuffed,
it inches away, abandoning her just like Jamie does.
It turns what might be, even now, everyday scene on the surface,
into a micro drama of significant depth.
A mother desperately trying to connect with her growing son, the son neither
recognizing, nor much caring, off on his own way with hardly a look.
It is a missed connection, an unrequited request for intimacy.
And it's the camera that clues us into the emotional weight of it,
lingering just a little too long on Dorothea, alone in the stairwell,
backing away quietly in her longing and defeat.
Okay, back to some actual footage.
For our number three,
we're looking at a brilliant little moment when the camera actually turns away.
When it averts its eyes, specifically chooses to spare us from seeing something
we're led to believe is coming.
And we know what you're thinking.
Reservoir Dogs, either because you remember the ear scene, or because we're
straight up showing you footage from it right now, because we're trying to make up
for the whole number two where you had to look at actual words, God forbid.
And that shot is incredible, really, truly genius.
But for our number three, we're looking at the moment it takes its inspiration from,
from a little Hitchcock film called Marnie.
By this point in the film, Marnie has been blackmailed by a man named Mark Rutland
into marrying him after she was caught stealing from his company.
On their honeymoon cruise, she declares her discomfort with men and
refusal to be touched by them.
Mark is chill about this for like all of a couple days before deciding he's had
enough and forcing himself upon her, then we get this
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Doesn't that just hit you like a sledgehammer?
The film sets us up for horror with incredibly confrontational and
direct shots.
It is fear, and anger, and violence pointed right at us,
it is about to happen to us, we know it's coming, and then we turn.
The camera move is resigned, it's like it leaves no hope for
escape, it closes the door on an alternate ending, completely out of our control.
It is a afraid, deciding for
us that the trauma is too much to view turning us away as if in a flinch.
And it is coping, looking out the window at something peaceful and
distracting, waiting for the horror to pass, just as Marnie might in that moment.
Sure, the camera move spares us the graphic violence, but
it is all the more emotionally brutal for
its movement here, imagine if Hitchcock had just cut and eclipsed the act.
No turn, just a simple jump to the next scene.
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We would be left wanting, waiting, expecting but not resigning, fearing,
or coping.
So much of the conversation would be lost by cutting out this simple pan,
because that much of the conversation was happening within it.
Next up at number four, we have a moment of the distracted camera.
The kino eye that loses focus on the main plot, the main character,
the main action, and decides to wonder away.
The view point that has a mind of its own.
There's no reason for it in a motivational sense.
No characters look or movement or reveal.
It's as if it's lost interest in the story for
a moment to explore another part of the world.
Children of Men is an awesome modern example of this that's
smartly analyzed in video essays elsewhere.
But for our fourth brilliant moment, we're looking at the master of the wandering
camera, Antonioni for a moment in The Passenger.
- (Sound) All right,
I don't care.
- This moment is so particularly special, because it's as if the camera is speaking
how it normally does, whispering to us, look at this.
But then it points at what to look at, and there's hardly anything there.
And in the absence of an object, we suddenly notice the looking mechanism.
There's a vacuum within which the turn can be felt,
it breaches our normal expectations.
Acts us to interpret it on its own merits, and personally, we find it terribly
moving, lonely, empty, detached, similar to the creep out but not quite the same.
The camera is saying, this man's plight isn't important.
Perhaps it is an answer to his yells, and the answer is nothing.
Or perhaps the camera has the same motivation as it does
just a minute prior when, as he's spinning his wheels,
it gets distracted by the beauty of the sand carried on the wind.
It's sad, poetic even, but also whimsical and curious.
Antonioni spoke of the film in an interview stating that he, quote,
no longer wanted to employ the subjective camera.
In other words, the camera that represents the viewpoint of the character.
Indeed, searching, wandering, drifting, exploring like
this the camera becomes its own character and speaks with its own voice.
And finally, at number five, we're looking at the camera yelling.
Loud, noisy, noticeable, saying (Bleep), something just happened.
It could be from a fast dolly rushing in, or a quick unexpected Dutch tilt, but
for our number five,
we're actually looking at a brilliant little short film called The Candidate.
Burton, a Patrick Bateman type with a whole bag of chips on his shoulder,
is approached by a mysterious man from an even more mysterious society
with a compelling pitch.
The organization works to rid the world of their mutual
enemies by collectively wishing their demise upon them.
The secret is that their enemies have to know that there
are thousands of strangers out there wishing them ill and
in at least some small way kind of believe it might work.
Skeptical at first but increasingly interested we get this.
- They promised him that regularly every day they would be wishing for his death.
Until he could no longer stop the mystic
juggernaut that would make the wish come true.
- Okay, that's a little bit silly.
- The man died of a heart attack two months later.
- Whoa, wasn't that wild?
Didn't you just feel that?
Don't you just know that something big happened there?
In Crossing the Line, the whole scene changes visually.
Their closeups flip from screen right and screen left, to screen left and
screen right.
And since everything has changed visually,
naturally we must conclude that everything has changed elsewhere to.
And the trick is that if you take the camera out of it,
that particular event would seem rather minor.
But the camera move suddenly sliding all the way across the line of action is like
a big neon sign pointing at that little moment saying, look here dummies,
there's something important happening here.
And that sign, that camera move, that's the narrator, the director piping up and
giving you a big clue.
We don't wanna give it all away.
You'll have to watch the whole short to really see the brilliance of it.
But give it a watch and listen to what the camera is telling you because sometimes it
says the things that the characters aren't.
So, what do you think?
Have any thoughts on our picks?
Any other brilliant camera movements worth taking a look at?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix Movie Lists.
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