It's been a couple months, but we haven't forgotten about our best shot.
And while our last three installments had us focused on them by scale, by group and
by subject, this time we're looking at them by motion.
So here we go again.
These are our picks for six more of the best shots of all time.
(Music)
Movies have a lot of motion.
I mean it's right there in the name.
And cameramen have been moving their units in just about every way you can imagine,
since just about soon cameras were lighting up to do it.
Cranes and trains, and automobiles, and strap to people, and places, and things,
and iguanas, and crash into the ocean, and thrown out of window, and
jump off a roof and CGI simulated into the most impossible of places.
And in asking ourselves how we wanted to dissect the topic,
we first had to ask what possible ways there are to move a camera and
if you're a math nerd in 3D space there are exactly six.
Around three different axis of rotation and
across three different axes of translation.
Any camera movement in 3D space is ultimately some combination of these six
different degrees of freedom.
And in camera terms, they have names.
You can rotate with a pan, tilt, or cant, and
you can translate with a push, track, or a boom.
So for our first foray into motion, we're keeping it simple and
limiting ourselves to these kinds of moves.
No craning with the tilt, no tracking with a pan, and for the love of god, no orbits.
Just basic movement along one axis only with a look at each in turn.
(Sound) So first things first,
we're looking at the pan, the most natural of the rotational moves.
Performed from a tripod, the pan is a simple, horizontal turning of the camera.
It's the direction we ourselves turn the most,
as we are largely horizontal moving creatures in a horizontal moving world.
So to us, a pan feels like scanning, like looking around.
It's an attention changer.
Following someone as they walk by or noticing something in In our periphery
it can feel like spinning around in the middle of action or
like tracking it from far away.
It reveals things, it connects them in proximity as it turns from one to another.
Some our favorite pans come from Rear Window where Jeffrey scans Thorwald's
apartment through his binoculars.
And in the work of House of Sin, in long scenes with patient and
restrained long takes that pan ever so slowly or quickly and
jerkily in the whip pans of Wes Anderson.
But if there's a master of the pan,
there's no name that comes to mind quicker than Kurosawa.
And while he has a lifetime catalog of work filled with spectacular pans that
I'm really just vamping here so we have time to show you a selection of.
Our favorite has to be this simple shot of Kikuchiyo charging in after some bandits.
While protecting the village they're attacking from the Seven Samurai.
(Noise) This battle is epic.
And where a modern director might gussy it up with soaring crane moves and
crazy fast dollies, Kurosawa does just the opposite.
In one sense he's just following the action with his pan.
But the simple way he does it gives way to the most wonderful effect.
He's shooting almost exclusively on long, telephoto lenses here.
And the effect of their narrow field of view means that even a subtle turn of
the camera covers football field lengths of ground.
And so the littlest movement has the greatest effect.
This pan, and the others like it, carry such an exhilarating sense of speed,
the characters zooming through the village and
the camera's eye with it, reducing all the static elements to a blur.
And here Kurosawa starts off this particular Kikuchiyo versus horseback
bandit conflict with a relatively static shot on combat.
Drawing the eye back and forth in In horizontal lines across the frame,
until we move to this tight shot on a galloping bandit held still in the rapid
panning frame moving left to right.
Setting us up for a visual collision in our shot moving the opposite direction of
a wild, half-naked Kikuchiyo sprinting like a madman into the fray.
The opposing directions of these two shots letting us know that we're destined for
a head on confrontation.
The move revealing his target as he approaches it, confirming our suspicions.
It isn't given enough time to be particularly showy, but it's so effective,
so communicative, and so filled with the feeling of the fury of the battle that we
just had to give it it's due.
(Sound) Next most common in our rotational quiver is the tilt.
A vertical turn, a craning upwards, or a peering downwards.
And these feel totally different to us.
Tilting up is like a look of awe.
A camera move that marvels at grandeur like we're in
the diner from Back to the Future staring up at Biff, and
tilting down reminds us of dropping our eyes, of letting our gaze fall.
It's a sinking feeling in a shot.
And the first thing that comes to mind when we think of looming and
tilting is Citizen Kane.
And sure enough,
it's filled with the terrifying neck strainers of an imposing Orson Welles.
Interstellar blows our minds with a tilt up on a space station that ends up
behaving like a tilt down,
while the fountain turns the mood into a full disorienting flip.
And yeah, how about that Star Wars Opening shot.
But for our second pick we think that our Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice
has a pair of beautiful slow motion tilt downs that blow the field away,
like a dream or vision or a memory of a man contemplating his life.
(Music)
This gorgeous, haunting, utterly Tarkovsky in Dream Sequence combines slow motion
photography, a switch to black and white, and a pitch perfect tilt move.
We are awed by the beauty of the starting frame, but
it seems to just be built for the tilt.
The design is all the better for
the way the camera moves through it, revealing new details as our eyes descend,
providing us with an involving series of still-lifes in a long continuous stream.
The way the camera reveals the visual information of the scene tells us a loose
story of the place, of the chaos.
Inviting us to imagine what happened there.
Moving ever downwards as if pulled by an invisible gravity and
we get to watch an effect completely opposite of our Seven Samurai pan where
Kurosawa's camera move was completely tied to a moving subject or motivated.
This move is entirely unmotivated, moving towards an endpoint we can only imagine,
an implicit promise of a payoff at its end and
a source of visual suspense and tension.
And there's also something to the way the camera moves slowly yet methodically,
as if it were tracking a subject we couldn't see, like we were chasing ghosts.
Until we see that exact same shot again and realize that we were.
The initial shot felt so empty because it was.
It was designed around a subject that had been, in its first iteration, removed.
And the effect of it feels so powerful, feels so
emotionally desolate, feels so lonely.
And it's all in the emotion of the cameras changing angle, positioned independently
of the apparent reality of the scene that suggests to us something more.
(Sound) Finishing our rotations,
we arrive at the forgotten sibling, the can't, or roll, or Dutch tilt.
It's turn around the cameras long axis,
the axis sticking straight out of the lens, but this one's kind of weird.
Because while we can talk about the visual experience of panning or
tilting as analogs for real world visual experiences that lend them some automatic
emotional attachments about scanning and falling and all sorts of things.
Go ahead and do a quick experiment about the Dutch Tilt.
Roll your head side to side, ears to shoulders.
And take a look around.
So first thing you should notice is that if you happen to be in public right now,
you look like a crazy person.
But the next thing is, that if you are paying attention to how it change your
view of the world around you, the answer is it actually really doesn't.
Because unless you have vertigo your brain compensates for
the role your inner ear detects and visually stabilizes your field of view.
You until you get it really far over.
So we don't have much of an experiential history for the role.
Which means when we see it on screen without our inner ear telling us to
correct for the horizon shift, the meaning it tends to take on is just weirdness and
disorientation, maybe dizzy or drunk or paranoid.
Gaspar Noé does this in a big way at the end of Irreversible,
while Carol Reed plays with it subtly in The Third Man.
Apocalyse now starts with an incredible example, and
the Face of Another flips as seen on end and the power dynamics with it.
However for our third pick we're actually looking to Chris Nolan
who designed a whole scene around the role in Inception.
But we think did it even better in The Dark Knight
right after Batman apprehends the Joker for the final time.
>> This is what happens when an unstoppable force.
Meets an immovable object.
You truly are incorruptible, aren't you?
>> So before the role, in the camera upright version of this shot,
we get to view the Joker as an almost non-person.
He seems to us more a dangling object,
like a mouse held by by its tail at arms length.
We are Batman regarding him from right-side up in the world.
But, once the role has finished, things look very strange.
Clothes are draping up.
His movement and struggles are against a backward gravity.
Something is off, and that's because we've entered his perspective.
We see the world how he sees it.
Currently as a very disorienting place with gravity as a big foe.
So in between the start point of the Batman perspective and
the endpoint of the Joker perspective, we hit our role and get to watch, uneasily,
as one morphs into the other.
As we move from feeling like we're the danglers with Batman to feeling like
we're the dangled with the Joker.
And this feels like a possession, a capture, or
a victory getting taken away from us.
The uneasiness of the role messes with us as we lose the upper hand and
watch all the narrative success we thought we've earned slip away.
Just like Batman will in a few short lines.
Okay now that we've panned and tilted and spun every which way it's time to lock our
tripod head, throw the camera on some wheels, and push.
And that makes a big difference.
Because while the rotational shots are all about changes in perspective from a fixed
geographical location, our next three shots will actually transport us and
our point of view through space.
And the first way to do that is with a push or a pull.
A dolly moves straight in or out along the camera axis and
this can feel all different kinds of ways.
Slow or fast, subtle or obvious, long or short, in or out.
Pushing in towards a point is a pretty common
move to turn up the emotional volume.
You can see this famously in the Spielberg closeup where Steve pushes into a widening
of the eyes, or in the introduction of John Wayne's Stagecoach, or
our perennial favorite Harry Lime in The Third Man.
Pulling out from a point feels like we're abandoning it.
Like we're getting the hell out of there, adding distance or
backing away in full view as we watch the subject recede.
Here, we like this one from Spotlight and especially in The Conformist.
But both a push and a pull can also move us through a space, gliding us into a new
place backwards or forwards introducing it to us as if we were walking through it.
In Kubrick is a master here, creeping through milk bars and hallways,
the walls gliding by as as the world seems to close in around.
And there's also Antonioni's great one from the end of The Passenger,
and Tarchovsky's fantastic push through in Stalker.
However, our absolute favorite push shot has to be this one from Wings where we
run into our ace pilot on leave in Paris.
(Music)
In a first ever best picture winner filled with fantastic camera work,
this shot is one of it's best.
It uses the pushing mechanic to it's fullest extent.
A shot consecutively about both moving through a space and
about focusing in on one point.
Telling us a story of a place of the people within it and
then fluently guiding our attention to the man we're looking for.
After the hallway-like two-shot vignettes give way to the final table,
we find it staged completely differently.
Distinguishing it from all those prior, and signaling to us that it is important.
The staging places its main character smack dead center in the middle of
the frame, with his face behind a glass of booze even deader center yet.
And then a shot that is quite admittedly about forgetfulness isn't this just
the perfect move, the camera moving inwards towards the alcohol and
in the process show moving past everything around him.
Pushing almost the entire room out of the size of the frame and behind the camera.
The push in is a focus narrowing technique, showing us less and
less and less as it progresses, transforming from a wide shot.
Into a two shot, into a medium, and then finally a close up eclipsing the world
around us like the myopic focus of a drunk man unaware of us surroundings.
(Sound) If you take the push shot and then turn the camera at a 90 degree
angle to the direction of movement you end up with a lateral dolly move.
A track or a truck and this 90 degree turn changes things completely,
there's a following along vibe with this cycling by and scanning across.
It's like looking out the window of a car, watching the world pass us by.
But it also completely changes its relationship with offscreen spaces.
Where the push almost exclusively narrows our view, and
the pull almost exclusively widens it.
The tracking shot does both at the same time, showing us something new on one side
of the the frame, while taking something out of the other.
Some of our favorite side long tracking shots come from Return of the Jedi,
Oldboy, and Paths of Glory, along with the inimitable weekend.
However, for our fifth pick we think of this one from when Travis Bickle calls
Betsy on the phone after a disastrous date in Taxi Driver has got to be the tops.
>> Would you like to have some dinner with me and the next few days or something.
Well then how 'bout just a cup of coffee?
I come by the headquarters or something?
We could, okay, okay.
Did you get my flowers and
the- (Inaudible) >> You didn't get them?
I sent some flowers.
(Inaudible) >> Well okay, okay can I call you again?
Tomorrow or the next day?
>> This shot is absolutely brutal.
It's almost as if the camera gives up on the scene far before Travis does.
As if it knows he needs to let go even when he can't.
Or it's like it can't stand to watch anymore.
Like it knows we're too mortified to continue to look on at the train wreck.
So it turns its back and abandons it.
Just like Betsy does and that's how we feel at the end of the shot.
But when the movie starts there's first a moment of curiosity
of a question that gets raised.
Where are we going?
Why are we going there?
This is another unmotivated trap.
Moving the camera without something to follow peeks our attention as if to ask
what for.
So maybe it starts with hopefulness.
Us looking for to show something to get away from this crashing sadness.
But in the end, it's only just showing as the door.
(Sound) And finally, closing our list,
we only got one place else to go and that's up, or, I mean, down.
Up or down but vertically, either way.
The point is, our last move is vertical, the crane, or pedestal, or boon.
And just like the dutch tilt, this one's also a little rare to find in the wild.
But the good news is that it tends to pack a the big punch.
The boom feels to us like riding in a glass elevator,
watching the world rise up or fall away.
It feels like ascending into the heavens or descending towards the depths.
There's either a soaring feeling to it or a plummeting one,
bringing along all the physical and emotional associations therewith.
Up, and everything is illuminated, down in Ivan's childhood.
Up in School Daze.
Down in Blow Up.
And in our opinion most beautifully and brilliantly and famously up in Soy Cuba in
the middle of a funeral procession for a fallen revolution missionary protest.
(Music)
Now, to be fair, the shot keeps going on after this and does a whole lot of other
fancy footwork on its way to become a crazy famous long take.
But, for this one beautiful moment, it is just a simple boom.
And for that portion of it, we think its edits most effective, and
it's easy to see why.
Sure, on an intellectual level,
it's just about like we're the camera ascending into heaven.
But experientially, it really does just feel like we're floating up and
away, like some kind of lost balloon, leaving the crowds of the living behind.
And from this more visceral, less symbolic approach, the one of feeling the floating
than just thinking about the afterlife, we get so much mileage.
There is so much mood crammed into the shot as it takes off and
leaves the main action behind.
The director is no longer just staging a funeral,
he's using his camera to tell us how he feels about it.
The movement becomes the poetry, it fills the shot up with
feeling it gives us a clue into the heartache of director feels about death.
As if he thought death was like leaving everyone who loves you behind and
watching you grow, very very small in the distance.
And for this little moment in this one shot, that breaks our hearts.
So yes, camera movement can be used as a simple tool to
uncomplicatedly follow some motion.
But the meaning doesn't have to stop there.
There is such a striking difference between a push and a track.
Between a track and a pan.
Between a boom and a tilt.
And while they're all capturing the action they do so to wildly different effects.
The way the camera moves says everything about the way in which the physical
information of a space is reveled.
About how a story is told.
You can approach someone like this, like this or like this and each one gives us
its information in a different order but it also gives us our position.
The director chooses how to position us as an audience seeing through the eye of
the camera with respect to the subject.
And in doing so decides not only how we see that subject,but also how
we feel about it as well.
Are we on their level, moving at their speed or moving independently?
Taking a different stance, forming our own cinematic opinion.
The movement becomes the director's editorial voice.
And this six shots combine information control with emotional positioning
just about as well as any we've ever seen.
Which is why we think there's six more of the best shots of all time.
(Music)
So, those are six more of the best shots of all time.
Let us know what you think about them.
Also did we leave out any of your favorite pans, tilts, cants or rolls?
Let us hear about it in the comments section.
And also be sure to subscribe for more movie lists right here on CineFix.
(Music)