Response to Aesthetics of Video

Though the article focuses predominantly on camera techniques and their aesthetic implications, I'd like to focus on the concept of the fourth wall, introduced in theater and carried over into the medium of cinema. For filmmaking, breaking this invisible art-audience barrier is all the more striking because the medium itself embodies a much more fleshed out reality than theater can offer -- as the author writes, filmmaking brings the audience into the action, using everything from camera placement to special effects to maximize our immersion into a world not our own. Taking advantage of this, filmmakers have in the past teased the edges of the fourth wall, whether for the purpose of farce, satire, meta-cinematic commentary, or any combination thereof.

Consider, for example, Spike Jonze's madcap masterpiece Adaptation, in which the protagonist adopts the role of a screenwriter who, over the course of the film, writes out the movie he inhabits (the hero and the actual screenwriter share the same name, and thus it's implied they're meant to be the same person). Reality and fiction are blurred, and through it the film comments on the role of the screenwriter in the Hollywood system, celebrating the scribe who defies the preestablished structures of commercial mainstream moviemaking.

Consider also the enigmatic Holy Motors, a movie that creates a dark, barren dreamscape from the world of the movies. In this film, we literally can't tell when the hero, a bizarre representation of the film actor, is on set or living his life. The actual non-diegetic actor, the diegetic actor, and the character played by the diegetic actor are clumped together, shaken up, and rendered indistinguishable. Even when seemingly "behind-the-scenes," this actor-character is still performing, if not for any diegetic audience then for us, the non-diegetic audience. The movie invites this kind of layered, reflexive thinking, precisely because it so completely disintegrates the fourth wall from the get-go.

For an article on the tradition of having actors play themselves in the movies, itself a more facetious but still subversive treatment of the fourth wall, read Matt Zoller Seitz's article on rogerebert.com.

For my video, I'm posting a trailer for Holy Motors. When reading the article, I was struck by the fact that the opening section is titled "Eye of the Beholder" - in that film, one question that's posed is whether the beauty of a film is in its making or in its reception i.e. the eye of the beholder (see 0:41-0:47).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Cww89TbkE

For a video foregrounding masterful camera technique, check out this clip from Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. A car chase is nothing new, but observe how the action is filmed almost entirely from within the vehicle. This unique choice of framing elevates the sequence above many of its action-movie counterparts. Rather than depicting somersaulting BMW's and all-around vehicular mayhem, the clip highlights the thrilling professionalism of the driver as he handles a dire situation with level-headed cool.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqei6w_drive-opening-scene-gateway_shortfilms