Camera for Interpretation (Sean Strelow)

I really loved this reading. I’ve been into film for a long time now and this reading reminded me why I love it so much. Little things, like the telephoto shot towards the end of The Graduate where he seems to take forever to get towards the camera, are why I love film and got into it in the first place. I always have trouble remembering the specifics of depth-of-field and the kinds of lenses, but this article articulated very well exactly what each means and does and did it very succinctly. One of my favorite lines was right at the end, when the author says, “camera technique, then, is not simply a matter of recording subjects and action on film or video, nor is it a matter of creating pretty pictures. Camera technique is the creation of an illusion of reality that exists on the screen” (192).

The concept that the article really seems to want to hammer home is that, in watching a film, we as an audience are inherently looking through a camera. Thus, manipulating the way that we perceive images as such is a necessary aspect of filmmaking and is, in fact, the crux of filmmaking as an art. I can dig it.

I’m going to analyze the opening scene of Drive for this post. In it, Ryan Gosling provides the getaway car for two burglars. The only problem is, one of them takes a little bit too long, and the police are on the chase. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, makes heavy use of telephoto lenses and carefully placed shots to place us in the mind of Ryan Gosling’s character, the Driver. As the Driver finds himself behind a cop car, he slows down. We find ourselves looking in a tight over-the-shoulder shot of him looking at the cop car. The telephoto lens blurs everything that is in the car; we are only focused on the cop car, just as the Driver is. When the car makes a turn, the camera racks focus to Gosling’s face in the mirror. He’s safe, and the focus of the scene has shifted from that car back to our main character. This rack focus takes us from the subjective point-of-view of the Driver back to a more objective point-of-view of watching the scene, or perhaps to one of the burglars backseat. When the helicopter flying overhead spots the Driver, we cut between shots of his face with extreme lead room and speeding shots with the camera attached to the car. The moving shots allow us to feel the intensity of the moment as he rushes to try to escape the police’s gaze, while the shots of his face looking intently ahead are made more powerful by the lead room provided. We get to see the space that he is staring into. When the Driver encounters a cop car across the intersection staring at him, Winding Refn provides us with a canted angle inside the car. Not only does this allow us to see both the Driver and one of the burglars backseat, it also makes the viewer uncomfortable, due to its skewing of horizon lines. We are made to feel uncomfortable, just like everyone else in the car. The scene uses the radio dialogue along with a faint bass humming sound to heighten tension without any actual dialogue, and we understand that the cop car is a danger to the Driver and the burglars simply by the over-the-shoulder shots of the car (giving us the Driver’s point-of-view) and the canted angle, tension building shots. The camera slowly moves closer to the Driver’s face in one shot, again, slowly building tension as he waits at the red light, and highlighting the stress he feels, which we can see in this close-up even more clearly the closer it gets. The ending of the scene, where the Driver reveals that the game he put on the radio was all part of his backup plan, is just icing on the cake. A dope scene from a dope movie.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdqbdEKeJ_4