Movie magic

        I like that Douglass and Harden mention Hitchcock’s Rear Window near the beginning of the reading. Rear Window is about a news photographer confined to a wheelchair after an accident during one of his assignments. Much of the film is tightly framed, and all the events are seen from the point of view of the main character’s living room. Jeffries (and the audience) is curious about what goes on in the other apartments in his neighborhood but the camera never allows us to see the inside of anyone’s home. Also, interestingly, many of the zooming camerawork comes from the point of view of Jeffries’ telephoto lens, which directly places us in the same point of view as the main character. The camerawork has the effect of placing us in the emotional perspective of Jeffries, feeling the same confinement to the little living space as he does.

         I really enjoyed the last line of the reading – “Camera technique is the creation of an illusion of reality that exists on the screen, rendered and interpreted with all the photographic devices at our disposal.” It makes me think of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which was also a film mentioned in the reading. The movie was filmed with fisheye lenses and made constant use of low angles. The set pieces were also deliberately disproportionate and spaced out. All of these aspects gave the film space its fascinatingly isolating and oppressive look and feel, communicating to the audience Kane’s isolation in a much more sophisticated way than outright in the script. One of my favorite scenes in Citizen Kane occurs when Kane has taken over a competing newspaper company and the camera zooms in on a photograph of the newspaper’s employees, now in the hands of Charlie Kane. There’s a very smooth transition between the photograph and a “real life” shot of the journalists posing for a new photo, and the first time I watched the film I didn’t even notice the transition and was mesmerized by the magical quality of the image coming to life. It was a cheeky play on camera equipment and technique and absolutely made me think about the wonder that accompanied the spectacle of moving film in its early days.