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
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