In a zoom shot, by contrast, perspective does not change because the camera does not move. Zooming in will magnify all objects on screen evenly. Zooming out will shrink all objects evenly. This is what produces the impression of camera movement. As objects in the shot enlarge, the viewer has the impression of moving closer to them. Whereas the zoom shot provides simple magnification, the moving camera provides a series of changing spatial relationships produced by movement and known as motion parallax or motion perspective . The absence of motion perspective in a shot where the camera seems to be moving is a clear sign that the shot is a zoom and not a true moving camera shot.
Filmmakers sometimes use zoom lenses as alternatives to camera movement, especially if they are filming on a low budget and a quick schedule. Zoom lenses, though, can be used for sophisticated effects. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), director Robert Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond employ a zoom to create a moment of 36
Film Structure
dramatic emphasis when the hero realizes a gang of gunmen has come to kill him. Altman and Zsigmond rapidly zoom in on the gang, conveying the hero’s sense of anxiety and the rush of excitement he feels. The optical effect suggests these emotional reactions.
USING LENSES Filmmakers often employ the telephoto lens when they are filming a scene on city streets in which the characters are engaged in conversation and surrounded by real pedestrians. A realistic impression depends on the pedestrians being unaware of the camera and the actors. Filmmakers can hide the camera by placing it at some distance from the action and then use the telephoto lens to bring the characters into the medium shot or close-up framing suitable for the dramatic content of the scene.
Telephoto lenses also can facilitate the staging of stunts. When Tom Cruise runs across a busy city street in The Firm (1993), viewers jump when a car nearly crashes into him.
The car’s apparent proximity, though, is an illusion created by a telephoto lens.
Viewers acquire greater cinematic sophistication when they become sensitive to the effects produced by different lenses used in the shots of a given scene. Just as filmmakers change camera positions and angles throughout a scene, they change lenses as well, fitting these to the unfolding dynamics of the dramatic action. In a shot with extreme depth of field, where near and distant objects are in focus, the lens is likely to be a wide angle. If, on the other hand, depth of field looks very shallow, with a compression of distance so that an object that definitely is very far off looks close, the lens is likely to be a telephoto.
Some filmmakers are closely identified with certain types of lenses. Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, and Tim Burton tend to favor wide-angle lenses, whereas Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah favor the telephoto. In Touch of Evil , his last U.S. picture, made for Universal Studios in 1958, Orson Welles filmed his gargantuan detective hero, Hank Quinlan, with extremely short lenses to exaggerate and enhance his huge and grotesque dimensions. Evaluating a filmmaker’s choice of lenses requires that one be sensitive both to structure—in this case, the visual properties of lenses—and the requirements of the scene or shot. Consider the lead-in to the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone (1993), when Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday make their fateful walk down the town’s streets toward the corral. A building blazes behind them for dramatic effect. The camera shoots them head-on as they stride toward it. The long lens isolates the heroes in a shallow plane of focus, giving them an unequivocal visual dominance in the frame. By excluding the fire from the plane of focus, the filmmakers ensured that it would not distract unduly from the foreground drama of the heroes’ determination. As an out-of-focus object, the fire is TOMBSTONE (BUENA
VISTA, 1993)
Telephoto lens per-
spective used to iso-
late, emphasize, and
intensify a point of
dramatic climax. Frame
enlargement.
37
Film Structure
TOUCH OF EVIL (UNIVERSAL, 1958)
Orson Welles was the master of wide-angle filmmaking, as practiced in Citizen Kane and subsequent films like this one about a corrupt sheriff in a Mexican border town. Filming on a small set during this police interrogation scene, Welles fills the camera’s wide angle of view with numerous characters and gives them a dynamic staging in deep focus. Note the strategic positioning of characters at four planes of distance from the camera. Frame enlargement.
BEOWULF (PARAMOUNT, 2007)
Digital effects often simulate many features of camera perspective, including camera movement and depth of field. The exaggerated depth perspective seen here mimics what an extreme wide-angle lens might capture. Building virtual camera perspectives into effects shots enables filmmakers to make the effects seem consistent with the way in which a camera might view the world. Frame enlargement.
a subordinate element in the frame, but its presence is nevertheless dramatic, serving to prefigure the violence to come. Assessed in these terms, the telephoto framing is an effective one. By contrast, a wide-angle lens would have increased depth of field and thereby eliminated the concentrated visual focus on the heroes.
38
Film Structure
RED BEARD (TOHO,
1965)
Japanese director Akira
Kurosawa preferred the
telephoto lens. He also
liked to film scenes with
multiple cameras, creat-
ing occasional problems
of perspective when
he cut between shots.
In this case he cuts
between two cameras
whose lines of sight
form a 90-degree angle.
The first camera setup
uses a telephoto lens
and makes the char-
acters seem very close
together, whereas the
second setup reveals
their true positioning.
The perspective change
between the two shots
is very striking. Frame
enlargements.
Camera Movement
The camera’s perspective not only changes from shot to shot, but it also can shift and move within the shot. The camera can move in virtually any fashion through space. To simplify things, this discussion will focus on four basic categories of camera movement: (1) pan and tilt , (2) dolly or tracking , (3) boom or crane , and (4) Steadicam . All these types of camera movements shift the boundaries and coordinates of the frame. Moving the camera creates a fluid perspective, unlike a static shot with its fixed framing.
PAN AND TILT A pan shot produces lateral movement on screen. The camera head rotates in a horizontal fashion from side to side on top of the tripod, which remains stationary. By contrast, in a tilt, the camera pivots vertically, up or down. If a filmmaker were shooting a skyscraper, she or he could start with a camera focused on the bottom of the building and then tilt slowly up to the top to reveal, perhaps, King Kong swatting at airplanes. The accompanying diagrams illustrate the action of panning and tilting.
Pans and tilts tend to establish linking movements, which filmmakers often use to connect objects or establish relationships between them or to call attention to new areas of the scene. Pans also may be used to readjust the frame to accommodate character movement. If a character crosses the room to open a door, the camera operator might pan to follow the movement. An early example of this use of the pan occurs in 39
Film Structure
Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). When the robbers make their daring escape from the train after holding it up, they go down an embankment and across a stream to get to their horses. As they do this, the camera operator pans left and tilts down to follow them. It is done a bit sloppily, however, because the robbers get almost out of frame at one point before the camera operator picks them back up again.
In most instances, pans are brief, with the camera only pivoting a small deg
ree.
However, its physical design permits the camera to rotate an entire 360 degrees on the mounting attached to its tripod. Nothing, therefore, except for conventional usage, prevents filmmakers from executing a fully circular, 360- degree panning shot. These tend to be rare, but they do occur. In Easy Rider (1969), when the heroes Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) visit a hippie commune and its members gather in a circle to pray for their harvest, cameraman Haskell Wexler uses a 360-degree pan across the faces of all the characters, who are grouped in a circle. The camera’s movement brings each character’s face into frame, creating a symbolic image of unity and completeness.
DOLLY, TRACK, AND BOOM Unlike the pan and tilt, in dolly, tracking, and boom or crane shots, the camera, along with its tripod or base, physically travels through space. As a result, these shots produce motion perspective, unlike pans and tilts. A dolly is simply a wheeled platform used for mounting the camera in a tracking shot.
Sometimes these are called dolly shots because of their platform mount. In tracking, or dolly, shots, the camera may move briefly toward or away from an object, such as a character’s face, or it may describe more extended and elaborate movements. In the latter case, a tracking shot may follow a character who is moving. As Rocky sprints along the streets of south Philadelphia to train for his big fight, the camera tracks with him. The rapid track helps to visualize Rocky’s power and adds energy to the shot.
Tracking, or dolly, shots generally move in a direction parallel to the ground. By contrast, boom, or crane, shots execute elaborate movements up or down through FIGURE 2
FIGURE 3
Pan.
Tilt.
40
Film Structure
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
(EDISON, 1903)
After holding up the train, the
robbers run for their horses to
escape. In the next moment, as
they turn left and run down a hill,
the camera operator will pan and
tilt to follow the action. Frame
enlargement.
space. They take their name from the apparatus—boom or crane—on which the camera is mounted. A famous boom shot occurs in Gone With the Wind (1939), during the scene where Scarlet O’Hara visits wounded confederate soldiers at the railroad station. The shot begins with a full-figure framing of Scarlet. The camera then pulls back and booms up to a high angle that shows Scarlet surrounded by a huge field of the dead and dying. This change of perspective creates a powerful dramatic effect by revealing the scale of the carnage surrounding Scarlet, a scale that the initial framing of the shot had concealed.
STEADICAM The Steadicam has revolutionized camera movement in contemporary film. It is a mechanical system that produces a very steady, jitter-free image from hand-held camerawork. It consists of a vest worn by the camera operator, a stabilizing support arm connecting the camera to the operator’s vest, and a monitor through which the operator views what the camera is seeing. (The Steadicam operator does not look through the camera itself.)
Using Steadicam, the operator can move the camera through space in a com-
pletely smooth and fluid way as an extension of his or her own body. The operator extends his or her arm and produces a “dolly” shot. The operator walks or runs along a street and produces a “tracking” shot.
Steadicam was introduced in Bound for Glory (1976) and Rocky (1976) and was used extensively in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Today it is used in countless productions and is the means for achieving the restless, continuously moving camera work that is such a feature of contemporary film. A common shoot-
ing practice today is to have one or two Steadicam operators following the actors through a scene and providing a full 360 degrees of coverage. Cinderella Man (2005) and Alexander (2004) exemplify this approach. Atonement (2007) features a 5-minute-20-second Steadicam shot that reveals an epic landscape of war, the British retreat at Dunkirk in World War II. It is a single, unbroken shot; no digital effects are used to “glue” several shots together. Children of Men (2006) is shot entirely with a hand-held camera, but not a Steadicam. The filmmakers wanted to avoid the 41
Film Structure
FIGURE 4
Tracking shot.
mechanical look that Steadicam sometimes creates. As in Atonement , many sequences seem to be composed of a single, lengthy moving camera shot, except that in this case digital effects were used to invisibly join several shots into one.
FUNCTIONS OF MOVING-CAMERA SHOTS This is a common and powerful function of camera movement: to reveal dramatic information by enlarging the viewer’s field of view. A complementary function is to narrow and focus attention on significant objects or characters. As a director, John Ford rarely moved his camera, but when he did, it had tremendous effect, as in The Searchers (1956), where a dolly in to John Wayne’s face emphasizes the character’s intense and pathological hatred of Indians.
Note the difference of emphasis between the opening and closing frames of the dolly as pictured in the frame enlargements as pictured after few pages in the photo “The Searchers (Warner Bros.,1956)” .
In addition to revealing action or concentrating the viewer’s attention, moving-camera shots can serve other purposes. One extremely common function is to
express a dynamic sense of movement that makes a shot or scene more sensuous and dramatically exciting. When the Joker hijacks a police car and speeds through Gotham City in The Dark Knight (2008), the traveling camera plunges the viewer into the scene’s frenzied action. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is a master of sensuous camera movements that add extraordinary dramatic and visual impact
to his scenes. In films such as Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957), where characters on foot or horse race through a dense forest, Kurosawa tracks the camera rapidly with them, darting in and out of trees, over streams and under branches, plunging the viewer into dense foliage and expressing in the most visually convincing manner the sensation and experience of flight.
U.S. directors Martin Scorsese ( Shutter Island , 2009; Taxi Driver , 1976) and Brian De Palma ( The Untouchables , 1987) are masters at using sweeping, sensuous camera movements. In Goodfellas (1990), Scorsese uses a hand-held camera in a single shot 42
Film Structure
to follow the main character, a New York
gangster, as he gets out of his car, crosses
the street, enters the side door of a night-
club, winds through narrow hallways and a
crowded kitchen, and walks into a ballroom
filled with hundreds of people and a stand-up
comic in midroutine. In Snake Eyes (1998),
De Palma used a hand-held camera to simu-
late a 20-minute moving-camera shot that
follows Nicolas Cage as he walks through a
sports arena filled with a capacity crowd. This
was a deceptive sequence, however, because
it was composed of several shots. These were
joined at hard-to-see edit points when a wall
or a person passed closely in front of the cam-
era. Another bravura moving-camera shot—
9 minutes long—opened Robert Altman’s The
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…
Player (1992) as a way of letting the audience
(GAUMONT, 1953)
know that this would be a very self-conscious
film. In the shot, characters discuss their love
Camera movement in contemporary film often has an
unstructured and sometimes sloppy look because the prolif-
for the elaborate opening tracking shot of
eration of lightweight equipment makes cameras very por-
Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil , as Altman essen-
table and hand-held shots relatively easy to execute. In con-
tially repeats the famous Welles shot.
trast with this contempo
rary trend, director Max Ophüls
Filmmakers also use moving-camera shots
was the master of elaborately choreographed, precisely
to visualize important thematic ideas. In such
designed tracking shots. The Earrings of Madame de… is
cases, the camera’s movement is metaphoric and
composed with the camera in continuous motion. Its move-
symbolic, its motion correlating, as a visual de-
ments reveal décor, simulate character perspective, visualize
social connections among groups of people, and create
sign, with important issues in a film’s narrative.
a series of fluid framings that are exacting in their focus
In Seven Samurai (1954), for example, to suggest
and design. The film is composed as an elaborate series of
the developing friendship and unity between
dances by the camera. Ophüls’ brilliance at choreographing
samurai and peasants, Kurosawa groups them
tracking shots and using them as vehicles for narrative and
in a circle and tracks the camera around its pe-
theme has never been equaled. Frame enlargement.
riphery. In We Were Soldiers (2002), to suggest
the Vietnamese enemy closing in on an army lieutenant colonel (Mel Gibson) and his men, the cinematographer did an inwardly spiraling tracking shot that loops around and in on Gibson. In The Sea Inside (2004), a digitally enhanced helicopter shot expresses a para-lyzed man’s fantasy of flying.
Some of the most unique and carefully conceived moving-camera shots occur in the films of French director Jean-Luc Godard. Godard’s structural designs are extremely self-conscious; that is, they call attention to the technique at work. Weekend (1967) is Godard’s dark, savagely funny satire of the barely repressed violence of an absurd Americanized consumer society. In the film, an amoral couple, Corrine and Roland, travel by car to Oinville, where they plan to murder Corrine’s mother so that they might claim the family inheritance. On the way to Oinville, they are caught in a traffic jam. On a narrow country road, a long line of vehicles impedes their progress. Anxious to get past the stalled line, Roland impatiently edges his car along the shoulder of the road, past the other vehicles.
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 9
