by Gil Bettman
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Before Spielberg started moving the camera whenever possible, directors usually established a new location in a static shot. To do this, they backed the camera away from the central object and put it at the angle that would most effectively set the stage for the drama about to take place. Commonly, this was a high, wide three-quarter angle shot of the location because this shot shows the front, the side, and the top of any three-dimensional object, along with whatever sits on the same plane of the object and surrounds it. One of the most famous establishing shots in film history — Hitchcock’s shot of the Psycho house with Norman Bates silhouetted in the window — is actually a low, wide three-quarter angle shot. Hitchcock put the house up on the hill and the camera below it because the house looks more imposing and ominous when seen from a low angle looking up.
But directors in the post-Spielbergian era have increasingly opted for establishing a new location with a moving shot, rather than a static shot, because this generates more eye candy and seamlessness. There are basically two ways to do this. Either the camera starts out on an extreme close-up of some small but significant object in the scene — a framed photograph, two wineglasses tinkling, something being typed out on a computer screen — and then pulls back along a circuitous or straight path, revealing the other significant objects in the scene one by one as it retreats. Or it does just the opposite, starting out wide, for example, on a high shot of the whole huge expanse of a Las Vegas casino, and then descending and tightening past various players and objects (which generally prove key to the following scene) before arriving at the principal player seated at a poker table, and then finally pushing in on an extreme close-up which shows that he’s holding a royal flush.
The shot from Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan that introduces Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller is a great example of a moving establishing shot. In one of the first scenes from the film we cut to a low angle, static shot of Omaha Beach on Normandy with the subtitle: June 6, 1944, Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach (Figure 2.046). This shot is followed by an externally generated traveling shot which follows a small flotilla of amphibious landing craft heading to the beach (Figure 2.047 to 2.050). Then we cut to a close-up on a G.I. canteen being opened and raised to the lips of Captain John Miller (Hanks). The camera is framed up so close that it has to make an externally generated move when Hanks raises the canteen to his lips (Figure 2.051 to 2.052). Then the camera starts to back up, passing between the two columns of soldiers lined up in front of Hanks, and revealing, one by one, the men whom he will lead into battle (Figure 2.053 to 2.061).
The camera is backing up as if it had a mind of its own. The men are all stationary so the camera is not following their motion, and therefore it is not externally generated. In addition, it is not showing us what any of these soldiers see or feel so it is not internally generated. But it does a brilliant job of establishing the scene by going from the specific to the general and revealing many important details along the way. At the beginning of the shot we are tight enough to clearly see the captain’s bars on Miller’s helmet and to reveal that his hands are trembling. When the camera starts to retreat, it first passes Sergeant Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore) close enough to see the sergeant’s bars on his arm and just in time to see Horvath very nonchalantly wedge a big chaw of tobacco into his cheek (Figure 2.055 to Figure 2.056). Then, as it passes between the rows of soldiers lined up in front of Hanks, first one soldier and then another doubles over and vomits onto the deck of the landing craft (Figure 2.057 to Figure 2.060).
To view a video of this film clip from Saving Private Ryan go to this link on the Internet: http://hollywoodfilmdirecting.com/directing-the-camera.html
In this one shot, the audience is very efficiently told what it needs to know to understand what happens next. First we learn that Miller is in charge and that even though Miller is frightened he is doing a good job of keeping his feelings in check. Horvath is Miller’s reliable assistant; made more reliable by the miracle of being born fearless in the face of almost certain death. The other soldiers in the boat are each dealing with the horror of the situation in their own individual way — some clearly so terrified they are retching their guts out. At the end of the shot we are given the big picture — a boat full of soldiers led by an able captain and a cool sergeant, about to hit the beach at the start of the Normandy invasion.
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As stated above, when the camera is backing up, the movement is neither externally nor internally generated. The camera is moving as if it had a mind of its own, and yet the audience remains transported into the fantasy world of the story, because it understands that the camera is backing up primarily to show them what they need to know in order to understand what happens next.
THOSE WHO BREAK BOB’S RULE AND WHY THEY DO IT
The Rise of the Snoopy Cam
Fans of the television cop shows Homicide, 24, and CSI at this point might have realized that the camera style used on these shows consistently breaks Bob’s Rule. I call this camera style the Snoopy Cam and with every year it gains more popularity. Initially it was used only on TV cop shows (NYPD Blue was the first long-running series to use it) but today it has become widely used on TV shows of all genres, and has made serious inroads into the realm of theatrical feature films. A substantial portion of the 2012 summer-hit film, The Hunger Games, was shot Snoopy Cam style.
I call it the Snoopy Cam because it is derived from the Shaky Cam style, which was popularized in the early 1980s by commercial director Joe Pytka. The Shaky Cam bounces around constantly as if it were always looking for the most important point on the screen. The Snoopy Cam generally is more focused or intelligent than the Shaky Cam because it always points right at what it wants to look at, as if it had a mind of its own. It often seems to be the POV of some easily distracted, invisible, mute member of the cast who is in the middle of every scene, or a big attentive dog that never barks. It pans much more often than it travels. Sometimes it pans dramatically and lands on a spot just in time to see something dramatic happen, such as a person coming in a door, or someone raising a gun. Sometimes it pans dramatically and lands where nothing particularly dramatic is happening. Sometimes it acts like the Shaky Cam and jitters around obviously hunting for whatever is driving the story, but never quite finding it. It never follows Bob’s Rule for camera movement, because its very purpose is to break Bob’s Rule. It is a camera move that is intended to have nothing to do with the story, so the audience will inevitably see it. It is there to say, “Look at me!” “Look at this camera move!” So it is constantly distracting the viewer from an uninterrupted, seamless appreciation of the story.
I have used this style while directing music videos, television shows, and corporate profiles for companies like Time-Warner and Verizon (to show at their annual shareholders’ meeting). The Snoopy Cam worked for these projects because, as is the case with Homicide, CSI, 24, and for that matter, TV commercials and music videos in general, the style of the piece was as important as, if not more important than, its content. In all these formats it is of paramount importance to stand out by seeming to be the most cutting-edge.
Bob’s Rule is geared toward and most effective at telling the story — at delivering content. For this reason, every great director in the history of cinema from Griffith through Cameron has followed it. James Cameron made Avatar strictly according to Bob’s Rule. Capra, Hitchcock, and Welles all followed Bob’s Rule, as did Renoir, De S
ica, and Bergman. But this has tinged Bob’s Rule with the aura of respectability.
The makers of Homicide, CSI, and 24 no doubt decided to use the Snoopy Cam style in an effort to convince the viewing public that, even though they were another knockoff of all the cop shows that have been on the air since the original Dragnet, they were more up-to-date than the competition. This hipness has to be immediately apparent — something that the audience can grasp instantaneously while surfing the channels or eating popcorn or changing diapers or all the other things that people do while watching TV.
In all fairness to the makers of Homicide, CSI, 24, and most other prime-time shows that use the Snoopy Cam, it must be noted that their stories and their characters must be very strong. If they were not, these shows could not maintain their popularity. Ironically, because the Snoopy Cam is constantly moving, after viewing an episode of CSI or 24 for five minutes, you start to take the moving camera for granted and ignore it. Instinctively, as viewers we seek out the substance and tune out the distractions. But still, something in the narrative is inevitably lost. And evidently, as important as story is to the makers of these programs, it is not of the same paramount importance as it is to a director who makes movies that will last, like Frank Capra or James Cameron, or a master of film as an art form, such as Jean Renoir or Ingmar Bergman.
Dogma Picks Up the Snoopy Cam
The contemporary Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier also uses the Snoopy Cam, and, to my mind, for the same reason as the producers of the above-mentioned American TV shows, to grab the audience’s attention — to use a very in-your-face-style of filmmaking that elevates style above substance. Producers of American cop shows need, above all, to distinguish their shows from the myriad of cop shows which have preceded them. Similarly, when von Trier wrote the rules that established the Dogma Movement in 1995, he was a young, obscure filmmaker who needed, above all, to distinguish himself from all the other young filmmakers who aspired to win the Grand Prix at Cannes. The Snoopy Cam and the rules of the Dogma Movement enabled him to do just that. In Breaking the Waves and later Dogma films, Von Trier used a handheld camera (as the Dogma rules required) that waved around constantly like the POV of a big, curious dog.
Twenty minutes into Breaking the Waves, the main character, Bess (Emily Watson), sits in the middle of a church, flanked by her mother and a girlfriend, silently listening to one of her straitlaced fellow villagers accuse another of “living too much in this world.” Von Trier shot the entire scene from one camera position in the middle of the church in front of Bess.
The camera starts framed up on the man doing the accusing who is standing in the back of the church, surrounded by seated congregants (Figure 2.062). The camera pans left off of him and lands on Bess (Figure 2.063 to 2.065). Since this is the very beginning of the scene, this pan shows the audience where Bess is sitting in relation to the accusing villager. Therefore it is a moving establishing shot. It tells the story and it remains invisible.
Then the camera suddenly pans off of Bess and lands for a fraction of a second on the villager (Figure 2.066 to 2.069). But it changes its mind in mid-pan and whips camera left back on Bess (Figure 2.070 to 2.072). This pan, as shown in Figure 2.072a, is a false camera move. It has nothing to do with the story. It does not move to follow an object moving in the frame, or to show what someone is seeing or feeling, or to establish.
A few seconds later, von Trier cuts away from Bess onto the accusing villager (Figure 2.073). The villager finishes talking and sits. As soon as he sits down, the camera whip pans camera left across the entire seated congregation and lands on the minister in the pulpit standing at the opposite end of the church (Figure 2.074 to 2.082). The minister calls on another congregant to speak. As soon as the minister has finished talking, the camera whip pans back camera right across the congregation and lands on the individual whom the minister has called upon (Figure 2.082 to 2.089).
Neither of the whip pans depicted in Figure 2.089a are externally generated, internally generated, or moving establishing shots. Somehow the camera knows exactly when each character in the scene will start talking and stop talking. This makes the presence of a cameraman operating a camera in the middle of the room more than palpable.
To view a video of this film clip from Breaking the Waves go to this link on the Internet: http://hollywoodfilmdirecting.com/directing-the-camera.html
Why does von Trier persist in blatantly and constantly breaking Bob’s Rule? I would argue he does this because, as I stated above, every director of note in the history of cinema has followed Bob’s Rule. It is the most effective way to tell a story on film and so it has become the rule. But despite its effectiveness, von Trier chooses not to follow it simply because it has become the rule and this enables him to break the rule and to stand apart.
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By adopting the Snoopy Cam, von Trier made it immediately apparent to anyone watching his films that they looked very different from Spielberg’s. All of the Dogma rules followed this same end. If Spielberg used it — a smooth, dolly-mounted camera that always follows Bob’s Rule, complex lighting setups, fantastic visual special effects, groundbreaking CGI graphics, complex sound editing, spectacular wardrobe and set dressing, etc. — Dogma forbade it. Therefore, by inventing Dogma and following its rules (and using the Snoopy Cam), von Trier dramatically burst on the film scene as the anti-Spielberg, anti-Hollywood champion.
The Snoopy Cam Today
The Snoopy Cam style certainly seems as if it is here to stay, for a variety of reasons. For one, it is a very cheap way to pump a lot of eye candy and seamlessness into a film. All it requires is an operator strong enough to work all day with a handheld camera.
The moving camera platforms which Spielberg and those who emulate his style use to move the camera smoothly and steadily in the interest of making the motion disappear — the Technocrane, the Skycam, the Libra head, the Steadicam, and others still to come — are very expensive to rent. Furthermore, you need highly trained, very expensive technicians to operate them well. Even if a director were to limit himself to shooting moving shots off a dolly, you still need a large, well-trained crew of grips to level a floor, and/or lay out dolly track. This means eye candy and seamlessness do not come cheap. Yet the YouTube-weaned audience requires its fix of eye candy and seamlessness, or it will tune out. What to do?
This was the dilemma facing Fernando Meirelles before he made City of God. So he solved the problem by adopting the Snoopy Cam style. His explanation was that the Snoopy Cam style gave the final film a documentary look and that this was particularly appropriate, since the film was about something shocking and real, namely the syndrome by which pubescent and prepubescent children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro are sucked into dealing drugs and killing each other in gangland shootouts. Most of the actors were nonprofessionals, plucked from the slums of Rio. Much of the dialogue was improvised. So the way that the Snoopy Cam swings around wildly looking for its subject, missing it, panning back, finding it, and then panning off to some other player in the scene made all the seemingly unrehearsed, real action look as if it was being captured by a seemingly unrehearsed, documentary cameraman, and so, theoretically, that much more real.
I remain unconvinced that the Snoopy Cam makes a film seem more real. It might make a fil
m resemble a home movie or a poorly shot documentary whenever the camera is waving around, hunting for the person who is driving the story. But the idea that this somehow makes the film seem more real is just that — an idea — a conceit. Consciously thinking about specifically how the cameraman operated the camera must make a film seem less real. On the other hand, if an audience starts to participate vicariously in what is happening on screen then they must believe what they are watching is real. The only way to do that is by following Bob’s Rule and making the camera movement invisible.
This is exactly what Fernando Meirelles did, as soon as he had the money in the budget for all the expensive toys needed to make camera moves disappear. There is not a hint of the Snoopy Cam style in The Constant Gardener — the film he made right after City of God. In The Constant Gardener he plays completely by Bob’s Rule, which, to my mind, proves that he used the Snoopy Cam on City of God more out of necessity than any other reason.
With that said, the success and popularity of the TV shows like CSI and 24 have bestowed the Snoopy Cam style with a certain aura of hipness that makes it attractive to any young director who wants to break through and make a name for himself, as well as older, established directors who do not want to seem over the hill. Kathryn Bigelow burst on the scene in the early 1990s as a hot, young director and made a string of highly acclaimed thrillers and action films. Then her output dropped off dramatically. She made only two films between 1995 and 2007. In 2008, she directed The Hurt Locker, which won her the Oscar for best director and reestablished her as a filmmaker of note. Her earlier films are all shot strictly following Bob’s Rule. For The Hurt Locker she adopted the Snoopy Cam style. It could be argued that this helped her win the Oscar, and it probably did, for political or stylistic reasons, in the same way that it helped von Trier win the Grand Prix at Cannes. But I would counter that The Hurt Locker succeeds, as a film, on the strength of its script and performances, and in spite of her use of the Snoopy Cam.
