Term 2 - Art Cinema 1

Why do we move the camera?

We've looked a lot at Andrey Tarkovskiy and how he uses single shots and still cameras and what effect it has on his audience. 

In last weeks lesson we looked at Hitchcock and how he used the camera in Vertigo, we watched the scene  where Scottie follows Madeline (for about the 50th time) and looked closely at how Hitchcock moved the camera to show the audience exactly what he wanted to be seen. He uses two different methods to show the audience two different things, first he shows us what Scottie is looking at, Madeline's flowers followed by the painting of the flowers, to do this he tilts the camera up and pans in, next he shows us Madeline's hair followed once again by the painting of the hair, this time zooming in to the painting from over Madeline's shoulder. These two methods are extremely similar but to the audience they mean different things, The first we think that Scottie looks up (as the camera tilts) and the camera pans in to give the audience a closer look, the second time is almost as if Scottie steps towards Madeline, gets close to her, a voyeuristic technique which Hitchcock is famous for. These camera movements are ones that we have grown used to watching, they make sense to us, we know what the camera is trying to tell us along with the editing. 

This week we looked at the film Breathless. Here again the camera is used in a different way, the use of Jump cuts at first can make us feel a little disorientated but here it makes the film an arty 'french new wave' film. An experiment (a successful one). 

The film edits between the conversation of the two main characters however the camera stays in the same place so its as if the background is just randomly changing. For me this style is very different from what I'm used to watching but its extremely interesting,  I would love to use this in my projects as a kind of experiment but with all these methods they can all go terribly wrong. 

Hitchcock made a film called 'rope' which was all filmed in one shot, he himself said he didn't like it and that it was mearly an experiment. So if Hitchcock was experimenting in film then I should defiantly give it a shot. 

Another example of a one shot scene from Breathless (1959)