Camera Movement in Narrative Cinema - Towards a Taxonomy of Functions

Microsoft Word - Final Final Cut 0609.docThe Broadway Crane (1929). The Classical Hollywood Cinema.
Jakob Isak Nielsen 951435
Richard Raskin/Edvin Kau Dept. of Inf. & Media Studies, Faculty of Arts
University of Aarhus March 2007
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
1 PERSPECTIVES ON CAMERA MOVEMENT: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 7
1.1 Camera Movement as a Craft 8
1.2 The Camera: Anthropomorphic Analogies 14
1.3 Statistical Analysis of Style 16
1.4 The Art of Film 22
1.5 Practical and Interpretive Criticism 24
1.6 Central Tenets in Early Theoretical Writings 33
1.7 Camera Movement Between Formalism and Realism 39
1.8 Camera Movement and Semiotics 50
1.9 Phenomenology and The Camera Movement Effect 53
1.10 Production History & Visual Style: Rhythmic and Expressive Movement 57
1.11 The Poetics of Cinema and the Functions of Film Style 61
1.12 The Issue of Style: Poetics versus Interpretive Criticism 72
2 CAMERA MOVEMENT IN A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 87
2.1 Primitives and Pioneers 88 2.1.1 Panning Movement in Early Cinema 89 2.1.2 The Mobile Point-of-View Shot and The First Dolly Movements 91 2.1.3 Follow Shots and the Boundaries of the Frame 94 2.1.4 The Narrative Integration of Pans 96 2.1.5 From A Cinema of Attractions to A Cinema of Narrative Integration 97
2.2 International Experimentation: Classical Cinema Around the Bend 100 2.2.1 The Cabiria Movement 102 2.2.2 Pre-Revolutionary Camera Movement 106
2.3 Camera Movement and the 1920s Avant-Garde 111 2.3.1 Die Entfesselte Kamera 113 2.3.2 In The Slipstream of Der letzte Mann 123 2.3.3 Expressive Schemes 125
2.4 Camera Movement and The Transition to Sound 137 2.4.1 Norms and Motivation for Camera Movement in Early Hollywood Sound Films 144 2.4.2 Introducing the Crane 147 2.4.3 The Musical and Camera Movement 153 2.4.4 The Aesthetics of Obstruction: Realist Styles of the 1930s 159
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2.5 Staging Strategies in Hollywood Sound Cinema 161 2.5.1 The Tyranny of Story 162 2.5.2 Restraint and Common Sense 163 2.5.3 A Strong Sense of Direction 165 2.5.4 A Cinema of Fluidity 170 2.5.5 The Follow Shot and Duration 171
2.5.5.1 Walk-and-talk 173 2.5.5.2 Ambience 178
2.5.6 Mobile Point of View 179 2.5.7 Autonomous Camera Movement in the Classical Cinema 180
2.6 Resistance to Norms or The Norms of Differentiation 183 2.6.1 The Continuing Story of Handheld Camera Movement 183 2.6.2 More Than is Needed: The Wandering Camera 189 2.6.3 Authorial Camera Movement 193 2.6.4 The Mobile Long Take 196
2.7 What’s New? 203 2.7.1 Shot Snatching 208 2.7.2 Camera Movements Suggest Every Subtlety 212
3 A TAXONOMY OF FUNCTIONS 219
3.1 Functions of Camera Movement in Narrative Cinema 219 3.1.1 Orientation 220 3.1.2 Pacing 229 3.1.3 Inflection 232 3.1.4 Focalization 242 3.1.5 Reflexive 247 3.1.6 Abstract 256
4 ANALYSES OF MULTIFUNCTIONAL CAMERA MOVEMENTS 263
4.1 Hævnens nat (1916) 264
4.2 Bomben auf Monte Carlo (1931) 270
4.3 Rope (1948) 273
4.5 Les Dernières fiancailles (1973) 281
4.6 Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000) 283
5 CONCLUSION 287
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 291
APPENDIX I 309 Résumés (US/DK) DVD with examples discussed in chapter 4
Introduction In order to introduce the reader to the type of dissertation that is in front of you, it is instructive to recall a tradition of research that is more widespread in art history and musicology than film studies. Just like art historians have focused on for instance composition or lighting, this dissertation takes a single stylistic parameter as its object of study. Within film studies such localized avenues of research have become increasingly viable under the aegis of a perspective known as ‘the poetics of cinema,’ and within this perspective two interrelated branches: stylistics and historical poetics (Bordwell 2001: 9-10). Rather than discussing the relationship of cinema to theories of culture, language and psychology, stylistics and historical poetics engage with localized problems of film form. Camera Movement in Narrative Cinema - Towards a Taxonomy of Functions is in line with this research perspective in its attempt to produce knowledge about a single mechanism of cinematic enunciation: camera movement.
Whether in the form of anthologies, monographs or books by craftsmen, there are fairly comprehensive accounts of other stylistic devices such as sound (Weis & Belton 1985, Langkjær 1996, Chion & Gorbman 1994, Abel & Altman 2001 etc), staging (Bordwell 1997, 2005) and of editing (Millar & Reisz 1968, Murch 2001 [1988], Fairservice 2001, Orpen 2003). As will be clarified in chapter 1 such cannot be said for camera movement. The device has not even been honored an anthology. As will become apparent from browsing through the bibliography, camera movement has mainly been embraced as an article or essay topic, a book chapter, a book section, or it has been woven into analyses and interpretations of individual films. This is particularly curious since contemporary cinema has become saturated with camera movements. Scholars have even posited free-ranging camera movement as a defining stylistic feature of contemporary mainstream cinema (Bordwell 2002, Salt 2004). Camera movements - real and virtual - permeate our visual culture to an unprecedented degree. New media such as computer games have been even more eager to embrace virtual camera movement than has contemporary cinema. Another reason to study camera movement is that it is a contested area. On one hand, camera movement has held a strong appeal for filmmakers since
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at least the mid-1910s (Maltin 1978: 77-8; Koszarski 1974: 48) and continues to do so (Brown 2003).1 On the other hand, both filmmakers and critics have often found cause to reprimand camera movement excesses (e.g., Hall 1932). Contemporary cinema is almost routinely blamed for ‘gratuitous’ camera movements (Ettedgui 1998: 139; Silberg 2003b: 53). Why does camera movement generate such contradictory responses? The most important reason to study camera movement - and a first step towards answering the above question - is that it has a profound influence on the way films look and the way films are experienced and engaged with by spectators. When we see the effects of camera movement we see an entire image in the process of changing. There is a variety of questions one could ask about camera movement. Do camera movements constitute a specifically cinematic form of communication? One could also ask more humble questions such as “what are the norms and practices of executing camera movement during production and at what points in the course of a film have particular types of camera movements traditionally been applied? How have these norms and practices changed across time?” Critics, historians, and theorists have discussed camera movement from many perspectives and at many levels of generality. Filmmakers and craft discourse have discussed aesthetic norms – why one way of moving the camera was more appropriate than another. Critics have located authorial signatures and interpreted the meaning of camera movements. Theorists have related camera movement to our own movement in empirical reality.
The ways in which camera movement has been engaged with within the literature is itself a topic worthy of study and the first third of this dissertation is dedicated to this task. But one should not stop there. The way films look has a history. Practically since the birth of cinema filmmakers have found occasion to move their cameras - even in the face of staggering technical obstacles. Executing mobile shots entails extra work: laying tracks, following focus, tying the footage into an editing pattern, accommodating lighting schemes so that every second of the shot is lighted in the desired way. But why do filmmakers bother? 1 See also cameraman Alexandre Promio’s account of his interaction with Louis Lumière concerning what is very likely the first trucking shot in cinema history, capturing Venice from a boat travelling down the Grand Canal in 1896. Recounted in Arnheim (1958 [1933]: 138-9).
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One way of answering that question is to look at the various narrative and aesthetic functions that camera movements have served in the course of film history. With the solid foundation of a survey of the literature and a historical survey of camera movements, one can address the question that lies at the heart of this enquiry: Do camera movements tap into a set of definable functional resources? In other words, can one define a taxonomy of functions for camera movement in narrative cinema? The dissertation proposes that it is indeed possible, but also argues that such a taxonomy need not be reductive but can assist interpretive criticism.
Interpreting film style in terms of its significance to subject matter, theme and meaning has been a remarkably persistent critical strategy. The British journal Movie and critics such as V.F. Perkins, Robin Wood, Douglas Pye, Charles Barr and Deborah Thomas have offered many interpretive guidelines in their articles and books. The recently published Style and Meaning (2005) indicates that this tradition is still very much alive – at least in Britain – and that a series of younger scholars such as John Gibbs are continuing the tradition.
On the other hand, stylistics and historical poetics as practiced by scholars such as Barry Salt, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Charles Musser and Charlie Keil have focused less on the interpretation of style’s significance to meaning and more on laying out stylistic norms, conventions and functions and/or placing these in a historical context. Differences set aside both Salt and Bordwell position their work on style in opposition to what Bordwell terms “the hermeneutic model” (Nielsen 2004a) including the abovementioned tradition of interpretive criticism. These issues will be discussed more fully at the end of 1.12. For now it will suffice to say that this dissertation tries to combine the strengths of both traditions.
The thesis is divided into three major sections. The first section features an extensive review of the literature on camera movement (chapter 1). This section analyzes how different discursive communities have explained, analyzed, interpreted or otherwise accounted for camera movement. As to my own contribution to the field I see no need to import a radically new theoretical perspective from psychology, sociology or philosophy and apply that to the study of camera movement. In fact, the existing avenues of research provide ample opportunity for durable and sound production of knowledge about
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camera movement. Hence my own position within the field follows naturally as an extension to some of the existing literature on camera movement. At the end of the chapter there will be an explanation as to how this dissertation positions itself in relation to the existing literature.
Whereas the first section discusses the literature on camera movement, the second section describes the history of camera movement itself. This section provides a general overview of what types of movement one is likely to find at particular points in time, but the main objective is to describe salient trends and durable norms concerning the aesthetic and narrative functions of camera movement.2 A study of such a wide historical scope stands a risk of becoming synoptic but throughout the chapter a number of analyses will supply analytic depth. The final section is devoted to functional analysis. Chapter 3 presents a taxonomy of functions for camera movement. The functional taxonomy accounts for the organizational principles of camera movement and can also be seen to distill and organize the range of functions laid out in chapter 2. In total a set of six basic functions will be taken to constitute the functional base for close to all camera movements. Some of these contain declensions in the form of central parameters and sub-functions. The functions, parameters and sub- functions are presented in a schematic overview at the end of the chapter. Six specific camera movements are analyzed in chapter 4, demonstrating how individual camera movements engage two or more of the functions and sub-functions presented in chapter 3. The examples represent various genres as well as different times and countries of production. As to the methodology adapted for the different chapters, a comment must be made about the sample of films consulted. The very extensive viewing necessary to chronicle the history of camera movement (chapter 2.1-2.7) naturally informs the functional taxonomy that will be presented in chapter 3.1, but time prohibited in-depth functional analysis of all camera movements in these films. In order to create a sample that was more manageable for in-depth functional analysis, it was deemed necessary to select a number of camera movements for closer study. Camera movements were selected in seven
2 An inspirational model for this stylistic history of camera movement is David Bordwell’s chapter on staging in On the History of Film Style (1997).
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categories according to type: push-ins, pull-backs, arcing shots, handheld shots, booming and aerial shots, follow shots and autonomous movements. For a definition of these types and an explanation of the methodology of selection and subsequent analytic procedure, please see Appendix 1. Another question that has to be addressed concerns the object of analysis. In its traditional sense, camera movement is a form of interaction between cinematography (the manipulation of a camera) and mise-en-scene (the optic pyramid of space captured by the camera). The object of analysis would then be to focus on what camera movement contributes to this dynamic process. This is good reasoning but I should like to redress the issue slightly by emphasizing that it is, after all, an on-screen effect that is the object of analysis. As one commentator has suggested, the very notion of a “camera” situates us in production surroundings and not in front of the cinema screen (Bordwell 1977: 20). Terms such as push-in and crane shot spring from actual ways of moving the camera or from the use of a specific camera support during production. Obviously, the spectator is not pushed in towards the cinema screen, nor is she transported away from the cinema screen. What meets us in the cinema is a surface that can display various cues of movement and depth. Strictly speaking we do not see camera movement. What we see is that the frame of the image appears to be moving in relation to the motive.3 This will be the object of analysis in chapters 2-4 and the functional taxonomy is a way of accounting for the organizational principles of this on-screen effect of camera movement. Finally, some practical remarks. In-text references are used in this form: (Brownlow 1968: 230). If, within a short span of text, several references are continuously made to the same source, only page numbers are given in the reference: (p. 84). The original publication date for a book or article will be given if its historicity is important: (Mitry 2000 [1963]: 189). Film dates given are the release dates.
3 This definition has led one textbook (Bordwell & Thompson 2004) to apply the term ‘mobile framing’ and then subdivide according to different ways of producing a mobile framing: e.g. camera movement, zoom, virtual or animated mobile framing. Since the dissertation is predominantly based on mobile framing produced by camera movement, this term will be preferred. If it is of significance that a mobile framing under discussion is produced by other means, it will be pointed out in the text. The camera-movement effect is discussed in more depth in 1.9. I subscribe to the definition of the camera-movement effect presented by Bordwell (1977: 19-26).
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One of the vexing problems about writing on camera movement is that its effects cannot be captured on the written page. To make them ‘come alive’ on the page app. 300 still frames (‘thumbnails’) accompany the text and a DVD has been included with the six examples discussed in chapter 4. If nothing else is stated, the still frames are to be read from left to right, one row at a time.
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1 Perspectives on Camera Movement: A Review of the Literature As of now there are no book-length studies of camera movement in the English language. What comes closest are Lutz Bacher’s The Mobile Mise-en-scene, an excellent master’s thesis that was published in 1978, and Serena Ferrara’s book Steadicam – Techniques and Aesthetics (2001). The former focuses on a particular manifestation of camera movement: mobile long takes. Second, only “the most outstanding directors” (p. 1) with a proclivity for mobile long takes are included in the study. Hence it is not a study of camera movement per se. Although it is comprehensive with regards to production history and long take theories up to the point of writing, it is sparse regarding analyses and interpretations of the aesthetic and narrative functions of the camera movements themselves.4 The latter – as the title indicates – takes Steadicam movement as its central focus. This is arguably the most important camera support to emerge since the advent of the crab dolly in the late 1940s and Bacher’s account stops just short of its introduction to feature film production in 1976. Ferrara’s book also contains brief sections on the history and theory of camera movement but its chief contribution to the existing literature concerns its information on Steadicam techniques and aesthetics.5
Despite the shortage of book-length studies relating to camera movement, it would be fallacious to claim that camera movement has not been written about. It has to a great extent, but typically in more limited or perfunctory ways: in short articles in craft journals, in a few critical articles or essays in film journals, incorporated into broader analyses - of a scene, an entire film or a director’s vision – in all types of film literature. Discussions of camera movement can also be found in the obligatory chapter on cinematography in introductory books to the art, look or language of film and then, of course, there are more theoretically oriented accounts of camera movement.
The following is a review of the literature on camera movement. It is not a sketch of how camera movement would be hypothetically accounted for, explained or interpreted from differing theoretical positions. Instead the focus is
4 Bacher remedied this point in his later work on the films of Max Ophuls (1982, 1984, 1996), which is acutely attentive to the nuances of camera movement staging and - to some extent - also its functions. See 1.10. 5 Among other things the book contains a number of stimulating interviews with filmmakers who have had experience using the Steadicam (and in the case of John Carpenter, the PanaGlide).
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on literature – whether of a theoretical, practical or critical nature - that actually engages with camera movement. That said, the account privileges texts originally published in or translated into English, German, French, Danish and Swedish. The review is organized according to the different perspectives from which camera movement has been discussed starting with craft literature. The reader should bear in mind that the chapter is organized so that there is a progression towards research perspectives that are increasingly pertinent to the work presented in chapters 2-4. Consequently the latter chapters will incorporate more extensive discussions of approaches to functional analysis and interpretation of camera movement so better to situate the research perspective pursued in the ensuing chapters of the dissertation. 1.1 Camera Movement as a Craft Camera movement as a cinematic technique has been discussed and evaluated by the craftsmen and artists working within the film industry since silent cinema. In America, The Society for Motion Picture Engineers published its first journal as early as 1916.6 Another key player was – and still is – The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), which was established in 1919. Relatively quickly the ASC “grew from an informal club into the professional association of studio cinematographers” (Thompson & Bordwell 1993: 119). American Cinematographer (AC) – published by the ASC since 1921 – represents the most important source of information on camera movement and camera movement technology as seen from the perspective of the Hollywood craftsman.7 In many
6 From 1916-29: Transactions…