Director Styles - the Clint v the Gee

I think, for me, anytime that the camera work becomes noticable it's failed to do its job of telling the story, because I'm thinking about how clever the director is and have therefore lost my connection to the story.

I have given this matter a lot of thought, to the extent that I have a rule to shooting that I apply, which is:

"The camera only moves when it absolutely has too."

I also tend to favour wider shots over close ups, shooting for cinema rather than for TV.

When I was teaching students I noticed that they found "pre-MTV" films boring and when I looked into this I realised that they were used to watching things that cut several times a second. Because the brain is stimulted to respond to movement, they had become conditioned to equating movement with excitement. So a film like the Exorcist, would with its slow pace and fluid camera work would literally send them to sleep.

I agree with Scott and Poke that the mark of a good director is in telling the story, not pandering to an obsessive need for visual stimulus. Which I think would put me in the Clint camp, if forced to chose. (I also think it's a mistake to right off Clint as a director "Midnight in Garden of Good and Evil" is a great piece of storytelling)

Given the choice I see myself more in the tradition of directors like Kurosawa or Tarkovsky, for whom framing was more important than movement.
 
clive said:
When I was teaching students I noticed that they found "pre-MTV" films boring and when I looked into this I realised that they were used to watching things that cut several times a second. Because the brain is stimulted to respond to movement, they had become conditioned to equating movement with excitement.
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I have to put my hand up and say that I was like one of those students. When I look back on my very first piece of coursework for Film Studies, there was some kind of dazzling cut or rapid movement every second - it was crazy. Made me feel like an old man. It was only 3 years ago, but now, give me a quality moment over quantity of movement. My eyes just can't take it anymore.
 
I think camera movement can enhance the storytelling, but only when neccessary. I like John Sayles and think he could use a little more camera movement in his films to add some visual impact to the story.

Now on to Kubrick. What an overrated hack!!!

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Are you outraged, Hawkeye? I'm just playing with you. I will say I'm not a big Kubrick fan. I think he is a great filmmaker, but for me his movies have never really grabbed me. I usually react to a movie on a gut level and Kubrick's movies always leave me cold. I feel like I'm seeing a technical and intellectual exercise, but not anything to touch my on an emotional level. This works well for films like "2001", which I think is a masterpiece, but "The Shining" left me cold. I think casting Jack Nicholson was a mistake. He's a great actor, but I never felt like he was sane so there was no transition from sane to crazy. In the end, I didn't care much who died or lived. For me Kubrick is a great technical director, but virtually none of his film touch me on an emotional level.

And I do have to ask this about Kubrick, everybody always talks about the number of takes he did. 87 takes of Scatman Courthers walking across a street is ridiculous. Some people say, "Kubrick is such a perfectionist, that he needed 87 takes." To me this is the sign of a piss poor communicator. You take the actor aside, you say this what I want and the actor does it. It should take a few takes to get it, not 87.

There's another story from "The Shining" in which he had Shelly Duvall do a huge amount of takes for the scene where Jack breaks into the bathroom. He wanted her to be exhausted so he just worked her to death. Now she's a darn good actor, so couldn't he have just asked her to play exhausted? That's what actors do, act like something they aren't. This leads to the famous story from "Marathon Man" in which Dustin Hoffman arrived to the set after staying up all night because his character needed to be exhausted and Laurence Olivier said to him, "Try acting."

Again, these are just one man's opinions and nobody is wrong or right here. As Duke Ellington said about music, "If it sounds good, it is good."

Scott
 
DANG! Forgot Clint directed Midnight in the Garden of... etc...
That was a fine movie...
Well, yeah, you can't pass him off, but until Raimi gets an oscar, I will forever hate everybody and everything... oh, how can I be so harsh.

But I agree with you Clive- about not moving unless it's necessary. I guess the only real thing that defines directors in that regard, is choosing WHEN it is necessary... but that's a style and perspective issue, and there's only shades of gray in that area...

-LOGNA)___-d
 
clive said:
"The camera only moves when it absolutely has too."
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I'd be curious to know your reaction to Shyamalan's direction of The Village. Although I don't remember every moment of the film, I recall observing (after only about 10 minutes) that the camera always seemed to be in motion. Subtle glides in and out, to the side, etc. As someone who dabbles with movie-making I noticed it right away, but I doubt it would be picked up by the casual observer.
 
I'd be curious to know your reaction to Shyamalan's direction of The Village. Although I don't remember every moment of the film, I recall observing (after only about 10 minutes) that the camera always seemed to be in motion. Subtle glides in and out, to the side, etc. As someone who dabbles with movie-making I noticed it right away, but I doubt it would be picked up by the casual observer.
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That's interesting. I'm very fond of Shyamalan as a director, when I first saw "Unbreakable" I was shocked because his choice of framing on that film was so close to my own style that it almost felt like I'd shot it.

The use of movement in The Village was very similar to that of another favorite film of mine "Diva" where the camera flows slowly around the actors in sync with the sound track which is mainly Opera.

I quite like these subtle movements of the camera, the flowing style. It's the shaky hand held NYPR blue style that is becoming passe. It's almost impossible to watch some TV now, even in non-conflict dialogue sequences the camera is is jerking around like the camera op has some neuorlogical disorder which prevents them holding anything steady.
I'm not anti-hand held, in fact I use it in all the flashback sequences of my feature "No Place," but that's a deliberate use of an ENG shooting style to show my protagonist's past life as a war photographer.

I think the thing that isn't so obvious about placement of camera is that it has a language and semantics of it's own. Where ever you place the camera is where you want the audience to be. The closer you get the more intimacy you imply, the futher away the more voyueristic it becomes, if you place the camera above the eyeline of the actor you are putting the audience in a dominate position and obviously if you place the camera below the eyeline you are putting the actor in the dominate position (Watch the begining of any early Arnie movie to see this one hammered home.) There are also conventions, so at the begining of the story you start wide and slowly move into the story and at the end you move away, telling the audience that their time with these characters is over. Most directors do this unconciously, because they've absorbed the languague by being part of the audience, some however consciously manipulate it, the most obvious directors in this category being the Coen Brothers, Roman Polanski and Kurosawa.

Roman Polanski talks about this explictly and I've always used it as a guide. When blocking out a scene he walks around the actors whilst they work, placing himself as the audience within the scene and seeing what is of most interest to him. He then places the camera and picks his shots accordingly.

I like this, because it's not about formulatic reproduction of other people's fancy shots, it's about creating a conscious link between the audience and how the film is shot.

I think the difficulty with a director like Kubrick is that he is the most visual centred director there has ever been. In much of his work the actors are no different to him emotionally than any other prop in the frame. This makes his imagery stunning and his attention to details is about creating a visual ballet, where how things look from second to second must conform to a fairly rigid visual formular. This makes his films both stunning to watch and at the same time difficult to connect to. At the same time, however, his early films Dr Strangelove and Lollita are compelling pieces of film making and seem to have been made before Kubrick could achieve the levels of control he took in later years. I think they are better films for that, but I must admit that Kubrick still has the ability to take my breath away with his capacity for creating visual coherence in a shot and I still wish he had completed A.I. rather than Spielberg, because I think the sentimental elements that pervaded that film were its weak points.
 
firstly, I would like to say that was a great post.
just a couple of points:
clive said:
I'm not anti-hand held, in fact I use it in all the flashback sequences of my feature "No Place," but that's a deliberate use of an ENG shooting style to show my protagonist's past life as a war photographer.
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please forgive my ignorance, but what does ENG mean?

I still wish he had completed A.I. rather than Spielberg, because I think the sentimental elements that pervaded that film were its weak points
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now we're talking the same language there.
 
please forgive my ignorance, but what does ENG mean?
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Electronic News Gathering

(Sorry indie, didn't see your post until I'd already written this)

News teams were the first professionals to go over from film to video (well after the porn industry).

Most of the video cameras we have now are a direct development of the needs of news teams, in other words high quality, shoulder mounted cameras that can easily be set up and run in all weather conditions by one person.

An ENG shooting style mimics the style used by news film crews. That is, shoulder mounted, hand held shots that follow the action in one continous shot, where the single camera operator moves and reframes with the action.

Over the years this has evolved into various forms of hand-held and even psuedo hand held (where HH camera movement is simulated on a tripod, sometimes refered to in the UK as "sloppy sticks," because it's when you leave the head on the tripod loose to give free movement to the camera from one stable point.)

The ENG style was made popular in TV drama in the eighties and really goes back to NYPD Blue, which was a ground breaking show visually. The point of shooting a cop show ENG style is that it makes it look more like documentary or news footage, adding to the "realism" via the means of a a camera convention that was established by the neccesities of news gathering.

Of course now that all cop shows are shot like that, so it's hard to see why everyone was so shocked by NYPD Blue.
 
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There is a specific moment in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express where (I cannot recall the proper term, its been a few years since those classrooms) he uses some form of triple framing shot. There is the background, the middleground and the foreground. The crowd (middle) moves with pace. The non-existent existence of the cook is shown in the slowed down images of the background.
It is a shot held for about 5 seconds I think. Yet it conveys so much. It gets across so many points that the story was about. I think it shows that you don't need to be a fancy-Dan (or even Larry) to produce lasting images.
He is the kind of director that I would aspire to be.
 
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