Recent Trends in Cinematography.(Part 1 of 4)

"No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings" - William Blake

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As always, in recent years cinematography has undergone many evolutionary changes in terms of stylistic choices that filmmakers have recently chosen.  While there still seems to be an old guard that is overstaying their welcome in the cinematic community, one that seems stuck on using archaic methods that were developed during an entirely different era of technology.  Aside from watching recent cinema and doing surface level research on the technical aspects that went into creating the films, this topic is not something I have done any academic research on as well, so if anyone could lead me on to articles or books that deal with this topic, from the past or present, please, do send me in the correct direction.


But I digress, the topic at hand is recent trends in cinematography, in terms of its evolution as a craft and art-form.  These trends I speak of are the much more loose and free style of camera-work that has begun to emerge in the last number of years with the introduction of new technology.  The technology I speak of is lightweight cameras, which by their very nature allow the person operating the camera to move in a manner more freely than previous generations could have ever even dreamt.  I do not have anything I am for or against here other than the fact that these evolution's, like in other art-forms, do exist in camera-work, and this blog will briefly examine this evolution from an expository perspective, before concluding a subjective assessment of my own recent work, concluding with a comparison of a project that for all intents and purposes was a failure, For Richer the Poorer, and one that, while I wouldn't have the ego to call it a success, was more successful and brought me more pride than any other project I had completed from a production point of view, which is my most recent project, entitled It's Been A Pleasure.


To illustrate this change, there are two works, one is a feature-length film, the other a television series, which I will use as my primary examples, however, before I cite these examples, I want to stress, in fact I cannot stress enough, these are not the only examples of this evolution in camera-work.  The first is Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky's most psychologically-driven project, and the second is Parks & Recreation, the very popular NBC television show which will soon begin production for its fourth season.  One again, I want to stress, my reasoning for choosing these two works is not because I think they are the only cases, or even the best cases for that matter, it is in fact because I feel that I, subjectively, am familiar with both of these works.


I would like to stress that these evolution's can be seen in every form of art or philosophy or life where there are people passionate about what they are doing.  At the risk of being self-indulgent, I will conclude this section by bringing in a quick analogy(which will hopefully come full circle in the final part) from eighteenth century Europe in the communities of Weimar and Jena, communities which housed some of the best minds of this time period: Goethe, Weiland, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel (as well as Nietzsche during his university years a century later) just to name a few. As Chytry noticed in Lukács' observations of this era:


" 'In a small German town, a few young people come together for the purpose of creativing a new, harmonious, all-embracing culture out of the chaos.'  Intoxicated by the revolution, eager to seize the moment for the creation of a community of 'pan-poetism,' the Jena spirits had found that the only basis for this Golden Age culture would be 'an art born of technology and the spirit of matter.' "  (note: I have not read this text, I got the reference from The Aesthetic State by Josef Chytry[ISBN: 0520063902])


While the individuals responsible for this aesthetic revolution were closely bound together by a physical community, I feel that despite not being bound by a physical community, the examples of cinematographers today still share in an ideal that mirrors the one of this aesthetic revolution, and ultimately together we are creating an "all-embracing culture out of the chaos" and "an art born of technology."

In the next number of weeks I will continue to explore this issue, before finally bringing it together into perspectives on my own craft.