Recent Trends in Cinematography - Drama. (Part 2 of 4)

Today's post will focus on the dramatic side of things, next week comedic, before the final concluding section.

To start with, loose and free camera movement is not anything that is completely new.  Look at a lot of the French New Wave, especially the movie Breathless by Jon-Loc Godard.  Here is an excert from it(SPOILER WARNING, if ya ain't seen it):

This film is credited by many, including myself, as really kick starting this revolution in cinematography, the French New Wave, the authorship theory and all that jazz.  In the last ten-twenty years, however, as huge changes in video technology, such as new lightweight cameras, filmmakers are now free to move around, to plan to move around, even more with the camera.  I an only imagine how heavy the camera that they used in the above scene could have been.  To see a camera move around like that, I could imagine in the perspective of someone living in that time, was very jarring and a taboo as far as what someone was supposed to do.  The camera was only supposed to move on a dolly of some sort, in a smooth manner so it wouldn't jar the viewer.  Godard, however, wanted to jar the viewers of his films, he wanted the viewer to remember his films, to see a style emerge in his films, similar to the way there was a style that carried over and evolved from film to film in Hitchcock's filmography.  Godard also wanted to destroy the bourgeoisie status cinema held in the French culture of his time.

Enough with Godard though, my view of his is nothing more than a history lesson for the director we are focusing on in this blog: Darren Arronfsky.  When one looks at his early films and Black Swan, there is a clear evolution that has occured in his filmmaking. In Pi, he began to use two techniques that would become motifs that would define many of his coming films.  The first is the use of quick, rhythmic edits, and the second is the use of certain cinematographic techniques and devices like the Snorricam.  In particular, an examination of a subway scene in Pi, contrasted against another subway scene in Black Swan, I believe will show this evolution in the cinematographic elements of his films:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRJgvwg6ru0 (it appears this user had embedding disabled, so just click on that link to see the clip, right click and open in new tab/window if you want to keep this window open).

As it is very obvious, this scene, like the whole film in general, has a very gritty(though, I must clarify, gritty is not meant to be a bad thing) black and white look.  The camera work is clearly influenced by the style that Godard had developed in his stylistic protest against the Bourgeois French society, however, here it is not so much a protest, as it is an aesthetic choice made by Arronfsky.  The reasoning I believe he made the aesthetic choice in to have loose and free camera movement is also to jar the viewer, but not in the more avant-garde notion of jarring like Godard had done with Breahtless, instead, this aesthetic choice was made because it was internal to the meaning of the work itself, it, just like the quick editing and use of the Snorricam, was a way for the director to give us insight into the obviously tormented psychological state of Maximilian Cohen.  However, as we will see, in Black Swan, Arronfsky was able to evolve many of these techniques because of new technology that had developed since he filmed Pi.

There are many different aspects that are interesting to contrast in the cinematography of Black Swan when one looks back at Pi.  One of the most interesting of these for me is the use of the subway setting.  In Pi, as I have just stated, much of the camerawork in not just this scene, but the entire film in general, gives us a gritty feeling that allows us deeper insight into our protagonist.  In Black Swan, he would return to the subway again, but now, for a number of reasons including both budget, technology and probably a more developed personal methodology of how to make a film, Arronfsky was able to film in a crystal clear quality while still giving us insight into the dark and tormented psychology of his protagonist.  Part of the reasoning for this clarity in both the cinematography and the way it was edited together, Arronofsky cites as a result of this new technology allowing him to plan out exactly how he wanted each shot:

“We used a Canon 7D or 1D Mark IV for all the subway scenes; I could just carry a 7D and shoot on the subway all day with a very small crew. I did some tests with my wife beforehand to figure out my ASA, my stop, and how I was going to deal with the focus. I didn’t use any rigs with it because I wasn’t trying to shoot in the traditional way. I tested a bunch of different exposures and then brought the footage to Charlie Hertzfeld at Technicolor, who put it in the system so I could look at the highlights, the moiré and the resolution. Then I went back to the drawing board to do more tests. The 7D has more depth of field than the 5D, but I needed that because I didn’t have a follow-focus unit and needed to work really fast. I shot everything documentary-style. I did all the focus pulls by hand, and we’d just look at it on the camera’s monitor. I ended up shooting on a Canon 24mm lens at 1,600 ASA to get as much depth of field as possible at a stop of T81⁄2" Article.

While both scenes are definitely creepy in a way that you can't put your finger on(note: this creepiness is at least partially a result of Clint Mansell, a frequent collaborator with the director, but this is the focus of another blog entirely), it is hard for me to deny that the scene in Black Swan brought more of an emotional reaction in me than Pi had initially had(though don't take this as discounting Pi as a film, because it is more a testament to just how awesome the execution of Black Swan really was).  I believe part of this is because as opposed to rehashing old techniques in Pi he used to convey the emotion of his character, the small intimately connected crew as well as the planning he was able to put into Black Swan allowed him to not box himself in as far as how he was going to display the characters psychology through the frame.  


(Notes:  Once again, this hasn't been very organized, so I apologize for any incoherence, but I just wanted to to some free writing exercises regarding my thoughts on film.  This will be be continued when I focused on Parks and Recreation and how similar uses of new technology have allowed this show to really push the line as far as comedy, breaking new territory(at least through the early part of the 3rd season)