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)

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.