'Standing Up' to Applaude the Camera

The last post! The last movie! I decided to make it a good one, without knowing it, as I randomly chose the 2013 family/coming of age drama Standing Up. It’s about two outcasts, Grace and Howie (also known as Bonnie and Clyde), who decide to run away from their camp after being bullied. The two find a best friend in each other, while finding ways to survive…or avoid returning to their camp.

While focusing on camera movements, I’m also going to focus on eyes in this post. Not only because one of the two scholars I am using focuses on eyes in his article, but also because this movie is very emotion and eye-heavy. The two kids on the run are outcasts, which means they don’t fit the norm of all the other kids. To cut to the chase, they have glasses.

Many of the times we have a close up on the faces of our main characters, and because of their large-rimmed frames, their eyes are the focus. According to Erik Knudsen’s article "Eyes and narrative perspectives on a story: a practice-led exploration of the use of eyes and eye lines in fiction film", this is not a problem at all:

“Eyes as revelation, eyes as expression, eyes as a window, eyes as a mirror – all are metaphors that give an indication of the complexity of the role of eyes in the interaction of sentient sighted beings. In this paper, we are specifically concerned with eyes as part of a cinematic expressive language and how this role relates specifically to create a perspective on a story. As we can surmise from the example of the eyes in a close up, and the seeming biological imperative to engage with eyes, empathy is one important aspect of eye contact. In order to fully engage with someone, we need to preferably engage with their eyes, and when dealing with a medium strongly aligned to notions of verisimilitude – the strong relationship between the iconic signifier and the signified – engaging with a character’s eyes takes on a heightened role in generating empathy with characters.12 And empathy is a critical component in narrative perspective,” (Pg. 6).

There’s not much to say other than the close-up of the eyes are significant to tell the emotion. In each of these shots there is confusion, sadness, hope, and curiosity. All from the eyes.

The first fifteen minutes is very rich in camera movements and angles. I’m reluctant to mention this without providing video clips, but screen shots obviously wouldn’t cut it. There are tracking shots, POV shots, and slow push-ins that truly kept me engaged, appreciating the art of film. Personally, I think the cinematography is what truly made this movie effective.

The above frame is very telling. It’s the point in the film where the duo is staying in a hotel room, undermining everyone in the process. They take on a adult roles, as if they are a married couple. Notice their glasses in the middle separating their bodies. They are at a point in their friendship where they feel sort of awkward, as they are exposed, not only without their glasses, but because their innocent (as the audience sees it – they’re just kids!) feelings towards each other are being realized. In addition, we are looking at them straight on, which is read to be sort of uncomfortable to us.

Katherine J. Thomson-Jones’ article “Narrative in Motion” discusses a lot about the narrator. However, in this film, we don’t exactly have one. Although, we receive voice-overs from Grace in the beginning and the end, questioning on why scientists chose a specific monkey for an experiment, if that monkey was to be more special than the others. This is obviously a parallel to Grace and Howie’s lives; why are they the ones chosen to be picked on? And that’s a question they ask each other, as they come to the conclusion that they are easy targets and want to simply be liked.

Standing Up is very shot rich, and while it's hard to explain the shots without visually seeing them, the mere focus on eyes in connection to emotion in the film is enough to conclude the film is overall captured very, very well.

Works Cited:

Knudsen, Erik. "Eyes and Narrative Perspectives On A Story: A Practice-Led Exploration Of The Use Of Eyes And Eye Lines In Fiction Film." Journal Of Media Practice 15.1 (2014): 3-20.

Thomson-Jones, Katherine J. "Narration In Motion." British Journal Of Aesthetics 52.1. (2012): 33-43.

'My Girl': My Favorite Thus Far

My Girl, a 1991 film, has been on my watch-list for a while, mainly because I love young Macaulay Culkin. Which was a bad choice because (SPOILER) he ends up dying suddenly. Anyhow, My Girl was to me the epitome of a coming of age story.

Trailer included as usual, though I’ll give you a short rundown. Vada is a spunky 11-year-old who, while is curious about the world and its adventures, is charmingly clueless about life…and death. With a crush on her teacher and false claims that she’s dying (no thanks to her dad’s job as a funeral director that takes place in their basement), she deals with loss, family, first kisses, and simply growing up.

Vada is sheltered from much of life, yet she is very mature and wise for her age. Right away it is shown what she is sheltered from most - death - with this very shot.

In Philip Cowan's article "Underexposed: The neglected art of the cinematographer," he refers to Bordwell a fair amount. He explains David Bordwell's view of the perception image in the following quote: "The perception image seems to be one where information in terms of setting, location or details are perceived by either the characters in the film, or the audience, or, as is often the case, both," (Cowan 90).

If we are taking that definition to heart, then the previous image is a perception image. There is a wall that separates Vada from a very horrific scene for anyone, let alone an 11 year old. Though, we are on Vada's side of the wall, we see and know what lies beyond her vision, though we know her innocence and respect the fact that she is afraid.

There is also the shot above, which is very geometric and purely pleasing to the eye...or is it? Vada is isolated and alone; she is in the center of the frame and the focus point of where all the linear angles lead to. In terms of Cowan, he refers to the long-shot as a view from an outside observer, which is what we are here. The audience is very distant from Vada, not even beginning to be able to feel her pain; so therefore, we are not equal to her, so we look up at her on the steps. This is overall a simple shot in terms of detail and space, but it's very complex as it matches the mood of our protagonist after her best friend has died.

Speaking of being observers, that is just what we are in these following shots.

In the first frame, we are spying and essentially we are Vada, as she is the spy who is looking out her window peering into the van when her father and his new employee Shelly are on their date. Again, the explanation is simple. If we were to cut from Vada looking out the window to just a static shot to the van, yes, the message of her watching the two adults would come across, but it would simply be boring. This is film, creativity is what keeps the viewers interest.

As for the bathroom shot where Shelly is teaching Vada about makeup, we are on-lookers viewing from the hallway, as the camera, and therefore we, are not physically in the bathroom with the two. This is much like the scene referred to in my very first blog, where I explain a similar scene
mentioned by Bordwell:

This distant shot is comparable to one in The Wolf of Wall Street where protagonist Jordan Belfort hits his wife Naomi, though we only see it through a far doorway at the end of a hallway, which blocks our view. David Bordwell in his article “Understanding Film Narrative: The Trailer” uses that exact scene to display shot style as part of the narrative. “This choice lessens the impact of Jordan’s aggression. It gives us important information about the story action,” (Bordwell). (Blog #1).

Much like the Jordan and Naomi scene in TWOWS, we are located in the hallway, viewing the action through a doorway to a separate room.

Getting back to our scholar for this blog, Cowan actually quotes Bordwell yet again, this time for an explanation of plot: "In his book Figures Traced in Light, Bordwell points out that the audience’s understanding of what we call plot comes ‘through the patterned use of the medium’s techniques. Without performance and framing, lens length and lighting, composition and cutting, dialogue and music, we could not grasp the world of the story’ (Bordwell 2005: 32)" (Cowan 90).

In the above scene, there is sad music, a strong performance, effective framing (such as the stair shot), heart-wrenching dialogue ("Where are his glasses? He can't see without his glasses!"), and a great use of camera and lens length (the tracking of Vada to the casket, a slow zoom into her face as he watches through the railings, crying). It is in fact true that without all of this coming together as one, there wouldn't be as much of a sad, strong, effective scene that would enhance the plot. Even if the music was absent, the scene would not be vulnerable, just instead awkward and uncomfortable, which would not fit.

While Cowan often refers back to David Bordwell, that is fair as all of Bordwell's knowledge referring back to film and the use of the camera is too rich not to touch upon. Much of what both scholars say refers back to My Girl effortlessly, as the film is filled with telling shots and camera technique.

Works Cited:

Cowan, Philip. "Underexposed: The Neglected Art Of The Cinematographer." Journal Of Media Practice 13.1 (2012): 75-96.

A Look Into 'If I Had Wings'

I watched the 2013 drama If I Had Wings and just like every other movie, it serves as a demonstration through style/cinematography as a mean of narrative.

First, the run-down. Let’s keep it simple. A junior felon is partnered up to run with a blind student, wanting to join the track team. Together, they become better…better runners, better friends, and better people.

In regards to the article to which I’m assessing this movie, we first have to figure out what, message-wise, the movie is trying to bring into the universe. Then, we will depict the frames themselves that help bring forward that meaning.

For example, Adam Ganz says his article "Digital Cinema: The Transformation Of Film Practice And Aesthetics." It is significant that this film,” (referring to Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film Festen), “which dealt with incest in an apparently successful bourgeois family, is about re-remembering and revealing. The digital allows the representation of multiple yet fractured points of view, which gives a sense of privileged yet partial access,” (Ganz 26). I’d like to produce the same analyzation of If I Had Wings.

Because one of our protagonists, Alex, is blind, I find that there are many digital shots consulting sight. For instance, there is a shot where Brad’s (the rebel) father shows up at the track coach’s door. When we learn this, we see him from the door peephole.

 It’s a sight thing, such as this shot that we see through a camcorder lens filter.

Maybe the shot variations themselves, angle wise, don’t contribute much in uniqueness to the film, though the different variations of sight and lenses is what connects to Alex’s blindness. This is just like the above quote from Ganz. The digital camera and the art itself in Festen furthered the movie with the theme of incest and revealing through partial access. In If I Had Wings, the multiple lenses straying from the human eye reminds us that Alex is blind, yet we (the audience, the fortunate seers) are lucky and privileged to even be viewing this film.

Again, this following quote is explaining just that – the relationship between the characters and the audience…

“The audience is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A comparatively conventional screenplay (which could almost have been written by Terence Rattigan and has been a success throughout Europe as a theatre piece) is transformed through the prism of the digital cinema and it’s different relationship between the audience the performers and their stories. We have a different kind of access. We never watch the story directly, instead we are present where it occurs, we overhear it,” (Ganz 26).

We are obviously not living either Alex or Brad’s life; we are onlookers, just like we always are when viewing any form of art.

We are strictly viewers, yet that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t try to include us in the same emotions portrayed by the characters in cinematographic ways/styles. The scene above starts off with a black screen, where as soon as the bedroom door is open and the hallway light floods into the room, we realize Alex was sitting in his room with the lights off. At first, that is strange to us. Then it quickly clicks that it makes no difference for him. After his mother closes the bedroom door again, we are lost again in the darkness of Alex’s room.

I could have focused on how we are introduced to Alex in a school environment (starting with his legs and his guide/pole reaching out in front of him. We are not positioned to see his face yet, as if none of his classmates see him as a friend/equal. Though, besides that, there were honestly just regular shot variations; nothing too telling of the story in a different way that hasn't already been discussed in this blog before. 

Adam Ganz focuses on the emergence of digital cinema, with details of enhancement of storyline and audience connection through said digital cinema. I simply connected that idea/structure to the film If I Had Wings. As sight in every film is important, it was just a little extra important in this movie.

Works Cited:

Ganz, Adam, and Lina Khatib. "Digital Cinema: The Transformation Of Film Practice And Aesthetics." New Cinemas: Journal Of Contemporary Film 4.1 (2006): 21-36.

Camera Angles in 'The Nanny Diaries'

The 2007 film adaptation of The Nanny Diaries. There’s a lot to depict from the movie’s editing and cinematography, so let’s get right into it. I’ve provided the trailer, like always, for basic context.

The beginning of the movie is heavily edited through animation, such as when Annie (our protagonist – Scarlett Johansson) floats away on a red umbrella, leaving everyone’s expectations of her (finance/business) to float away and take some time to figure out who she wants to be.

The movie has a fair amount of voice-over narration in the beginning, as well as all the prospective lives Annie could lead are displayed as museum showings. She is looking at these scenes/people in an environment that is foreign to most of us. She is an onlooker, and based on the angle, we are equal to her. We are seeing the same thing she is: the lives of the rich in Upper East Side, one she will soon go work for as a nanny. We are onlookers. This whole story, the different lives of the same human species, is what Annie calls a “case-study”.

At the end, when Annie finally knows who she is.

With such animation and editing, there is a lack of realism that takes away from the viewers ability to get even more engulfed in the scenes depicted. Obviously, flying away on an umbrella and pausing moving situations to further study the environment is impossible. This sort of fairytale narration being provided with the help of voiceover challenges what Stephen Boyd David quotes Bordwell for in David’s article “Interacting with pictures: film, narrative and interaction”. The article says “At times Bazin (1967 46) considers realism as having an unproblematic relation to the scene: we know what scenes look like and film should look the same. The depictive strategies by which film evokes a sense of seamless vision have proved so effective that even experienced film theorists have tended to write as though the camera’s viewpoint were analogous to a situated eye (Silverman 1983, Aumont 1989), an ‘invisible witness’ (Bordwell 1985 54),” (Davis 72).

There is no seamless vision because we know what’s reality and what is just plain special effects and green screen. This personally takes away from the strength of the acceptance and grasp of the whole storyline and narration in general, as my viewpoint and investment is constructed with Annie randomly floating up in the air. But I’m not saying it doesn’t still have a meaning. Again, as she leaves the ground and wanders up towards the clouds, she leaves her life (though, still alive!) and becomes even more of an onlooker, from a birds eye view. Take the first photo again for an example.

Though, I might be hypocritical when saying to disregard all I have said about the editing as taking away from the narration. There is one instance where the viewpoint of reality is broken, and we consciously realize that, however, it strongly adds to the film, in what I think is hands down the best scene.

Above is the scene where Mrs. X, the mother employer, is watching the compromised nanny-cam tape in her privileged form of a parenting-nanny class (designed to really shape the nannies and fix their flaws. Weird, right?). Annie tells Mrs. Ex like it is, aggressively. We get a split screen edit: on the left, there is Annie is little Grayer’s room, spewing off into the open the mother’s flaws, and on the right, Mrs. X with fellow disconnected mothers, simple viewers of the tape. Though it is clear that it’s as if Annie is speaking directly to Mrs. X, as they face one another.

Maybe it is all acceptable here because there is a sense of realism. Annie could easily stand in front of that line of women and be yelling. That whole situation is possible and familiar to our eye, so we don’t question its realism.

There are many shots that the camera is looking down on Annie. “In narrative-oriented virtual worlds, the camera is a communicative tool that conveys not just the occurrence of events, but also affective parameters like the mood of the scene, relationships that entities within the world have with other entities and the pace/tempo of the progression of the underlying narrative. For instance, in the vshots shown in Figure 3 (below), the telling of the narrative is enhanced by selection of camera angles such that the initial low angle shot establishes dominance of the character that later turns submissive with the progression of the narrative as highlighted by the transition to high angle shots,” Arnav Jhala and R Michael Young explain in their algorithmic film study titled “A Discourse Planning Approach to Cinematic Camera Control for Narratives in Virtual Environments.” (Jhala and Young 307).

Just like the dominance in Figure 3 above, the down, aerial camera angles also convey dominance on our end, as Annie is being looked down on either from us as the onlookers as our opinions form, or we simply see Mrs. X in frame looking down on her.

I believe Jhala and Young explain it perfectly in the above passage. It really needs no further explanation. The camera is looking down on Annie, therefore Annie is being depicted as inferior.

Needless to say, The Nanny Diaries is pact with rich camera angles and a narration that, while may at times take away from the realistic viewership, does a strong job of further the plot and conveying certain emotion.

Works Cited:

Davis, Stephen Boyd. "Interacting With Pictures: Film, Narrative And Interaction." Digital Creativity 13.2 (2002): 71.

Jhala, Arnav, and Robert Michael Young. "A discourse planning approach to cinematic camera control for narratives in virtual environments." AAAI. Vol. 5. 2005.

'Here On Earth' is a Melodrama, Sort Of

Last night I viewed the film Here On Earth. It’s a 2000 romance film, and after viewing the first minute of the trailer before watching the actual movie, I had high hopes. It was pretty misleading. Or it was my fault for not watching the whole trailer. Either way, it’s a bad version of Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk To Remember. If you know me, you know I love cliché, sappy romance films; however, this movie was terribly acted and the storyline was just completely frustrating. A girl is trapped between two boys; one troubled by lack of family and therefore is spoiled with materialistic things, the other she’s known all her life. Guess which one she falls for. Beyond that, she randomly has cancer and has kept it a secret. Aspects of this film reminded me of the melodrama Written on the Wind that we recently watched in class.

Both films are sappy and emotional (characteristics of a melodrama), as the audience is mainly women, according to past film critics who saw melodramas as bad filmmaking (as discussed in class). Though beyond that, the film has a storyline that is quite male driven that is filled with drama and emotion. First we have the tension between Kelley, the spoiled rich kid always looking for a fight, and Jasper, the humble, loving boy that claims he and Sam (the pure, good-willed girl next door) are destined to be together. This love triangle is parallel to the love triangle in Written on the Wind, between Kyle, Mitch and Lucy.

In Laura Mulvey’s 1977 paper “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” a response to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, she says, “Although this device [mise-en-scène] uses aesthetics as well as narrative to establish signs for characters on the screen as for the spectator in the cinema, elements such as lighting or camera movement still act as a privileged discourse for the spectator,” (Mulvey 41). Lighting is a large component in this film, because if we are not outside where the boys are working to rebuild the diner they destroyed or not doing their mandatory farm work, we are inside a dim house, feeling Kelley’s dull, empty attitude.

In the shot below, we can see the disconnect between Kelley and his father who is often distant (notice how he is on the laptop). Besides the psychical distance created by all the objects between the two, which reflects back to their minimal relationship, the darkness in this shot is saddening. Kelley deeply longs for his father’s attention after his mother’s suicide; however, he only gets it when he creates trouble for himself. Or rather for his father’s name and reputation in society. The lighting in the office is uncomfortable, a feeling that our character Kelley is feeling sitting in that chair. Their bodies are almost lost with all the peaks of light above their figure. An unsettling shot overall.

There are quite a bit of these shots, along with close up shots to express the character’s emotions. Notice the close up on Jasper’s face below. Sam just broke up with him and went on a bus to Boston to be with Kelley. What is the point of focus in this shot? It’s his tear filled eye. The whole background is out of focus but his left eye is the central point of contact as that side of his face is established (due to lighting).

Mulvey is not wrong when she says lighting adds to the narratives in melodramas, and while this is not a melodrama all together, it contains the same characteristics.

Another powerful shot is this one below, where Kelley carries Sam back after her knee gives out, signaling the cancer that Kelley nor we are aware of has come back. At this point, I still was not pro Kelley. Sam leaves the great guy (Jasper) for a rich, spoiled guy who is troubled due to his family life. It doesn’t make sense to me, mainly because she falls for him after hearing him recite a verse of one of her favorite poems. Suddenly he is just misunderstood to everyone. Too cliché, even for me. Anyway, this is the moment where the bad-boy becomes the soft, caring hero. He saves her. We are focusing on their almost silhouette as they enter over the hill. The orange skyline meets the out of focus ground, creating a very simple, yet narrative turning, scene. He is the hero, and we now accept him. He saves her, he’s a good person…?

This film is often times in Kelley’s point of view when dealing with his family and his tense emotions, though like a melodrama according to Mulvey, it’s much from a woman’s point of view, as again, women are the central audience, for both a romance and a melodrama. Both are meant to make you feel and make you cry. “The story-line is extremely simple, if not minimal…and is told strictly from a woman’s point of view, both in the sense of world view (the film is structured around female desires and frustrations) and point of identification,” (Mulvey 42).

We get both Kelley and Sam’s desires and frustrations, as they both want each other and long for something exciting and different in life. For Kelley, it’s happiness outside of material things. For Sam, it’s a change in relationship and a change from her small town, routine life. And we can identify in one way or another to each character.

Then there are scenes that follow the words suggesting the scenes. For instance, at the beginning of their relationship, Kelley says for Sam to meet him that night. Cut right to them walking the baseball field at night. We don’t need to see the time in between. Why show what we can infer, right? Again, a lot of scenes are derived like such. This relates back to David Bordwell’s article I mentioned in my first blog post “Understanding Film Narrative: The Trailer”. While I plan to use the section of ‘Narrative as inference-making’ for a future blog post, this sort of jump cut is a perfect example of what he is talking about.

“By saying that narration pushes us to make inferences I’m not suggesting that the inferences are models of deep thinking. They are, we say, commonsensical,” he says, using The Wolf of Wall Street as his mode of examples. I plan to go more in depth with this in the future; however, in Here On Earth when we don’t see the petty time passes in between, we make the common sense inference that Sam agreed to meet Kelley that night, as we then see them together a scene away.

Overall, Mulvey, while talking about melodramas in her article, is quite right when she, along with Bordwell, says that camera movements (and lighting) add to the narrative. While Here On Earth is not a melodrama, it has components that connect with Sirk’s melodrama Written on the Wind. 

While this is was not a very strong film plot and acting wise, in my eyes, the camera work did a solid job to keep me from turning it off.

Works Cited:

Mulvey, Laura. "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama." Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 39-44. Print.