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.