Can w please lose the jittery camerawork...? (1 Viewer)

[Lyle_JP]

This "style" doesn't come from any one show, movie, or director. It can all be traced back to MTV. It's no surprise to me that so many hack directors (Michael Bay, McG, etc.) have a music video background. For some reason, Hollywood looks to MTV as its recruiting grounds for directing "talent", since they've apparently figured out that their target audience (thanks also in no small part to MTV) has the attention span of an average mosquito.

 

[Michael Reuben]

We must not be watching the same movies. In fact, I can't think of a film I've seen recently that this applies to.

BTW, to answer the question first posed by the OP, the TV show most identified with handheld camerawork wasn't NYPD Blue but another cop show: Homicide: Life on the Streets. And its creators most definitely didn't learn their trade in music videos.

M.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Not sure why...but this is a technique which just doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I've even heard complaints about the quirky shots in a show like Boston Legal...which just seem to emphasize a character's hands rather than just focus solely on their face. But, it's all good for me.

 

[Tarkin The Ewok]

If I'm thinking more about the camera work on my first viewing instead of the movie's story, then the movie has failed. It doesn't matter if it's shaky-cam, Steadicam, crane shots, or some other technique. Taking the audience out of the story is one of the gravest flaws a movie can have.

 

[Mike Frezon]

I understand, Brandon, what you and all the posters are saying. Being taken out of a movie sucks. I'm just saying the hand-held shots don't do that for me. I'm taken out of a film much more often by bad writing or wooden delivery by actors, etc. Others are affected by over-use (or clumsy use) of CGI. And so on.

I would still think film-makers would take the large amount of criticism being heaped on this choice of rapid camera movement for what it is and probably cut back...or at least become more selective of its use. I think there's been enough negativity attached to it that they should think about if they want to alienate that much of their audience in future endeavors. But, then again, as artists maybe they don't care. I guess it depends if they want to have good box office and make big $$$.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I completely agree. If I wasn't so insanely conscious of the jittery camerawork in Ultimatum and the rest, it wouldn't be an issue, but unfortunately, the shots are so distracting that it becomes impossible for me to focus on the action. Even if we leave the physical nausea that sometimes results out of the equation, I still think the technique calls too much attention to itself.

It's like super-quick edits. If I think about editing, then the film fails - I shouldn't notice the cuts...

 

[Robert Crawford]

In all my discussions about film with people that are not really film buffs such as the film buffs that post on this forum, I have not heard one of them complain about shaky-cam. I've heard them complain about bad acting and writing, but not one word about using this type of camerawork.






Crawdaddy

 

[Zen Butler]

I think it "works" in some cases. How do you all feel about the opening battle of Gladiator? I compare the 2nd Bourne car chase about the same. It gave me the feeling of being right there. Any one of you who has been in a real fight would know; that's the way it kinda looks. It's not all flowing

 

[John_S]

The hyper-fast editing style so common today bothers me even more than the jittery camera-work.

 

[DavidJ]

I do agree with this, but close-ups and ecus are far more prevalent today than they used to be. It seems to be one way that television where tighter shots are the norm has influenced film. Of course, we continue to see more film-like techniques make the transition to TV. I personally think this cross-pollination of the mediums is a great thing.

Still, I love a greatly composed and lit medium to wide shot on a tripod where the actors are given the room to do their thing.

 

[SD_Brian]

Bourne's box office receipts would seem to indicate that shaky-cam doesn't turn off general audiences. Combine that with another rapid-edit movie like Transformers' $300+ million gross and brace yourself for the fact that these stylistic devices aren't going away any time soon.

 

[Simon Howson]

It wasn't new then either, they were just trying to emulate the look of cinema veritae documentaries. Why people still associate cinema veritae with realism I have no idea, ultimately it is just another style that isn't inherently more realistic than any other approach.

 

[Simon Howson]

Surely they will hit a perceptual limit though? There is only so many gracelessly staged sequences audiences will take before finding a film incoherent. Consider that there are many films with average shot lengths under 2 seconds, but none I'm aware of below 1.5. It seems even directors / editors and directors realise that there is a limit to how fast a film can be cut. Perhaps that is why they are trying other tactics like constantly moving the camera, plus zooming in and out. It makes the image even more unstable but without cutting to another shot.

 

[SD_Brian]

Perhaps it will be a cycle: we'll get to a point where Parkinson's Disease-style cinematography and Cuisinart editing will become the norm and the average shot-length will be 4 frames. Then someone will come along with a movie that holds a medium shot for 20 seconds. Critics will embrace this radical departure and this new "deliberate pacing" will be praised for its innovation, leading to a "new" style of leisurely cutting with close-ups used only as punctuation, rather than as the whole sentence.

It could happen.

 

[JohnMor]

I totally agree about the shakey-cam and the overdone hyper-edits. Really a shame on both counts. As has been said, every technique can be great in moderation, but man are these overdone today.

In addition to being vomit-inducing, they are insulting (to me anyway) in that they are the cheapest way to build tension and/or suspense. It's like the old shock-scare cheat in the horror movies: if you don't have the chops to legitimately scare an audience, make another kind of film. If you can't build tension and suspense through good writing, acting & directing, then don't make the movie. But cheap visual tricks to compensate don't cut it with me. Same when it's used in musical numbers in movies like Moulin Rouge or Chicago to substitute for "energy" and "verve."Obviously, I'm in the minority, save for the majority of posters in this thread. It would have been great to see the dancing in those films, but I don't think there was one complete body movement seen in either film without at least 2 cuts. It's really too bad The Third Man and West Side Story didn't have the benefit of all this. They could have really been successful films.

A good friend of mine and I have been complaining about this for years now. Glad to see others are as sick of it as we are.

 

[Michael Reuben]

I never said it was.

M.

 

[SD_Brian]

It's one of those "Back in MY day!" things.

In the "old days" movement was done within the frame rather than with the camera and editing because technical/practical reasons demanded it: cameras were heavier to move, film stocks weren't as advanced as they are now so lighting was a pain and editing was all done analog style so every cut involved a splice. It's not that directors didn't WANT to move the camera and use fast cutting, it's that it was a big dang deal to do so.

What I find amusing about the "justification" for Shaky-cam is that it's supposed to give a "documentary-like" feel to the movie. I've personally never seen a documentary outside of, say, home movies or combat footage where the camera operator could not hold the camera relatively steady.

 

[Simon Howson]

Well I watch all sorts of different films made over the last hundred years. I don't know what you watch, so it is pointless asking me to comment on it.

But I ask, don't you instinctively sense that when you watch a film made in the 1940s that it looks (and sounds) different to one made in the 21st century? I'm not refering to what people wore, and what cars they drove, just the way filmmakers make films now is in some ways similar, but in other ways very different from how films were made 60 years ago.

I am not proposing that every film made in the last 10 or 20 years is filmed in exactly the same way. I simply state the obvious that there are certain trends in contemporary filmmaking that are different to trends that existed 50, 60 or 70 years ago. Film style is partly based on fashion, and changes over time based on what different filmmakers do (and also what technologies they use but that's another story). Filmmakers learn by watching films as well, they see small things that they like that were innovative in say 1950, which they then add to the films they make today. (Surely the film The Killing (1956) was an important influence on how Tarantino narrates many of his films?)

For example, 50 years ago it was considered 'wrong' for there to be an edit during a camera movement. Sure you could find a film from the 1930s that had an edit during a camera movement (Grapes of Wrath comes to mind), but it was very rare. Compare that to films made in the last 20 or 30 years where there are cuts during camera movements (or camera shaking) all the time. Something has changed, obviously some filmmakers thought the 'rule' or 'trend' was silly, so they just put the cut wherever they wanted to, which ultimately led to a new trend.

Of course there are exceptions to any prevailing trend, but having an idea of what was the 'normal' approach at any given time can make some films more interesting because they become recognisable as innovative, for featuring things that at the time were relatively rare. So of course you could study 100 films and concentrate on ways that they are different. But it is also informative to look at the approaches that they share in common.

For example, Hitchcock started experimenting with fast cutting between close ups in the 1950s and into the 1960s. At the time this was rare, so you could say Hitchcock was innovating. However, this is an extremely common approach to covering conversations in films made since the 1970s. When Hitchcock did it he was experimenting with ways to speed up exposition scenes, and it seems that filmmakers in the 70s and 80s have taken that approach and applied it in their films. However, Hitchcock liked shooting films with basically one focal length lens up to at least Psycho (which was shot almost entirely with a 50mm lens). Yet in the 1960s and 70s directors started experimented with long lenses and zooms, which became fashionable. Have a look at Hitchcock's last film made in 1976, sure enough, it features long lens shots and some stunning uses of zoom lenses. So even a 77 year old filmmaker like Hitchcock stayed up with current trends, but applied those techniques in interesting ways.

In general terms it is pretty obvious that films made in the last 10 or 20 years feature faster editing, more camera movement, far more close-ups, and the use of extreme lens lengths compared to films made 50, 60, or 70 years ago.

Some contemporary (currently working) Hollywood filmmakers may reject one or two of these general trends, but I can't think of any filmmakers that reject all of them. Or if they do, it is for a film or two before they adopt a version of the dominant style.

Look at films by Jim Jarmusch, he started making independent films with extraordinarily long takes, but his films feature faster and faster editing as his career goes on, and he is more likely to move the camera a lot more now than at the start of his career, as well as relying on a lot more close-ups during conversation scenes.

Or consider Wes Anderson who likes shooting films in anamorphic using just a few lenses such as 40, 50 and 75mm (which are all wide-angle in the anamorphic format anyway). So he has rejected the trend of filmmakers using all sorts of long and short lenses by restricting himself to just a few. However, he uses a lot of camera movement, and in historical terms, his films are edited fast (but not fast compared to contemporary action films). He perhaps shoots less close-ups that most contemporary filmmakers, but he still shoots a lot more that a director working in the 1940s would.

Of course when looking at a film you should judge it for what it is. But a bit of knowledge of general trends at different periods of time can make one appreciate whether a film is - for its time - conventional, or stylistically innovative.

 

[Simon Howson]

I think they think it evokes combat footage. The beach landing in Saving Private Ryan was filmed using a device to shake the camera by carefully calibrated amounts - an "un-steadicam" if you will.

 

[Michael Reuben]

While verging on the self-evident, that statement strikes me as substantially more defensible than generalizations like "[m]ost shots in contemporary Hollywood films are Medium Close-Ups, from the chest up, or tighter" -- a statement that ultimately can't withstand scrutiny, as your own discussion of Wes Anderson suggests.

To return to the original point on which we disagreed: If you're seeing as many contemporary films as your presentation indicates, then you should be seeing plenty of examples of actors performing with their whole bodies and the camera capturing it. I don't dispute (and never did) that films of today have more close-ups than films of 50 years ago. But that's not all they have.

Examples just off the top of my head include almost anything featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman (with the exception of MI:3, where he was wasted), because he's that kind of physical actor, and directors who know what they're doing hire him for that reason. Think Capote or The Savages or Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (the last two have impressive casts all around). Or The Illusionist, where Edward Norton's performance depends much more on body language than on dialogue.

In general, I find it unproductive (although it's seductively easy) either to praise or to attack a particular cinematic technique in the abstract, whether it's "shaky-cam", fast editing, heavy filtering, close-ups, crane shots or what-have-you. Divorced from the context of particular uses in storytelling, the discussion of such techniques suffers from the very evil complained of here -- it's no longer "about" anything but itself.

M.