Michigan Today - October 2007

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Talking about movies

The camera as storyteller

By Frank Beaver

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Still image from 'Two Days in Paris'
Julie Delpy, left, directs and stars with Adam Goldberg in "Two Days in Paris"

Recently I've been thinking about how, over the course of film history, a dynamic, active camera has been a primary tool for communicating on-screen ideas and character emotions—from the medium's "silent" years to the present.

In the 1920s, German filmmakers at the Ufa Studios created complex psychological narratives with the aid of subjective point-of-view shots. In F.W. Murnau's "The Last Laugh" (1924) and G.W. Pabst's "Variety" (1925), the camera frequently takes the points-of-view, respectively, of a proud hotel doorman whose self-respect is shattered when he is demoted to a washroom attendant, and a trapeze artist caught in a love triangle after a handsome new performer arrives to join him and his lover in their trapeze act.

In these classic silent films, deeply-felt emotions of self-worth, pride, humiliation, love and betrayal are delineated through subjective shots that put the viewer in the mind's-eye of the characters. In "Variety," for instance, the camera is actually mounted on a trapeze for a tense scene in which the two male artists hurtle through space and into the waiting hands of one another. The subjective shots put the viewer into the midst of action that is ripe with expectations of revenge on the part of the cuckolded performer. In "The Last Laugh," when the old doorman is called into the hotel manager's office to receive notice of his demotion, a subjective close-up view of the letter begins to blur out of focus, signaling the doorman's disbelief and humiliation.

And to provide a modern example: In "The Insider" (1999), Michael Mann's tense drama about a whistleblowing scientist at a tobacco company, the protagonist's increasing paranoia is abetted by well-placed subjective point-of-view shots that show what the character is looking at as he imagines potential threats in the world about him.

A particular conceit of filmmakers who have wanted to imbue their images with a sense of unstaged reality has been that of the hand-held camera—a strategy that can convey spontaneity and immediacy to screen imagery. Should the images be slightly out of focus, so much the better. Handheld camera work is now common in contemporary dramatic filmmaking, but it was pioneered in the 1960s by cinema verite ("cinema truth") documentarists such as Frederick Weisman ("Titicut Follies," 1967). These artists threw away their tripods in favor of handheld filming of their subject matter. The idea was to give the impression that the documentary material had been filmed without undue planning or artistic manipulation.

It's fun to find instances of the use of the technique during Hollywood's studio years when exacting production values were everything to film quality. A notable one occurs in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941). In the simulated "March of Time" biography of Charles Foster Kane near the beginning of the film, the aged newspaper magnate is seen in a wheelchair, being pushed about the grounds of his Gothic Xanadu estate. It's a handheld, slightly out-of-focus shot that has apparently been captured by a snooping cameraman. This candid, verite image of Kane in isolated loneliness portends in a brief few seconds what the film's ensuing narrative will deconstruct in psychological detail.

Having recently seen Julie Delpy's "Two Days in Paris," one of the summer's big indie hits, I was once again reminded of the many and different roles that an innovative camera can play in acting as a correspondent for character emotions and thematic ideas on the screen. "Two Days in Paris" is a quirky romantic comedy about a French woman, now living in the United States, who takes her American boyfriend home to Paris where he meets her family and, alas, also encounters her old friends and lovers. The film is anything but an idyllic foray into the "city of love." Tensions surface, neuroses flare, and amid growing doubts the relationship between the couple seems to be hovering on the verge of collapse.

Delpy's camera does much more than provide long/medium/close shots and interesting angles of the action. Its presence is made meaningfully apparent. It rapidly pans, tilts, and flits about from character to character—like a psychiatrist observing a couple's back-and-forth exchanges in an overheating counseling session. This camera styling makes the viewer feel like a nervous observer, standing on the sidelines taking in one tense situation after another. It's as much a part of the film's neurotic feel as that conveyed through the characterizations and the sketchy plotting.

Delpy's hyperkinetic camera work, inherited from this long line of camera technique,  added to my enjoyment of what seemed to me a thoroughly modern work of art, in content and in its form.

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Frank Beaver

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.