Putting the "Move" in Movie（很好的一篇关于摄影机运动的文章）
我已经看完了，不过还是很可能会抽空翻一下。
Prominent cinematographers and industry experts consider the aesthetics and psychological implications of camera movement.
by John Calhoun
ASC OCTOBER 2003
The "hows" of camera movement - the technology and techniques whereby camera operators, cinematographers, and directors can create moving shots in a film - are easy enough to identify and define. It's when you start trying to talk about the "why" and the "when" that the discussion gets vague and a bit complicated - as hard to pin down as the famous tracking shot that opens the noir classic Touch of Evil (1958).The impulse toward movement is not hard to understand; we are, after all, talking about motion pictures. But if you don't want to be indiscriminant in moving the camera, questions arise: When is it called for? When should it stop? And what does a camera on the move mean to the spectator?
"My philosophy is, good camera movement happens when you're not even aware of it," says Owen Roizman, ASC. "It just feels right. My approach has been to always let my instincts, the scene and what the actors are doing dictate whether or not the camera should move." For William A. Fraker, ASC, it's all about story: "Camera movement's great, but it's got to be about exposition. You have to involve the audience visually, but to do that, you don't need fancy movement and 360-degree dolly shots." According to Haskell Wexler, ASC, "Camera movements are used to lead the eye, to give people a feeling - an emotional one, a logical one, a dramatic one - just the way lighting and framing are." In fact, both Wexler and Roizman maintain that camera movement can't be considered separately from those other key elements of a cinematographer's art. John Toll, ASC, puts it succinctly: "The shot has to fit into the overall visual design of a film to have impact."
Still, it is movement that makes a movie a movie. Other visual arts are lit and composed, but only in cinema (and its video offspring) does the ability exist to reframe a continuous image. And ever since 1896 or so, filmmakers have been looking for ways to do so. In 1916, D.W. Griffith and cameraman Billy Bitzer created what is one of cinema's earliest camera moves: the slow, simultaneous track in and down on the massive Gates of Babylon set inIntolerance. The obvious reason for the shot was to first establish the scale of the set, and then to move closer to verify that actual human activity was taking place in it. This is what Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown refers to as "the 3-D effect." In an excerpt from an upcoming series of articles on "The Moving Camera" for Zerb: Journal of the Guild of Television Cameramen, Brown explains, "When the camera begins to move, we are suddenly given the missing information as to shape and layout and size. The two-dimensional image acquires the illusion of three-dimensionality and we are carried across the divide of the screen, deeper and deeper into a world that is not contiguous to our own."
As the silent era reached its apogee in the 1920s, artists around the world were finding new ways to incorporate camera movement into the grammar of film. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein was doing pioneering work with montage; in Germany, F.W. Murnau was experimenting with other methods of telling a story through purely visual means. Murnau's 1924 film The Last Laugh, shot by Karl Freund at Ufa Studios, is so visually expressive that it contains not a single intertitle. In one sequence, the camera was operated from a bicycle, and in another, Freund strapped the camera to his chest to simulate a drunken character's point of view. When Murnau came to Hollywood to make Sunrise in 1927, he imported his roving style, working with cinematographers Charles Rosher, ASC and Karl Struss, ASC to unleash the camera from its bonds.
During his audio commentary on the recently released DVD of Sunrise, John Bailey, ASC lovingly describes what he calls "one of the most famous shots in all of silent film." The lead character, a farmer played by George O'Brien, walks into a swamp at night to tryst with a licentious woman from the city. As the farmer moves through the foggy set, Bailey details, "The camera is following him, not on a dolly, but on an overhead track with a platform suspended from it." O'Brien moves in a more or less figure-eight pattern, followed by the camera; the stalking movement mirrors the farmer's compulsive entry into dangerous psychological terrain.
For another famous sequence in Sunrise, the filmmakers placed the camera on a trolley that appears to move continuously on tracks from a country location to the city, which was built on the Fox lot. Murnau and his cinematographers were always looking for reasons to free the camera, whether to express an emotion (as in the swamp scene), or to get the characters from point A to point B in an eloquent way (the trolley scene).
French director Abel Gance was another filmmaker for whom "the tripod was a set of crutches, supporting a lame imagination," writes Kevin Brownlow in his book The Parade's Gone By. Recalling Gance's biggest production, Napoleon (1927), which was shot by Jules Kruger, Garrett Brown marvels, "There are things in Napoleon that are so ahead of their time. [Gance] stuck the camera on every possible type of vehicle; he did things in that film that weren't taken up again for 30 years."
However, everything seemed to change when movies began to talk. The demands of technology and recording dialogue started this transformation, and the "invisible" classical style that soon developed finished it. The odd talent like Busby Berkeley was still devising means to move the camera between a grouping of dancers' legs, and a stray crane shot - such as Scarlett O'Hara searching through the bodies at the depot in Gone With the Wind, or the swoop down a staircase into a close-up on the key in Ingrid Bergman's hand in Notorious - still got through.� But when Fraker says, "If you look at the great, great films, there's very little camera movement," it's the 1930s and '40s he's talking about.
It was during the '40s that German-French emigre Max Ophuls imported his sweeping camera style to Hollywood, in movies such as Letter from an Unknown Woman. When he returned to Europe, Ophuls directed four films -La Ronde, Le Plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de... and Lola Montes, all photographed by Christian Matras - that raised the bar for camera movement. Bailey calls our attention to the opening shot in La Ronde, "about eight or nine minutes long, a studio shot that sets up the whole film." In this extended dolly move choreographed to the musical score, master of ceremonies Anton Walbrook guides the viewer through the set, finally alighting on a carousel, which serves as metaphor for film's narrative structure: a roundelay of love. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, film critic Andrew Sarris writes that the meaning of "Ophulsian" movement is, "Time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment."
Stanley Kubrick was a fan of Ophuls' camera moves, and in his 1957 World War I epic Paths of Glory, he and cinematographer George Krause paid tribute with one sweeping ballroom sequence. Still, Paths of Glory is even more notable for its lengthy dolly moves in the trenches, which were made two feet wider than the real thing to accommodate the shots. The camera tracks back as a general inspects the bedraggled, demoralized troops, who appear and recede on the sides of the frame like insignificant onlookers. Later, that same general sends those troops over the trenches and onto the battlefield to execute a suicidal mission, and the camera moves with them - halting as they fall, and then moving on. Andy Romanoff, president of Panavision Remote Systems and a former camera operator, says of these moves, "They are enormously powerful at making you feel the inevitability of what's going on, and of pushing you toward it."
This is movement that creates emotion in the spectator, says Romanoff. On the other hand, he says, the opening of Touch of Evil - which remains at the top of most people's lists of great camera moves - is not about emotion, but is "an amazing storytelling movement. It's a tour de force of exposition." Says Fraker, "It's the most fabulous shot, but it's about telling the story."
Is it, though? In his 1985 introduction to the film's published shooting script, Terry Comito wrote: "[The] camera seems less concerned with monitoring the events on the screen than in disorienting the spectator." Guided by cinematographer Russell Metty, ASC and camera operator John Russell, a 22-foot Chapman crane moves up and down, back and forth, laterally and diagonally, picking up a range of activity, introducing Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, but repeatedly losing the car on which a bomb has been planted. What the shot conveys is the world of Touch of Evil, a "whirling labyrinth," wrote Comito. It also conveys the personality of the filmmaker, and the independence of the camera from the characters.
Brown might be describing that shot when he writes, "Out-of-sync camerawork, moving too soon or carrying on after the actors stop, draws attention to the camera's eye and we feel like an entity, a presence, if not quite an onlooker." As Wexler puts it, "When there's a quiet room and a person's sitting alone and the camera moves around him, there's a subjective response that someone else is there. You're saying to an audience, 'This is a movie,' which is a legitimate thing to say. After all, we're making movies, not capturing reality."
Wexler operated an early helicopter shot for the finale of the Picnic (1955), which was shot by James Wong Howe, ASC. The shot starts on a bus Kim Novak has just boarded, and pulls up to reveal an overhead view of Kansas farmlands. It then moves across to catch up with the train carrying William Holden, whom Novak is traveling to meet. This move serves two purposes: it connects point A to a relatively distant point B, and it carries an emotional charge. Obtaining the shot was, so to speak, no picnic. "I sat on a 2-by-4 in a navy helicopter with a rope around my waist, holding my Cinemascope camera," recalls Wexler. The effort was rewarded, though, and the grand aerial move became a hallmark of big-screen entertainments in the 1950s and '60s. Those opening bird's-eye views of Manhattan in West Side Story (1961) and of Julie Andrews in the Alps inThe Sound of Music (1965) were not something audiences could experience the same way on TV.
The freeing up of camera and sound equipment coincided with the ascendancy of personal style in film, and that meant an increase in different styles of camera movement. A case in point is the sudden rise of the handheld camera shot, most prominently among filmmakers of the French New Wave. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot many of those pictures, explains on the DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Band of Outsiders, "The idea was that we were filming live reporting. Live reporting means handheld cameras and no artificial lighting." In a documentary on that disc, Godard says, "This movie was made as a reaction against anything that wasn't done.... A handheld camera isn't used for tracking shots? Then let's do it. It went along with my desire to show that nothing was off-limits." Liberation was the point, particularly in Jules and Jim(1962, directed by Francois Truffaut and shot by Coutard), with its famous handheld scene of Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau racing each other on a Parisian bridge. The freedom of the camera and the freedom of the characters are one.
Late in the same decade, filmmakers once again began to explore the kinetic possibilities created by mounting cameras on moving vehicles. To capture the trend-setting car chase for Bullitt (1968), Fraker recalls, "We mounted cameras inside, we mounted cameras outside and we used a special camera car alongside. It was the first extensive use of pipe rail to mount cameras on cars, so on the bumps and uneven streets it's solid, because the camera moves with the car." Fraker is even more interested in talking about his use of camera movement in another 1968 film,Rosemary's Baby. "There's a particular scene involving a confrontation between Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes," he says. "It's a static shot all the way through, about two and a half or three minutes long. Then you push in to Mia, and she says, 'Oh, my God. It's alive, the baby's alive.' At that point, [director] Roman Polanski's got the audience. It's all about reserving the movement for the moment when you want to make a story point."
Such economy hasn't always been in great supply. Roizman famously expanded and refined camera-car movement in The French Connection(1971), but that film's justly celebrated chase inspired countless others, with steadily diminishing returns. In addition, new ways of achieving more kinetic movement kept being developed. Devices such as the Louma crane increased the camera's ability to travel where no camera operator had gone before. This French device was brought to the U.S. for 1941, the 1979 comedy shot by Fraker and directed by Steven Spielberg. (Romanoff was the show's camera operator.)
At about the same time, of course, Brown's Steadicam made a revolutionary impact on such films as Rocky and Bound for Glory, the latter of which earned Wexler the 1976 Oscar for Best Cinematography. "Haskell understood before we did that it would be a good replacement for a dolly shot over ground where you couldn't possible dolly straight ahead or straight back," says Brown. While the Steadicam was more direct than a dolly, it was far more controlled than a standard handheld move. "I think it's very close to getting to the essence of what a moving shot's all about," says Brown. In The Shining (1980), Kubrick's penchant for endless takes allowed Brown to perfect the use of the device, and to achieve the famous "controlled float" in the film's moving shots. Brown writes, "For nearly a hundred years, backing up ahead of oblivious characters in scary places has made movie audiences nervous, but the relentlessness and, I think, the oily smoothness of Stanley's camera cumulatively made the vast cold environs of the Overlook feel dangerous throughout."
Fraker believes the Steadicam has had as much impact on the way movies are made as the introduction of sound and the arrival of television. But the ubiquity of the Steadicam in the age of the music video is part of what caused Brown to consider the issues he does in his Zerb article. "Why move the camera?" he posits. "The reasons range from the very most primitive (the simple 3-D effect) to the most absurdly complex (intersecting dramatic, kinetic, psychological and optical possibilities), which suggest that the most important thing to know is when to stop!"
"Somebody will say, 'Let's move the camera,'" says Roizman, speaking of the type of director who came of age after 1980. "'Okay, why do you want to move it?' 'I don't know, let's just move it.' Well, that doesn't make sense to me. I usually like to hear a reason, or feel a reason." Adds Wexler, "So much contemporary film and television is involved with getting people's attention. The fascination with the details in the technology and tools has prevented many contemporary filmmakers from exploring better ways to impart visual drama." Fraker decries the use of camera movement "just to create some energy in a scene that has no energy." To Romanoff, the issue of energy is both crucial and elusive: "People become enamored of the idea of the big crane shot or the big Steadicam shot, and they lay out two minutes' worth of move that runs out of emotional energy after about 30 or 60 seconds."
But even amidst all the uninspired camera moves, the great, exhilarating ones still turn up. A memorable example is Larry McConkey's Steadicam shot of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco entering the Copacabana inGoodfellas (1990), shot by Michael Ballhaus, ASC and directed by Martin Scorsese. The camera stays behind the pair as they enter the club's rear entrance and move through the kitchen and various service areas, where everyone knows and greets Liotta's character. Says McConkey, "Several times I would get to a moment when I felt the shot was starting to die, so we'd bring in another character for Ray to interact with." As the shot reaches its climax in the club's main room, a table is set up for the couple near the stage. Writing about this shot, Brown notes that in the hands of Scorsese, Ballhaus and McConkey, the Steadicam became a very different instrument than the one used on The Shining. In the Goodfellas sequence, he says, the device is "disarming and cheerful and entirely about the careless power of Ray Liotta and his mobster pals." McConkey says, "I deliberately tried to take on the role of an audience member and behave as a surrogate character that responds on their behalf. I thought of myself as a tour guide driving a bus, a sports car or a boat, gently leading the audience to anticipate a turn or surprising them with a sudden curve."
A more recent invention, the Akela crane, allowed John Toll, ASC to obtain some unusual, low-to-the-ground shots that moved through the tall grass of a Guadalcanal battlefield in the World War II drama The Thin Red Line(1999; AC Feb. '99), directed by Terence Malick. "The whole idea of using that crane was to not make it feel like a crane," says Toll. "We wanted it to look like the most continuous, smooth dolly that had ever been built." The 85'-long Akela arm "is so long that it really minimizes the arc of the move; you can actually make it feel like you're traveling in a straight line," he adds. Romanoff observes, "In those shots, the camera isn't used apart from the actors to tell the story. Welles takes a crane and uses it to move from story point to story point, but you're always aware somebody is taking you on the trip. In The Thin Red Line, the camera doesn't rove from place to place, so it doesn't call attention to itself as a crane move."
Brown acknowledges some professional jealousy over Russian Ark, whose makers managed to sustain an 86-minute Steadicam shot (AC Jan. '03). However, he also feels the illusion of movement has become too easy to achieve in the digital era. He writes, "There is something about the klutzy dolly and crane shots in classic movies that comparatively resonates - something physical. They felt more important, more meaningful!" Adds Fraker, "The young filmmakers, God bless them, all want to do the greatest camera shot that's ever been done, regardless of what it has to do with the picture."
For his part, Romanoff believes camera movement is all a matter of style, with each example as legitimate as the next. "From my point of view, there's no such thing as too much movement unless it doesn't serve what you're trying to accomplish. When MTV started to happen, a lot of my friends were saying, 'This is terrible, it's so overused,' but I was saying, 'No, this is really cool.' If you only love Dixieland jazz, then you're going to find it hard to love a great blues performance. I happen to like a lot of different music."
Prominent cinematographers and industry experts consider the aesthetics and psychological implications of camera movement.
by John Calhoun
ASC OCTOBER 2003
The "hows" of camera movement - the technology and techniques whereby camera operators, cinematographers, and directors can create moving shots in a film - are easy enough to identify and define. It's when you start trying to talk about the "why" and the "when" that the discussion gets vague and a bit complicated - as hard to pin down as the famous tracking shot that opens the noir classic Touch of Evil (1958).The impulse toward movement is not hard to understand; we are, after all, talking about motion pictures. But if you don't want to be indiscriminant in moving the camera, questions arise: When is it called for? When should it stop? And what does a camera on the move mean to the spectator?
"My philosophy is, good camera movement happens when you're not even aware of it," says Owen Roizman, ASC. "It just feels right. My approach has been to always let my instincts, the scene and what the actors are doing dictate whether or not the camera should move." For William A. Fraker, ASC, it's all about story: "Camera movement's great, but it's got to be about exposition. You have to involve the audience visually, but to do that, you don't need fancy movement and 360-degree dolly shots." According to Haskell Wexler, ASC, "Camera movements are used to lead the eye, to give people a feeling - an emotional one, a logical one, a dramatic one - just the way lighting and framing are." In fact, both Wexler and Roizman maintain that camera movement can't be considered separately from those other key elements of a cinematographer's art. John Toll, ASC, puts it succinctly: "The shot has to fit into the overall visual design of a film to have impact."
Still, it is movement that makes a movie a movie. Other visual arts are lit and composed, but only in cinema (and its video offspring) does the ability exist to reframe a continuous image. And ever since 1896 or so, filmmakers have been looking for ways to do so. In 1916, D.W. Griffith and cameraman Billy Bitzer created what is one of cinema's earliest camera moves: the slow, simultaneous track in and down on the massive Gates of Babylon set inIntolerance. The obvious reason for the shot was to first establish the scale of the set, and then to move closer to verify that actual human activity was taking place in it. This is what Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown refers to as "the 3-D effect." In an excerpt from an upcoming series of articles on "The Moving Camera" for Zerb: Journal of the Guild of Television Cameramen, Brown explains, "When the camera begins to move, we are suddenly given the missing information as to shape and layout and size. The two-dimensional image acquires the illusion of three-dimensionality and we are carried across the divide of the screen, deeper and deeper into a world that is not contiguous to our own."
As the silent era reached its apogee in the 1920s, artists around the world were finding new ways to incorporate camera movement into the grammar of film. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein was doing pioneering work with montage; in Germany, F.W. Murnau was experimenting with other methods of telling a story through purely visual means. Murnau's 1924 film The Last Laugh, shot by Karl Freund at Ufa Studios, is so visually expressive that it contains not a single intertitle. In one sequence, the camera was operated from a bicycle, and in another, Freund strapped the camera to his chest to simulate a drunken character's point of view. When Murnau came to Hollywood to make Sunrise in 1927, he imported his roving style, working with cinematographers Charles Rosher, ASC and Karl Struss, ASC to unleash the camera from its bonds.
During his audio commentary on the recently released DVD of Sunrise, John Bailey, ASC lovingly describes what he calls "one of the most famous shots in all of silent film." The lead character, a farmer played by George O'Brien, walks into a swamp at night to tryst with a licentious woman from the city. As the farmer moves through the foggy set, Bailey details, "The camera is following him, not on a dolly, but on an overhead track with a platform suspended from it." O'Brien moves in a more or less figure-eight pattern, followed by the camera; the stalking movement mirrors the farmer's compulsive entry into dangerous psychological terrain.
For another famous sequence in Sunrise, the filmmakers placed the camera on a trolley that appears to move continuously on tracks from a country location to the city, which was built on the Fox lot. Murnau and his cinematographers were always looking for reasons to free the camera, whether to express an emotion (as in the swamp scene), or to get the characters from point A to point B in an eloquent way (the trolley scene).
French director Abel Gance was another filmmaker for whom "the tripod was a set of crutches, supporting a lame imagination," writes Kevin Brownlow in his book The Parade's Gone By. Recalling Gance's biggest production, Napoleon (1927), which was shot by Jules Kruger, Garrett Brown marvels, "There are things in Napoleon that are so ahead of their time. [Gance] stuck the camera on every possible type of vehicle; he did things in that film that weren't taken up again for 30 years."
However, everything seemed to change when movies began to talk. The demands of technology and recording dialogue started this transformation, and the "invisible" classical style that soon developed finished it. The odd talent like Busby Berkeley was still devising means to move the camera between a grouping of dancers' legs, and a stray crane shot - such as Scarlett O'Hara searching through the bodies at the depot in Gone With the Wind, or the swoop down a staircase into a close-up on the key in Ingrid Bergman's hand in Notorious - still got through.� But when Fraker says, "If you look at the great, great films, there's very little camera movement," it's the 1930s and '40s he's talking about.
It was during the '40s that German-French emigre Max Ophuls imported his sweeping camera style to Hollywood, in movies such as Letter from an Unknown Woman. When he returned to Europe, Ophuls directed four films -La Ronde, Le Plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de... and Lola Montes, all photographed by Christian Matras - that raised the bar for camera movement. Bailey calls our attention to the opening shot in La Ronde, "about eight or nine minutes long, a studio shot that sets up the whole film." In this extended dolly move choreographed to the musical score, master of ceremonies Anton Walbrook guides the viewer through the set, finally alighting on a carousel, which serves as metaphor for film's narrative structure: a roundelay of love. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, film critic Andrew Sarris writes that the meaning of "Ophulsian" movement is, "Time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment."
Stanley Kubrick was a fan of Ophuls' camera moves, and in his 1957 World War I epic Paths of Glory, he and cinematographer George Krause paid tribute with one sweeping ballroom sequence. Still, Paths of Glory is even more notable for its lengthy dolly moves in the trenches, which were made two feet wider than the real thing to accommodate the shots. The camera tracks back as a general inspects the bedraggled, demoralized troops, who appear and recede on the sides of the frame like insignificant onlookers. Later, that same general sends those troops over the trenches and onto the battlefield to execute a suicidal mission, and the camera moves with them - halting as they fall, and then moving on. Andy Romanoff, president of Panavision Remote Systems and a former camera operator, says of these moves, "They are enormously powerful at making you feel the inevitability of what's going on, and of pushing you toward it."
This is movement that creates emotion in the spectator, says Romanoff. On the other hand, he says, the opening of Touch of Evil - which remains at the top of most people's lists of great camera moves - is not about emotion, but is "an amazing storytelling movement. It's a tour de force of exposition." Says Fraker, "It's the most fabulous shot, but it's about telling the story."
Is it, though? In his 1985 introduction to the film's published shooting script, Terry Comito wrote: "[The] camera seems less concerned with monitoring the events on the screen than in disorienting the spectator." Guided by cinematographer Russell Metty, ASC and camera operator John Russell, a 22-foot Chapman crane moves up and down, back and forth, laterally and diagonally, picking up a range of activity, introducing Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, but repeatedly losing the car on which a bomb has been planted. What the shot conveys is the world of Touch of Evil, a "whirling labyrinth," wrote Comito. It also conveys the personality of the filmmaker, and the independence of the camera from the characters.
Brown might be describing that shot when he writes, "Out-of-sync camerawork, moving too soon or carrying on after the actors stop, draws attention to the camera's eye and we feel like an entity, a presence, if not quite an onlooker." As Wexler puts it, "When there's a quiet room and a person's sitting alone and the camera moves around him, there's a subjective response that someone else is there. You're saying to an audience, 'This is a movie,' which is a legitimate thing to say. After all, we're making movies, not capturing reality."
Wexler operated an early helicopter shot for the finale of the Picnic (1955), which was shot by James Wong Howe, ASC. The shot starts on a bus Kim Novak has just boarded, and pulls up to reveal an overhead view of Kansas farmlands. It then moves across to catch up with the train carrying William Holden, whom Novak is traveling to meet. This move serves two purposes: it connects point A to a relatively distant point B, and it carries an emotional charge. Obtaining the shot was, so to speak, no picnic. "I sat on a 2-by-4 in a navy helicopter with a rope around my waist, holding my Cinemascope camera," recalls Wexler. The effort was rewarded, though, and the grand aerial move became a hallmark of big-screen entertainments in the 1950s and '60s. Those opening bird's-eye views of Manhattan in West Side Story (1961) and of Julie Andrews in the Alps inThe Sound of Music (1965) were not something audiences could experience the same way on TV.
The freeing up of camera and sound equipment coincided with the ascendancy of personal style in film, and that meant an increase in different styles of camera movement. A case in point is the sudden rise of the handheld camera shot, most prominently among filmmakers of the French New Wave. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot many of those pictures, explains on the DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Band of Outsiders, "The idea was that we were filming live reporting. Live reporting means handheld cameras and no artificial lighting." In a documentary on that disc, Godard says, "This movie was made as a reaction against anything that wasn't done.... A handheld camera isn't used for tracking shots? Then let's do it. It went along with my desire to show that nothing was off-limits." Liberation was the point, particularly in Jules and Jim(1962, directed by Francois Truffaut and shot by Coutard), with its famous handheld scene of Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau racing each other on a Parisian bridge. The freedom of the camera and the freedom of the characters are one.
Late in the same decade, filmmakers once again began to explore the kinetic possibilities created by mounting cameras on moving vehicles. To capture the trend-setting car chase for Bullitt (1968), Fraker recalls, "We mounted cameras inside, we mounted cameras outside and we used a special camera car alongside. It was the first extensive use of pipe rail to mount cameras on cars, so on the bumps and uneven streets it's solid, because the camera moves with the car." Fraker is even more interested in talking about his use of camera movement in another 1968 film,Rosemary's Baby. "There's a particular scene involving a confrontation between Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes," he says. "It's a static shot all the way through, about two and a half or three minutes long. Then you push in to Mia, and she says, 'Oh, my God. It's alive, the baby's alive.' At that point, [director] Roman Polanski's got the audience. It's all about reserving the movement for the moment when you want to make a story point."
Such economy hasn't always been in great supply. Roizman famously expanded and refined camera-car movement in The French Connection(1971), but that film's justly celebrated chase inspired countless others, with steadily diminishing returns. In addition, new ways of achieving more kinetic movement kept being developed. Devices such as the Louma crane increased the camera's ability to travel where no camera operator had gone before. This French device was brought to the U.S. for 1941, the 1979 comedy shot by Fraker and directed by Steven Spielberg. (Romanoff was the show's camera operator.)
At about the same time, of course, Brown's Steadicam made a revolutionary impact on such films as Rocky and Bound for Glory, the latter of which earned Wexler the 1976 Oscar for Best Cinematography. "Haskell understood before we did that it would be a good replacement for a dolly shot over ground where you couldn't possible dolly straight ahead or straight back," says Brown. While the Steadicam was more direct than a dolly, it was far more controlled than a standard handheld move. "I think it's very close to getting to the essence of what a moving shot's all about," says Brown. In The Shining (1980), Kubrick's penchant for endless takes allowed Brown to perfect the use of the device, and to achieve the famous "controlled float" in the film's moving shots. Brown writes, "For nearly a hundred years, backing up ahead of oblivious characters in scary places has made movie audiences nervous, but the relentlessness and, I think, the oily smoothness of Stanley's camera cumulatively made the vast cold environs of the Overlook feel dangerous throughout."
Fraker believes the Steadicam has had as much impact on the way movies are made as the introduction of sound and the arrival of television. But the ubiquity of the Steadicam in the age of the music video is part of what caused Brown to consider the issues he does in his Zerb article. "Why move the camera?" he posits. "The reasons range from the very most primitive (the simple 3-D effect) to the most absurdly complex (intersecting dramatic, kinetic, psychological and optical possibilities), which suggest that the most important thing to know is when to stop!"
"Somebody will say, 'Let's move the camera,'" says Roizman, speaking of the type of director who came of age after 1980. "'Okay, why do you want to move it?' 'I don't know, let's just move it.' Well, that doesn't make sense to me. I usually like to hear a reason, or feel a reason." Adds Wexler, "So much contemporary film and television is involved with getting people's attention. The fascination with the details in the technology and tools has prevented many contemporary filmmakers from exploring better ways to impart visual drama." Fraker decries the use of camera movement "just to create some energy in a scene that has no energy." To Romanoff, the issue of energy is both crucial and elusive: "People become enamored of the idea of the big crane shot or the big Steadicam shot, and they lay out two minutes' worth of move that runs out of emotional energy after about 30 or 60 seconds."
But even amidst all the uninspired camera moves, the great, exhilarating ones still turn up. A memorable example is Larry McConkey's Steadicam shot of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco entering the Copacabana inGoodfellas (1990), shot by Michael Ballhaus, ASC and directed by Martin Scorsese. The camera stays behind the pair as they enter the club's rear entrance and move through the kitchen and various service areas, where everyone knows and greets Liotta's character. Says McConkey, "Several times I would get to a moment when I felt the shot was starting to die, so we'd bring in another character for Ray to interact with." As the shot reaches its climax in the club's main room, a table is set up for the couple near the stage. Writing about this shot, Brown notes that in the hands of Scorsese, Ballhaus and McConkey, the Steadicam became a very different instrument than the one used on The Shining. In the Goodfellas sequence, he says, the device is "disarming and cheerful and entirely about the careless power of Ray Liotta and his mobster pals." McConkey says, "I deliberately tried to take on the role of an audience member and behave as a surrogate character that responds on their behalf. I thought of myself as a tour guide driving a bus, a sports car or a boat, gently leading the audience to anticipate a turn or surprising them with a sudden curve."
A more recent invention, the Akela crane, allowed John Toll, ASC to obtain some unusual, low-to-the-ground shots that moved through the tall grass of a Guadalcanal battlefield in the World War II drama The Thin Red Line(1999; AC Feb. '99), directed by Terence Malick. "The whole idea of using that crane was to not make it feel like a crane," says Toll. "We wanted it to look like the most continuous, smooth dolly that had ever been built." The 85'-long Akela arm "is so long that it really minimizes the arc of the move; you can actually make it feel like you're traveling in a straight line," he adds. Romanoff observes, "In those shots, the camera isn't used apart from the actors to tell the story. Welles takes a crane and uses it to move from story point to story point, but you're always aware somebody is taking you on the trip. In The Thin Red Line, the camera doesn't rove from place to place, so it doesn't call attention to itself as a crane move."
Brown acknowledges some professional jealousy over Russian Ark, whose makers managed to sustain an 86-minute Steadicam shot (AC Jan. '03). However, he also feels the illusion of movement has become too easy to achieve in the digital era. He writes, "There is something about the klutzy dolly and crane shots in classic movies that comparatively resonates - something physical. They felt more important, more meaningful!" Adds Fraker, "The young filmmakers, God bless them, all want to do the greatest camera shot that's ever been done, regardless of what it has to do with the picture."
For his part, Romanoff believes camera movement is all a matter of style, with each example as legitimate as the next. "From my point of view, there's no such thing as too much movement unless it doesn't serve what you're trying to accomplish. When MTV started to happen, a lot of my friends were saying, 'This is terrible, it's so overused,' but I was saying, 'No, this is really cool.' If you only love Dixieland jazz, then you're going to find it hard to love a great blues performance. I happen to like a lot of different music."
