Word: camera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Avedon brought this knowledge to portraiture, he unsettled people who suppose a camera captures the psychological truths of the sitter. To the contrary, an Avedon portrait is just as likely to be a record of the photographer's preoccupations and psychic distresses, in which the sitter plays an unknowing part. If his portraits are psychological studies, the psychology is his, and that, he admits, is why so many of them are so gloomy...
Quentin Tarantino's first film, "Reservoir Dogs," files in the face of every Hollywood cops-and-robbers flick you've ever seen. It has the emotional level and acting quality of "Glengarry Glen Ross" and the script and camera work of a newcomer who isn't afraid to challenge the status quo. It screams out, "CULT CLASSIC...
...Dancing and singing to "Stuck in the Middle With You," he announces, "I don't give a fuck about what you know or don't know. I'm gonna torture you anyway." Then, as he pulls out a knife and proceeds to slice the cop's ear off, the camera suddenly shifts away from the action to focus on an empty doorway. For some reason, Tarantino hits the right button with this decision: the sounds of slicing and screaming with no visual accompaniment make the scene even more excruciating than it would have been had Tarantino chosen to show...
Clearly, this young director enjoys experimenting with his camera. He zooms, slowly, in and out of scenes. He opens a dialogue by focusing on a toilet and then peering down a hall to show one character having a conversation with another who is outside of the camera's range. Despite its originality, the camera work can sometimes be bewildering. For instance, in the opening location, a diner, we see a lot of the backs of guys' heads as they sit around a table bantering with one another...
Such audacious camera work would be lost without a solid script: luckily, the guy can write, too. What do diamond crooks talk about when they eat together in a diner? Tarantino imagines them interpeting Madonna songs as though they were literary critics: "you said 'True Blue' was about a nice girl who finds a sensitive fella. But 'Like a Virgin' was metaphor for big dicks," proclaims one enlightened criminal. From here they move to philosophising on the wrongs of society...