Word: cameraworks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...images that do work suggest the direction the film should have taken. The first few shots of a nude wrestling match between Birken and Gerald, deep, low-angle, lit by a darkly golden fire. are quite eerie in their implications. (Although, the inevitable pulsing soundtrack and tumultuous camerawork mar the development of the scene.) A shot of a drowned girl, entwined in the arms of her dead lover, as they are washed up onto a muddy shore is equally effective. (Although, it is mistakenly intercut with shots of Birken and Ursula making love. Properly, the omen is directed at Gerald...
...earlier bedroom scene. We hardly need hear her quiet sobs to feel the sorrow into which she has fallen. Chabrol tells us visually, and tells us emotionally more than intelectually. His realistic avoidance of significant dialogue throws the job of character delineation onto acting, set design, and camerawork. Chabrol's mastery of all three is complete...
This does not mean that he is a good craftsman who can use his stylistic means only for character descriptions. The visual style of La Femme Infidele is a consistent unity which he has developed beyond that of his earlier films. One notes the familiar traits of his camerawork: shots that track across a situation rather than into characters; telephoto lenses used at certain points to achieve selective depth of field, so that he can pull focus from a character in the foreground to the background. Beyond their narrative function, these techniques turn the background from a spatially articulated field...
...relationships. It is his facial expressions that detail his momentary emotional states and reactions to other characters' words that betray his character. He is the most completely motivated character I have even seen in a film, for Chabrol has chosen to use dialogue obliquely, turning rather to acting and camerawork to describe his characters...
...that dominate the ending. Superficially connected by dramatic relationships, the shots are actually as distinct from each other as the five-minute montage of locations that ends Eclipse. In the airport footage, each group (police, newsmen, airport workers) is given its own turf and its own shot-the camerawork never connects them, and the soundtrack stresses their diverse functions and attitudes. Cross-cutting between Daria's final drive to Phoenix and Mark's return to L. A. stresses spatial differences and dissimilarity of direction and movement, widening the gap between their futures. Except for two brief inserts when police...