Word: scenes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NEWSMEN, especially press photographers, have this absurd fascination with being on the scene of a great news event. They begin to be interested in only those things that fit the press's arbitrary formula for "news." They can't help themselves. If anything is going to happen, they want to be there to record it; but it has to be something they expect, or have seen before. so they know its importance when it starts happening...
Such an occurrence is known in the trade as an "eco-catastrophe." in other words, a situation in which the ecology of the earth is irretrieyably disturbed. Little mini-eco-catastrophes have been happening ever since man arrived on the scene. In the South, Pacific collectors, naturalists, and trumpeters on hundreds of islands have been picking up tritons off the coral reefs and beaches to get their conch shells. The tritons cat the starfish which prey on the coral animals that build up the reefs. Because there are now so many people on the earth, they are now picking...
INDEED, Rossellini's camera motions are perfectly responsive to the emotional progress of a scene. They are not invisible-they have too much integrity and power-but they do not impose a certain mood upon any scene. Instead one feels them as an intelligent penetration of the action, moving with one's sympathies. Rossellini's camera does not assume positions according to some formal conception of the space and moral setup in which he is shooting. It follows human actions, emphasizing them without stylizing appearances...
...jolts-into his face, and zooms out to a long shot as the man begins running to cells, banging on their doors, and yelling "they've tortured General della Rovere." As they begin a noisy riot. Rossellini cuts to an agitated close-up pan over the walls. Similarly, a scene in which the prison is airraided begins with a siren and a quick zoom up into windows at the end of the prison hall, and continues in zooming in and out of the hall. Though Rossellini in both cases uses devices which intensify emotion, he becomes in these shots more...
Thus he underplays every scene, particularly the heroic ending. The spiritual dimnesion he sees in human nature becomes another fact of the situation. This is only possible in the most integrated of personal styles. Completely responsive to emotional changes, his camera motions are a sufficient dramatic means, so that each film evolves smoothly to its transcendent ending. One can only accept the ending of General della Rovere as one more truth...