Anodyne
Saturday, March 08, 2014
 
Some relevant points from that Richard Brody piece, all of it worth your closest attention:

"Godard told the story of when he and Jean-Pierre Gorin, working together sometime in the early nineteen-seventies, attempted an experiment: to imitate a single shot from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. He explained that they didn’t manage to do it—that the framing and the angle completely escaped them. I’m not surprised—in exactly the same way as I doubt whether Eisenstein, had he lived longer, could have copied perfectly a shot of Godard’s. The camera operator’s own gestures, the particular equipment that’s available, and—yes—the very carriage of the actor being filmed all determine the nature of a shot.

There’s no such thing as a pure angle or composition, any more than there is such a thing as a pure performance; the life of the creators are embodied in all the actions that bring a movie into being. And those habits of body are no mere accidents of upbringing but the very essence of a zeitgeist, of the spirit of the time as it manifests itself. The angles have been lost for the same reason that people move differently; people move differently because of differences in the way that people are raised and educated and influenced, because of differences in thought and feeling, in essential self-image."
- posted by cjb @ 8:32 AM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }