1st ....is this incredible feat of teamwork camerawork ever attempted in 'I AM CUBA ' (1964)
"The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military[2] to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny). Most shots are in extreme wide-angle and the camera passes very close to its subjects, whilst still largely avoiding having those subjects ever look directly at the camera.
Shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the socialist Castro government, isolated by the United States after the latter broke diplomatic and trade relations in 1961, turned to the USSR for film partnerships. The Soviet government, interested in promoting international socialism, agreed to finance a film about the Cuban revolution.
The director was given considerable freedom to complete the work, and was given much help from both the Soviet and Cuban governments. They made use of innovative filming techniques, such as coating a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, so the camera could be submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. At one point, more than a thousand Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene — this despite the then-ongoing Cuban missile crisis.
In another scene, the camera follows a flag over a body, held high on a stetcher, along a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four stories until it is filming the flagged body from above a building. Without stopping it then starts tracking sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a rear window where the cigar workers are watching the procession. The camera finally passes through the window and appears to float along over the middle of the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by the camera operator having the camera attached to his vest - like an early, crude version of a steadicam - and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator's vest to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops."
2nd is TOUCH OF EVIL .....The amazing opening shot is classically revered ....and it's inclusion as part of our dedicated search for an all-time archive of cinema history as a separate iconic moment would be assured ......and i'm definitely vindicated for showing it all year in room 1.22 between classes... to anyone that would watch.
"The film opens with its most famous sequence. It's an audacious, incredible, breathtaking, three-minute, uninterrupted crane tracking shot under the credits (appearing superimposed on the left of the screen). The entire tracking shot covers four blocks from start to finish. In a close-up, hands set an explosive, timed device. A shadowy figure runs and places it in the trunk of a parked convertible. The pounding of bongo drums and blare of brass instruments are heard (Henry Mancini's score), accompanied by the ticking-tocking of the mechanism on the soundtrack. The camera pulls away sharply, identifying the car's location - it is parked on a street in a seedy Mexican border town."
3rd is the famous DOLLY ZOOM shot used in 'JAWS'... this qualifies as breathtaking....
"The effect is achieved by using the setting of a zoom lens to adjust the angle of view (often referred to as field of view) while the camera dollies (or moves) towards or away from the subject in such a way as to keep the subject the same size in the frame throughout. In its classic form, the camera is pulled away from a subject while the lens zooms in, or vice-versa. Thus, during the zoom, there is a continuous perspective distortion, the most directly noticeable feature being that the background appears to change size relative to the subject.
As the human visual system uses both size and perspective cues to judge the relative sizes of objects, seeing a perspective change without a size change is a highly unsettling effect, and the emotional impact of this effect is greater than the description above can suggest. The visual appearance for the viewer is that either the background suddenly grows in size and detail and overwhelms the foreground, or the foreground becomes immense and dominates its previous setting, depending on which way the dolly zoom is executed.
The effect was first developed by Irmin Roberts, a Paramount second-unit cameraman, and was famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Vertigo."
As part of our 'Match Cut ' (Another Man's Loss) module for PCA we used this process to capture our actor Lewis with a similar technique ......see if you can spot it towards the end of this film I edited .....
4th is the 'GOODFELLAS ' The Long Take......This is a piece of brilliantly crafted establishing shot to the extreme ...and leads us right into the heart of the club on the tailcoat of the the characters... ....enjoy this splawing eye opener ...
6-10 are..... Kill Bill which also uses the long tracking shot .......and the last 4 are examples of iconic moments in cinema with 7.. The car chase in French Connection....... 8..Buster Keaton in The House.........9..Lind Blair's head spin in The Exorcist......and finally 10.. The Chicken Game with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause
I hope you enjoy these choices ...meant as a bit of fun viewing while we consider the more juicy project of discussing our choices for our own archive of gazing/voyeurism/fetish in the cinema.
By Tim Francis May 2011
"The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military[2] to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny). Most shots are in extreme wide-angle and the camera passes very close to its subjects, whilst still largely avoiding having those subjects ever look directly at the camera.
Shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the socialist Castro government, isolated by the United States after the latter broke diplomatic and trade relations in 1961, turned to the USSR for film partnerships. The Soviet government, interested in promoting international socialism, agreed to finance a film about the Cuban revolution.
The director was given considerable freedom to complete the work, and was given much help from both the Soviet and Cuban governments. They made use of innovative filming techniques, such as coating a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, so the camera could be submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. At one point, more than a thousand Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene — this despite the then-ongoing Cuban missile crisis.
In another scene, the camera follows a flag over a body, held high on a stetcher, along a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four stories until it is filming the flagged body from above a building. Without stopping it then starts tracking sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a rear window where the cigar workers are watching the procession. The camera finally passes through the window and appears to float along over the middle of the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by the camera operator having the camera attached to his vest - like an early, crude version of a steadicam - and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator's vest to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops."
2nd is TOUCH OF EVIL .....The amazing opening shot is classically revered ....and it's inclusion as part of our dedicated search for an all-time archive of cinema history as a separate iconic moment would be assured ......and i'm definitely vindicated for showing it all year in room 1.22 between classes... to anyone that would watch.
"The film opens with its most famous sequence. It's an audacious, incredible, breathtaking, three-minute, uninterrupted crane tracking shot under the credits (appearing superimposed on the left of the screen). The entire tracking shot covers four blocks from start to finish. In a close-up, hands set an explosive, timed device. A shadowy figure runs and places it in the trunk of a parked convertible. The pounding of bongo drums and blare of brass instruments are heard (Henry Mancini's score), accompanied by the ticking-tocking of the mechanism on the soundtrack. The camera pulls away sharply, identifying the car's location - it is parked on a street in a seedy Mexican border town."
3rd is the famous DOLLY ZOOM shot used in 'JAWS'... this qualifies as breathtaking....
"The effect is achieved by using the setting of a zoom lens to adjust the angle of view (often referred to as field of view) while the camera dollies (or moves) towards or away from the subject in such a way as to keep the subject the same size in the frame throughout. In its classic form, the camera is pulled away from a subject while the lens zooms in, or vice-versa. Thus, during the zoom, there is a continuous perspective distortion, the most directly noticeable feature being that the background appears to change size relative to the subject.
As the human visual system uses both size and perspective cues to judge the relative sizes of objects, seeing a perspective change without a size change is a highly unsettling effect, and the emotional impact of this effect is greater than the description above can suggest. The visual appearance for the viewer is that either the background suddenly grows in size and detail and overwhelms the foreground, or the foreground becomes immense and dominates its previous setting, depending on which way the dolly zoom is executed.
The effect was first developed by Irmin Roberts, a Paramount second-unit cameraman, and was famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Vertigo."
As part of our 'Match Cut ' (Another Man's Loss) module for PCA we used this process to capture our actor Lewis with a similar technique ......see if you can spot it towards the end of this film I edited .....
4th is the 'GOODFELLAS ' The Long Take......This is a piece of brilliantly crafted establishing shot to the extreme ...and leads us right into the heart of the club on the tailcoat of the the characters... ....enjoy this splawing eye opener ...
5th is also Goodfellas .....and with the notorious reverse tracking shot .....invariably used by film tutors and critics alike to open up the secret of the technical ceative aspects of film making..
6-10 are..... Kill Bill which also uses the long tracking shot .......and the last 4 are examples of iconic moments in cinema with 7.. The car chase in French Connection....... 8..Buster Keaton in The House.........9..Lind Blair's head spin in The Exorcist......and finally 10.. The Chicken Game with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause
I hope you enjoy these choices ...meant as a bit of fun viewing while we consider the more juicy project of discussing our choices for our own archive of gazing/voyeurism/fetish in the cinema.
By Tim Francis May 2011
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