Submission + - A Kubrickian indictment of Shakycam
Mirnotoriety writes: A Pretend Review of Modern Shakycam by Stanley Kubrick
I have spent a lifetime arranging the frame with the care of a surgeon arranging instruments. Every line, every shadow, every centimetre of negative space was deliberate. The camera was not a nervous animal; it was an instrument of absolute control. And then I am shown this.
A young man in a hoodie runs through a warehouse while the camera handheld, I am told, “for authenticity” convulses as though it is having a mild stroke. Walls lurch. Floors buck. Faces stretch and compress like reflections in a funhouse mirror operated by a drunk. The operator appears to believe that if the image is sufficiently unstable, the audience will mistake nausea for intensity.
This is not cinema. This is the visual equivalent of someone shouting in your ear while simultaneously shaking you by the shoulders and asking whether you “feel it.”
The technique is defended with the usual solemn nonsense: “It puts you in the moment.” “It feels real.” Realism, apparently, now consists of the camera operator’s inability to stand still. One wonders what these filmmakers do when they wish to convey calm, or elegance, or simply the existence of a horizontal plane. Do they hire a second operator to shake the first one harder?
I once moved a camera three inches over the course of an entire take because the composition required it. These people move the camera three feet in every direction because someone told them “energy.” Energy is not the same as uncontrolled spasm. A seizure is energetic. It is not art.
There are rare carefully chosen moments when a handheld camera can serve a precise dramatic purpose. Those moments are not “every scene involving movement, dialogue, or the simple act of looking at something.” The current fashion treats the tripod as an instrument of oppression and the Steadicam as a bourgeois affectation. The result is a generation of images that look as though they were photographed during an earthquake by a man who has just been struck in the head with a bag of oranges. I am not opposed to innovation. I am opposed to the replacement of craft with tremor.
If the goal is to make the audience feel unmoored, disoriented, and faintly ill, then congratulations, the technique is a triumph. If the goal is to make a film, one might consider the radical alternative of holding the camera steady long enough for the audience to actually see what is happening.
The frame is a sacred space. Stop vibrating in it.
I have spent a lifetime arranging the frame with the care of a surgeon arranging instruments. Every line, every shadow, every centimetre of negative space was deliberate. The camera was not a nervous animal; it was an instrument of absolute control. And then I am shown this.
A young man in a hoodie runs through a warehouse while the camera handheld, I am told, “for authenticity” convulses as though it is having a mild stroke. Walls lurch. Floors buck. Faces stretch and compress like reflections in a funhouse mirror operated by a drunk. The operator appears to believe that if the image is sufficiently unstable, the audience will mistake nausea for intensity.
This is not cinema. This is the visual equivalent of someone shouting in your ear while simultaneously shaking you by the shoulders and asking whether you “feel it.”
The technique is defended with the usual solemn nonsense: “It puts you in the moment.” “It feels real.” Realism, apparently, now consists of the camera operator’s inability to stand still. One wonders what these filmmakers do when they wish to convey calm, or elegance, or simply the existence of a horizontal plane. Do they hire a second operator to shake the first one harder?
I once moved a camera three inches over the course of an entire take because the composition required it. These people move the camera three feet in every direction because someone told them “energy.” Energy is not the same as uncontrolled spasm. A seizure is energetic. It is not art.
There are rare carefully chosen moments when a handheld camera can serve a precise dramatic purpose. Those moments are not “every scene involving movement, dialogue, or the simple act of looking at something.” The current fashion treats the tripod as an instrument of oppression and the Steadicam as a bourgeois affectation. The result is a generation of images that look as though they were photographed during an earthquake by a man who has just been struck in the head with a bag of oranges. I am not opposed to innovation. I am opposed to the replacement of craft with tremor.
If the goal is to make the audience feel unmoored, disoriented, and faintly ill, then congratulations, the technique is a triumph. If the goal is to make a film, one might consider the radical alternative of holding the camera steady long enough for the audience to actually see what is happening.
The frame is a sacred space. Stop vibrating in it.
