Five Academy Award Nominees in Five Days

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Chris Knipp

If I were teaching a film history class I'd either be very vague on this part or I'd have to go into more detail listing all the intermediate stages. And what was really the first full-length feature film with a live-recorded dialogue and music soundtrack throughout? It must have come after both DON JUAN and THE JAZZ SINGER.

---

Yes, it comes after those two landmark films: Lights of New York. It is interesting to note that all three were released by Warner Brothers and that all three used a Vitaphone sound-on-disc process that would quickly become obsolete.

I do get into a lot of detail when I teach the transition to sound. It's a most fascinating period in film history. BTW, a current debate among film historians concerns whether the need to enclose the noisy cameras in a booth and the unidirectionality of early microphones resulted in films with little or no camera movement. There is evidence of that, as well as evidence that filmmakers managed to make dynamic films anyway.

It's good to go into a lot of detail. It's also good not to deliver history lectures studded with simplistic milestones. As for recording and camera movment, well, you like Hou Hsieu-hsien and that Asian school of visual restraint, so you enjoy films that have very little camera movement. And so do I. I'd say we are in the throes of a period where there's way too much camera movement a lot of the time! But it depends on who's doing it, and why.

I love Hou, our contemporary master of the long take. For me, Red Balloon feels like a side project, a small diversion, in the career of Hou. It's been 8 years since Three Times. And finally, news that he is shooting The Assassin, "a martial-arts art-film" that is his most expensive one to date. Can't wait.

It's steady cam! It's been the death of editors and the tripod! Directors can take a steady-cam to a remote location, do a quick set up and start shooting. The only problem is that when you blow up that image to more than a hundred feet across, the slightest movement makes you feel as if you were on a ship at sea and the whole room was rocking. I was extremely upset with Bayona who employed veteran actress Geraldine Chaplin (Dr. Zhivago and others) for a cameo and then shot the entire scene with steady-cam so that we never looked at her performance without the camera rocking back and forth, up and down... very disconcerting and a god-damn waste of a superior talent. I'd like to take every steady-cam and throw it on a big pile and burn every last one of them!

You could be absoutely right about the shooting of that Geraldine Chaplin scene. I'd have to re-watch it to give an opinion. But I am far, far more happy with the cinematography of THE IMPOSSIBLE than that of LES MIZ. I thought the technical side of THE IMPOSSIBLE was admirable, on the whole. I was pretty well swept away with the tsunami action. LES MIZ on the other hand is more full of distracting, unpleasant camera work than any recent film. A large number of the in print film critics have commented upon it. Most who've found fault with THE IMPOSSIBLE have focused on the limitations of its story line in relation to the context of major events.

You're probably right about the shooting of that Geraldine Chapline scene. I don't remember but I'll trust you on that and would like to see the shot again to notice that. But I am far, far more happy with the cinematography of THE IMPOSSIBLE than that of LES MIZ. I thought the technical side of THE IMPOSSIBLE was admirable, on the whole. I was pretty well swept away with the tsunami action. LES MIZ on the other hand is more full of distracting, unpleasant camera work than any recent film. A large number of the in print film critics have commented upon it. Most who've found fault with THE IMPOSSIBLE have focused on the limitations of its story line in relation to the context of major events.

The photographic, camera technique used in Les Miz didn't brother me at all. Rather I was swept up in the entire epic and the movement and the sights and sounds. The camera movement for me added to the angst of the underlying theme of the movie. The feelings of anxiety, fear, unpredictable chaos only were enhanced by the shakiness but quite visually appealing and detail of the visual scenes that were not blurred or distorted like many action thrillers or sci fi/occult horror movies deliberate attempt to do.

Tab, I would agree with you to certain extent on the use of camera technique to create visual tension. However, in the case of this particular musical where you have a scene shot in tight quarters with a "wide" lens on a steady-cam, the effect when enlarged on a big screen is amplified by a factor of ten or more. This gives the scene that rolling motion, as if you were shooting on the deck of an oceanliner. Some shots require forethought and planning. While I like hand held scenes for dramatic tension in fights and car chases, when a woman is singing about her inner feelings, I don't like the idea that camera movement should draw attention to itself. That's a distraction and the reason so many critics and other people have complained about it.

As to "The Impossible" I would agree that techically the wide shots of the disaster and even the traveling shots inside the hospital were well planned and rehearsed in such a way ahead of time they did not draw attention to themselves. That's one instance of steady cam that turned out to support action and display an incredibly complex set filled with focused extras.

No, I would not agee with tabuno on this in any aspect. The cinematography on many of the solo song moments of LES MIZ is an absurdity and a total distraction and I could cite a dozen reviews that confirm the ridiculous use of wide angle and extreme closeup, with swoops between. I'll just recall Anthony Lane's review, which you read cinemabon, but tabuno may have eschewed:

Quote:

---

The director is Tom Hooper, fresh from “The King’s Speech,” and you can’t help wondering if this shift into grandeur has confused his sense of scale. The camera soars on high, the orchestra bellows, and then, whenever somebody feels a song coming on, we are hustled in close, forsaking our bird’s-eye view for that of a consultant rhinologist.

---

I'm always dubious when somebody says something in a movie "didn't bother" her, or him. It just means they chose to ignore it, not that it is not a fault. I have a friend who watches a lot of bad movies with uncritical pleasure and then reports they "didn't bother" her. So what?

Last post seems overly dismissive of individual differences in motion perception as well as experiential differences caused by screen size, viewer position relative to screen, etc.

About half the critics like LES MIZ and half don't at all. Those who don't, find fault with the camerawork. Motion perception, screen size, or where you sat in the theater have nothing to do with it. Here are some examples of reviewers' references to the camerawork. I could give more, but I got tired.

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: "The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground."

David Edelstein, New York Magazine:; "When an actor begins to sing, the camera rushes in and fastens on the performer’s face, positioning itself just below the head, somewhere between the navel and the Adam’s apple—and canted from 30 to 45 degrees, although the angle changes as the performer moves and the operator scampers to keep up. I imagined the cameraman to be small, fleet, and extremely high strung, like Gollum. The actors must have had to cultivate an inner stillness to keep from recoiling from him/it. A Zen forbearance would also have kept them from grimacing at all their missed notes."

Dana Stevens, Slate: "We're all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors."

Jay Gabler, Twin Cities Daily Planet: "Hooper’s approach varies little. For the confessional numbers, he brings the camera in as he did with Hathaway and lets us watch the actors’ eyes redden for the first couple of verses, then as the song rises to its climax, he cuts to a medium shot at a 45 degree angle (dynamic!) and finally gives us an ascending helicopter shot so that we can see the computer-assisted recreation of 19th century Paris. . . Except we can’t actually see it very well. Much of the movie takes place at night. . ."

Kimberly Jones, Austin Chronicle: "Shot to shot, Hooper’s vision careens between lightly grotesque hyperrealism and tinny movie artifice, wherein unplucked brows and oozing open wounds share space, if not sensibility, with digital fakery and histrionic zooms. "

Lou Llimerick, The New York Post: "It’s worth seeing the movie for Hathaway alone. . .It’s the worst of times, though, when Hooper repeatedly traps his stars in tight close-ups during the musical numbers — practically shoving the camera down the singers’ tonsils."

Justin Chang, Variety: "As it shifts from one dynamically slanted camera angle to another via Melanie Ann Oliver and Chris Dickens' busy editing, the picture seems reluctant to slow down and let the viewer simply take in the performances. That hectic, cluttered quality becomes more pronounced as the story lurches ahead to the 1832 Paris student uprisings. . ."

Tasha Robinson, AV Club: "Content with steadier, soberer camera work in The Damned United and The King’s Speech (which won him a Best Director Oscar), he repeatedly chops Les Misérables’ setpieces into disorienting fragments seen from a crazed variety of angles."

Lawrence Toppman, Charlotte Observer: "Nor does Hooper know how to shoot musical numbers. He often locks onto actors’ heads for the length of a number, pointing the camera at open mouths, until we become more familiar with Jackman’s uvula than his otolaryngologist.

Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post: "There’s little sense of dynamism or pacing, a fault both of the original score and Hooper’s unimaginative staging and camera work, which tend to underline, italicize and boldface every emotional beat."

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: "The director Tom Hooper can be a maddening busybody behind the camera. . . .Mr. Hooper’s maximalist approach is evident the very moment the scene begins — the camera swooping, as waves and music crash — setting an overblown tone that rarely quiets. His work in this passage, from the roller-coaster moves of the cameras to the loud incidental noise that muffles the lyrics, undermines his actors and begins to push the musical from spectacle toward bloat. . . . .his inability to leave any lily ungilded — to direct a scene without tilting or hurtling or throwing the camera around — is bludgeoning and deadly. "

Eric Kohn, Indiewire: "Relying heavily on close-ups over the course of a two-and-a-half hour narrative with almost no spoken dialogue, Hooper's approach comes across as the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a stage play while the entire cast leans forward and blares each song into your eardrums."

Calum Marsh, Slant: "Fisheye lenses and poorly framed close-ups abound in Les Misérables, nearly every frame a revelation of one man's bad taste; the best that can be said of the style is that it's deliberate, which at least distinguishes it from Hooper's work to date."

Matt, Cinecritic: " Two of the the musical's biggest numbers, Lovely Ladies and Master of the House, which involve large parts of the cast, were the weakest moments of the film because of Hooper's decision to focus on single characters with a zooming camera."

When I wrote that I "wasn't bothered" by Les Miz, I apparently under reported my experience to others. Instead the close ups and the less than stellar, perfect singing, held me "enthralled" for instead of the wide shot, on-stage spectacle, the film camera was able to bring into focus and clarity the richness of an intimate and intensely emotional personal experience. The ultimate in art form expression is to enable the viewer to directly connect to the message, thoughts, feelings of what is the most important sensory experience on the screen and this was accomplished directly and powerfully in how Les Miz was shot. When there was a need for wide angled, larger than life epic photography, Les Miz delivered, when there was a need for a deeply personal and singular focus on the humanity of a person Les Miz delivered spectacularly.

Too often the deep, secreted emotions and feeling are wrapped up in mystery and vagueness that damper the emotive and visceral stimulus available to be experienced on screen. Too often in real life, such deeply held thoughts and feelings are masked and in reality, the audience has been numbed and possess undeveloped perceptions of authentic communication with others, even their own family members and love ones. It is movies such as Les Miz that can bring this dull, vague sensations into rich and vibrant life by the use of music, lyrics, and close ups that penetrate the contemporary human filters and unused powers of observation. As a person who has experienced deep pain, loneliness, powerlessness, hurt, rejection...how Ann Hathaway captured Fantine was powerfully brought forth...Even Russell Crowe's less than stellar singing was all the more real and human, with its internal frailties even though supposedly masked by a strong exterior. Such is the delicate director that avoided perfection the actors in order to make the movie ironically more perfect in reality..

Tab, I don't mean to belittle your observations. However, there have been some great moments in film musical history that are very emotional and quite genuine. Take Shani Wallis singing "As long as he needs me," moments after her boyfriend nearly beats her to death for disobeying him. She could walk away and say, "Forget you!" But she loves the guy... no matter how badly he treats her. Now that's love... not a healthy love, but love nonetheless. The scene is shot through the broken dirty glass of abandon London wharehouses near the river Thames, a filthy place. But Carol Reed's camera work is both subtle and sublime, the colors muted, and Shani Wallis is quite emotional without us being thrust into her face. We feel with her but don't have to sit in her lap to understand how she feels. Carol Reed allows Wallis to tell us how she feels using her voice, that trained beautiful voice in one of the greatest solos in musical history. This is only one of many scenes down through the years when great directors have captured singers, and yes these actors are also great singers, in ways that convey the perfect emotion required for the scene without relying on techniques that tend to be "obvious" or "distracting" to a scene, rather than allow the actor to convey what is necessary in terms of human emotion. I can point others, many others in both cases where directors have used "techniques" that distract while other directors allow the actor/singer and the music to convey the meaning. The truth is that when a technique draws attention to itself and does become part of the story flow, then it becomes a distraction that undermines the integrity of the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzz-RmLM8Ic

Like a primitive who has never been out of the United States, I've heard that baked goods in France are to die for. There are children who lived in the Capitol of Utah, Salt Lake City, when they had had the opportunity to visit a local mountain for the first time in their lives which happened to overlook their city, they were amazed that there were "stars" below them.

cinemabon's detailed and moving description of a scene from a musical (it is inferred) offers up a transferred emotional imagined scene in one's mind that reflects my limited memories of Les Miserable through tinted, warped glasses. Without such other memories and experiences, the ones from Les Miserable are the only touching and moving ones I have upon which to judge a movie, as limited as they are. I've mentioned it before long ago that I reflect those mass audience tendencies of which we respond to from the perspective what we moves us and captures our imagination that haven't had the opportunity or resources to experience the "stars" of the valley.