Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler utilized extreme camera angles to seize Manhattan’s forceful and lively qualities. The intentionality of their work is key, their cameras aren’t free traveling. Paul Strand and Walter Benjamin’s camera position is not accidental. Where they set up the camera is not where something will happen, rather where the happenings take place, and turns the subjects of his work into narrators, where the camera acts as a listener. When they rearranged the position of the camera as opposed to the subjects, the pictures were freed in a sense, almost to a point where you could put all his pictures together and they’d transform from still life to abstraction.
In Paul Strand’s Essay “Photography and the New God” He references the camera as God the machine. “Thus the deeper significance of a machine, the camera has emerged here in America, the supreme altar of the new God.” (Strand 143) In the film Manhatta by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, we see Strand’s argument being fulfilled of the camera as
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Even though it’s a silent production, Manhatta seems to work on an intuitive level based on several examples from the film. The ability to understand that technology is taking over the world in a negative way is strongly portrayed through the dehumanizing aspects in the film. Going back to the construction workers, who are enslaved in the component of the machine, without saying a word describe the context of the film. Artists were in pursuit of intuitive knowledge which in the film, Strand and Sheeler used to foreworn of the effects of the scientists allowing themselves to be used for profit, and creating weapons and unjust ways of life that resulted in mankind reaching a point approaching
Spike Lee does many fascinating things from a directorial standpoint, which makes his film (dare I say, joint), Do the Right Thing so interesting to watch. Writer, director Lee makes much use of the high and low angle shots. He does this to draw clear contrasts between the two elders of the block, Da Mayor and Mother Sister and to make conflict more apparent.
Though complex and brilliantly written for its time, the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, is only half of the genius behind it. Alfred Hitchcock’s unique presence as an auteur is truly what sets his films apart. There is symmetry to his shots that give the film an artistic feel, as if each frame were a painting. Many times, within this symmetry, Hitchcock places the characters in the center of the frame; or if not centered, then balanced by whatever else is adding density to the shot. For example, as Madeline sits and looks at the painting in the museum, there is a balance within the frame. To counter-act her position to the right of the painting, Hitchcock puts a chair and another painting on the left side, which is visually pleasing to the eye of the audience. The use of red and green not only adds a visual effect as well, but later serves as a clue that Madeline is not actually dead, when the women who looks like her is wearing a green dress.
The way that the director has manipulated the camera angle to represent the theme is more unique than I have ever seen in any other movie directors. For example, in the beginning of the movie, the director chose to have huge flakes of Vincent’s body flakes and hair falling to the floor. This scene shows how discrimination has evolved from the looks to the DNA of
The innovative theories and filmmaking techniques of Dziga Vertov revolutionized the way films are made today. Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a documentary that represented the peak of the Soviet avant-garde film movement in the twenties, displayed techniques in montage, creative camera angles, rich imagery, but most importantly allowed him to express his theories of his writings of Kino-eye (the camera). The film has a very simple plot that describes an average day in Russia, yet the final pieces of this film emerge a complex and fast-paced production that excites the audience. Vertov's ability to use radical editing techniques with unconventional filming to present ordinary things has inspired many directors around the world. And still now modern avant-garde movies apply many of these same techniques to dramatize simple and complex stories.
In cinema, lighting, blocking and panning drastically influence what an audience will notice and take away from a scene. Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane has numerous examples of effectively using these aspects within mise-en-scène, cinematography and editing to portray the importance of specific events and items in the film. The scene where Kane writes and then publishes his “Declaration of Principles” (37:42-39:42) in the New York Daily Inquirer after buying them focuses on important elements of the film, aiding the audience by combining lighting, blocking and panning to define significant roles and objects that further the movie as a whole.
Camera Lucida was Roland Barthes’ last written piece, published posthumously in 1980. This book deals with the topic of photography and the death of Barthes’ mother in 1977. The role of photography is questioned; he asks what about photography makes it a valid media? We read about the operator (the photographer), spectrum (the subject) and spectator (the viewer), also about the studium (what we see in the photograph) and the punctum (the unclassifiable, the thing that makes the photograph important to the viewer). According to Barthes the photograph is an adventure for the viewer, but it is ultimately death, the recording of something that will be dead after the picture is taken. This idea is the main focus of Barthes’ writing, the photograph “that-has-been”, in Latin “interfuit: what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject; it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irref...
In the chapter, “The Mirror with a Memory”, the authors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle, describe numerous things that evolved after the civil war, including the life of Jacob Riis, the immigration of new peoples in America, and the evolution of photography. The authors’ purpose in this chapter is to connect the numerous impacts photography had on the past as well as its bringing in today’s age.
Also, in the West Side Story, it uses many camera angles and distances. One example is the high-angle shot (B 49). In the very beginning the camera shows an overview of the West Side. I think that is shows this because it gives the audience a perspective on how large the West Side is. It also shows a distance shot (B 49) when the police arrive to the fight scene where the...
This essay offers a contextual, and theoretical explanation as to why Stereoscopes are a product of modernity: drawing particular attention to the stereoscope - that enables what many viewers perceive as a greater level of realism in the cinematic image -, existing arguments around the topic which have been developed to interpret and explain its social significance within the modern period. The discussion begins with an informative differentiation of both ideologies, which we identify as Modernism and Modernity; the second paragraph, is a brief background of the optical instrument which hopefully bleeds into the main body of ideas conceived from thorough research via David Trotter, Jonathan Crary and Goethe. My interest in this particular subject arose out of empirical knowledge of cameras from studying Photography at A Level and a prior thesis I conducted in regards to Capitalism: Slavery, an excerpt by filmmaker Ken Jacobs. A metaphorical screening considering the relationship of both fields not only in their shared money form but also the difference surrounding these two highly charged and complex kinds of bodies: the slave body and the corporate body which in reality are the a biological form and a wealth form.
Between 1500 and 1900, paintings and drawings were the main medium of visual art. They represented the universe based on the author’s imagination and technical skill. However, the birth of photography presented new possibilities and a new means to depict and show an accurate, complete and ‘authentic’ reproduction of reality. Based and inspired by Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography, this essay will discuss and explore the notion of the authentic image as well as what makes for an authentic photograph.
Susan Sontag has a very strong and interesting take on modern photography. In her essay, “In Plato’s Cave”, she talks about the power of photographs and what they convey about reality. Sontag states that “Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.”(23). Sontag argues
The photographic image emerged as an invention and innovation of the early nineteenth century. Right from the day of its invention in the 19th century, till the present day in the 21st century, photography has been hailed as a technologically great invention that changed the world. Though precursors have been identified by a number of theorists, an example would be the Camera Obscura in the eighteenth century. Since it’s creation, photography
‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.
“When photography was invented it was thought to be an equivalent to truth, it was truth with a capital ‘T’.” Vicki Goldberg
Since the end of 19th century, photography is the part of human life, its most direct witness. However, the definition of photography, and what is its main prompt, appears still ambiguous. On the one hand, it would be fair to define photography as a transfer of a fixed image on a photosensitive material with the help of camera. On the other hand, photography it is a certain outlook on life, which comes from the bottom of an artists heart. To collect photographs is to collect the world. With photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store (Sontag, 174). Photograph refers to the process and result at the same time. Nevertheless, in all cases photograph represents reality imprinted in the memory of camera as a picture.