Juan Felipe Rodríguez Marín

Readig: Vocabulary Building

GAME CHANGERS

How technological innovation has shaped film history

CAMERA MOVEMENT

In 1961, Jacques rivette wrote a short Cahiers du Cinema review of gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapd (60), a
grim Holocaust drama whose many horrors include the sight of a young concentration camp
prisoner (Emmanuelle Riva) hurling herself fatally against an electrified fence. “The man who
decides at this moment to employ a tracking shot to reframe the corpse from below, taking care to
emphasize her raised hand within her carefully composed memorial image,” Rivette wrote,
“deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.” Camera movement has deep and powerful
roots—moral roots, as Godard would maintain—and it’s one of the things that makes film an art.
The Lumieres were probably the first to experiment with affixing the camera to an object in
motion, and the resulting shot from a moving train in Liverpool in 1897 helped clarify what set
filmmaking apart from the other arts. A moving camera allowed for dynamic visual composition
over time. When I started making films, directors and DPs had eyepiece-style viewfinders. The
cinematographer and I would walk around using the viewfinders during blocking rehearsals:
circling the actors, standing up, lying down, watching space rearrange itself in the floating
rectangle in front of our eyes. Afterward, we’d turn to each other, compare what we saw, then do
it again.

There are two types of camera movement: motivated and unmotivated. Motivated camera
movements are direct responses to the action on screen: you move, I follow you. A character
walks across the room and the camera tilts, pans, or physically moves by hand or on tracks.
Unmotivated camera moves are used for emphasis of one kind or another, be it emotional or
supernatural, by the storyteller. You stand still, I approach—that’s unmotivated. There are two
types of unmotivated camera movement. One is logical. A character is doing something—
brandishing a small object, making a gesture, displaying a look of heightened emotion— and it’s
important that we see it, so the camera moves in to get a closer look. The camera is doing what
the viewer wants or needs it to do. And if emotion is building in that character, the camera gets
closer. Logical.

Then there is illogical unmotivated camera movement. This occurs when the storyteller imposes
himself on the story, when the camera calls attention to itself. Many people don’t care for this
type of movement. Recently, I read an interview with a DP who said that “the best directors and
cinematographers utilize camera movement to tell the story and never move the camera
arbitrarily.” Unmotivated camera movement, for him, “feels unnatural and artificial—and at worst,
it doesn’t help tell the story.” Bullshit. The unmotivated camera is wonderful.
When a camera move is imposed on the action rather than just following or accenting it,
something very interesting happens. The Conformist (70) is a film full of unmotivated and beautiful
camera movements. When the Fascist handler who supervises the Jean-Louis Trintignant character
paces back and forth in a park, the camera moves with him. But after he sits down on a bench, the
camera slides over to a tree blocking our view of him. In the next shot, as Trintignant heads down
a corridor, the camera retreats in the other direction. Two remarkable examples of illogical
unmotivated camera. “Unmotivated” simply means that the camera frame reflects the director’s
point of view first and the characters and narrative action second. Camera movement is motivated
by the storyteller not the story. In The Conformist Bertolucci melds Visconti’s pictorialism with
Godard’s willfulness.

When I was in film school, there used to be all these rules about continuity, such as not crossing
the eyeline. In today’s cinema, there really are no rules. Or maybe there is only one: whatever
works. You can do anything. If it works, you’ve created a new rule. As I’ve said before, the
innovators who make the rules are often the first to break them. Their followers are stuck with
rules while the creators are running free. These moments in The Conformist are examples of what
I think is most interesting and powerful about camera movement, a technique that came of age in
the Nouvelle Vague. Godard’s notion was that even if there are only two people in a scene, there
is a third person in the room, watching them: the camera. His innovation was to make the
camera’s perspective just as valid as that of its subjects. “I’m watching this scene,” you can hear
him say, “and if I get bored, I just may turn over here to look at something else. If the scene gets
interesting again, I may come back and watch it again. I’m part of the story.”

Godard’s line of thinking goes back, in a way, to D.W. Griffith. In The Country Doctor (1909), a one-
reeler about a doctor torn between the needs of his sick daughter and his duty to come to the aid
of a gravely ill farm girl, Griffith opens with a landscape and pans to the doctor and his family
exiting their home. He concludes the film with a corresponding pan away from the front of the
doctor’s house across the landscape of what is now south of Rye, as if to take in the whole world.
This is a very atypical move for Griffith. It’s suited to the movie’s philosophy—each of the
surrounding homes contains its own drama, its own film waiting to be made— but it’s not
motivated by the story or the characters. If anything, it’s motivated by the storyteller’s need to
make a point above and beyond the content of the movie’s plot.

Words:

1. Sigth= pensamiento

2. Across= en medio

3. Imposed= Impuesto, impuesta

4. Bench = Banca / banco

6. Often= aquellos

7. While= mientras

8. Notion= noción

9. Duty= duda

10. Surrounding= encerrando

Representation

1. Sigth= visión

A synonym of this would be "perspective" in the context of the script, "sight" is used referring to
the director's perspective
2. Across= a través de

3. Imposed= impuesto

Put a burden, an obligation or something else.

4. Bench = banco

5. Crossing= cruce
Crossing, cross, junction, intersection, interchange

6. Often= a menudo

What happens or is done several times

7. While

CONJUNCIÓN

1. (al tiempo que)

a. mientras

I love listening to music while I clean the house. Me encanta escuchar música mientras limpio la
casa.

2. (siempre que)

a. mientras

You will keep your job while I am the boss. Mientras yo sea el jefe, mantendrás tu trabajo.

8. Notion= noción

Idea, thought, smattering, slight knowledge

9. Duty= deber
(i feeling bad for not understend it before , i feeling stupid)

10. Surrounding= rodeando

Bibliographie
https://login.loginbiblio.poligran.edu.co/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=aph&AN=101483540&site=ehost-live