Coosa Creek Mambo

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Madeline Kahn in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

Tags: Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn, Mel Brooks

Here’s a shot from Béla Tarr’s Satantango that is masked to a shape familiar to any birdwatcher (or, because it is such a common convention, anyone who’s ever seen a thriller). The mask works on several levels: on the surface, it simulates the view through a pair of binoculars. Because we do not [...]

Tags: Bela Tarr, Satantango

Here’s brief scene from François Truffaut’s Day for Night that evokes a love of cinema better and with more economy than any other I can think of.  Truffaut (right) plays Ferrand, the director of the film Meet Pamela, and Jean Champion (left) is his producer.  As Ferrand receives a package of books about film, he [...]

Tags: Day for Night, Truffaut

Here’s one of my favorite murder sequences, from Robert Siodmak’s 1946 version of The Killers, a classic from the golden age of noir. Siodmak was a German immigré who was heavily influenced by expressionist films of the 20s and 30s. He and his cinematographer Woody Bredell created a beautiful, brooding, high-contrast atmosphere that’s classic [...]

No early film maker used tracking shots with more intelligence and originality than Carl Theodor Dreyer. Far from being simply a way to move the camera, or a way of showing off (yes, I’m talking about you, Atonement), in Dreyer’s work they they are integral to the design of each film.
A major theme running through [...]

Tags: Dreyer, Joan of Arc

Yesterday, I posted a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) that showed the dialog scene from a classic Hollywood perspective. The conversants are established half-facing each other, and after a master shot, the dialog proceeds in shot/reverse-shot fashion, with alternating takes shot over the shoulder of the actors. The lighting is [...]

Tags: My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar Wai

Watching Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, I got to thinking about what David Bordwell and others have called the “Classical Hollywood Style.” It refers to a collection of techniques or rules that work together to enable smooth, unobtrusive film-making that does not call attention to itself.
Here’s a scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest [...]

Tags: Cary Grant, Hitchcock, Wong Kar Wai

Nobody was better at composing for the 4:3 frame than Akira Kurosawa. Like many of the directors of the day, he routinely used normal to slightly wide lenses; with the advent of widescreen, he abandoned them in favor of telephotos, and rarely looked back.
Here’s a scene from Ikiru (1952) that illustrates. The protagonist [...]

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Here’s one more clip from Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). Unlike the indoor tracking shot from yesterday’s post, it’s a pan (i.e., the camera remains still and rotates around its vertical axis). It takes place near the beginning of the movie as [...]

Tags: Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir

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Those who’ve read this blog before (and you know who you are!) will know that I’ve made a case for Jean Renoir being perhaps the greatest director of all time. As Peter Bogdanovich has noted, during the 1930s he made a virtually unprecedented [...]

Tags: Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir, tracking shot