The Power of Perspective
From the pioneers of cinematography like Hitchcock, Kubrick and Spielberg, to modern innovators like Wes Anderson, Darren Aronovsky and the Coen Brothers, the manipulation of perspective and point of view (POV) is key to establishing characters and environment, as well as creating the cycles of tension and resolution that drive the narrative of a film.
In the 1950s, film theorists like Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc argued that great films required a strong narrative with deep focus and longer scenes with a powerful visual aesthetic. This philosophy illustrates that the engineering of perspective and camera angles stand shoulder-to-shoulder with complex editing, sound design and programmatic music in eliciting powerful emotional responses from the audience.
Hitchcock and the Dolly Zoom
Hitchcock’s 1958 classic film Vertigo saw the first cinematic use of the dolly zoom - a distorted perspective technique where the camera pulls back from the subject while zooming in to create a vertiginous surrealism. Spielberg employed the same technique to great effect in Jaws where it emphasises the horror of Chief Brody’s reaction as he finally witnesses a shark attack.
Jaws (1975).
While the dolly zoom is a distinctive and powerful tool for climactic moments, there are other more subtle film techniques that toy with our perception. Notable examples are track-in shots, where the camera moves closer to the subject, whilst blurring the background, to highlight a significant point in the character’s story and sideways tracking shots, which often follow two subjects talking, giving a sense of movement and richness to the frame. Another classic and well-used approach, is the use of wide angle lenses which provide a more detailed environment in the background, while still allowing the foreground characters to dominate the scene.
The Power of POV
Away from the technical wizardry of lenses and complex tracking techniques, there’s the basic question of where to put the camera. Camera placing is an integral part of immersing the audience in the director’s vision and is integral to the mood and power of the drama.
An over the shoulder shot looking down on the main subject gives the foreground character an automatic dominance over the person they’re talking to. These can be made to magnify the sense of claustrophobia even further, when the back of the foreground character fills most of the frame, leaving the main subject cowering in the small space that’s left for them. Other tried and tested POV techniques include shooting characters from below to give the impression they are powerful, confident people, with an air of superiority, or a high camera angle looking down on them from above to portray their child-like innocence or inferiority.
Where a wide panoramic shot with a lone figure walking in the distance can express loneliness and isolation, or a tight close-up of a person’s face wracked with emotion can wring an empathetic or uneasy reaction from the audience. The artistry of the filmmaker is embedded in how they use the camera to catalyse the performance of their actors and engineer the perceptions of the viewer to create exactly the story they want to tell.
Mommy (2014).
More recent innovations in POV have combined forced perspective shots with CGI to stress the different sizes of characters – this is evident in fantasy films like Lord of the Rings where vertically challenged hobbits are in the same scene as huge wizards and other giants. There are also examples where directors have used changes in aspect ratio as a dramatic tool; Xavier Dolan’s 2014 film Mommy was shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio - rather than the 1.85.1, or 2.35:1 in which most modern films are shot - in order to achieve a deeper intimacy with the characters whose lives we’re looking into.
Montage Theory
The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein - known for his huge-scale historical epics - was a major proponent of montage theory, where the juxtaposition of related images creates a powerful collage of shots, which manipulate the emotions of the audience. This technique capitalises on the intellectual perspective of the audience rather than relying on visual perspective via photo-optical trickery.
Hitchcock also maintained that ‘all moviemaking is montage’, explaining that if you take a close-up of a man’s face, cut to a picture of a woman nursing a baby, then cut back to a shot of the man smiling, the audience judges him to be a benevolent gent. However, if you substitute the nursing mother for a picture of a girl in a bikini, the man is immediately perceived as a dirty old man. It’s these simple psychological tricks that directors use to play with our emotional perception of the action.
The true magic of cinema is that the psychological toolbox used by directors - which can seem technical and manipulative under analytical scrutiny – is subliminal in practice. The fact is, our perceptive behaviours are programmed from childhood and we are hard-wired to decode the literal meaning of everything we see and avoid the abstract. In the same way that an innate knowledge of the theory of music doesn’t stop the listener being moved by a powerful melody, the emotional power of cinema will continue to draw us in, regardless of the techniques that are at work beneath our perception.
