Lately all my posts have been WAH WAH but here's one that's going to be pretty unrepentantly positive:
The Hurt Locker's a terrific movie. Yeah, I only caught up to it now, and only because we randomly chose it out of a roulette of on-hand Netflix rentals the other night. But I'm glad I did, because in light of her win at the DGA awards Saturday night, I want to shed light on a certain quality of Bigelow's craft that is going underemphasized.
Normally a bit of a pet peeve for me: like much recent genre cinema, the film operates in what David Bordwell has identified as 'intensified continuity.' The average shot length is probably something around 1 or 2 seconds, and feels especially rushed in the earliest action setpieces. Bigelow uses that great trope of intensified camerawork: the 'humanistic zoom' that attempts to signify the immediacy of the action by drawing an aesthetic line to the camerawork present in documentary footage. As Bordwell notes, the intensification of continuity editing has resulted in a net contraction in film grammar: actors largely work in the close-up rather than the medium shot, and no longer do we see sustained two-shots. But what troubles me most about intensified continuity is the breakdown of mental geography. Bordwell has talked about this problem in relationship to Paul Greengrass' Jason Bourne films, but it's a problem in a lot of films, including recent offerings by Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese.
The directorial triumph of a film like The Hurt Locker, then, is that it can sustain such a rapid clip of editing, but that because Bigelow's staging is based on classical, fundamental technique, we never lose sense for the relationship between characters and their environment. Given the thematic interest of the film - Bigelow is interrogating the narcotic feeling of rush and the emotional drain of a team of expert bomb disposal technicians - it's necessary at all times to understand the physical distances between characters and objects, and Bigelow communicates this expertly. Staging of actors is such a fundamental part of storytelling, and it's the thing that the Cult of the Image has tossed out the window in a really cavalier manner.
Watch this sequence carefully (spoilers, obviously, for those who haven't seen it).
In addition to be an incredible act of sustained tension (in which the lack of non-diegetic music and prolonged downtime make the sequence that much more heartwrenching), it's a masterpiece of staging in which our three main characters are attempting to save British contractors by taking out the long-range snipers who have targeted them in the desert. Bigelow moves her characters, rapidly shifts points of view, and even draws the action away temporarily to a different theater of action (not seen in this clip, but later in the sequence), but we never lose track of the relationship between the characters, and their proximity to each other as they shift around reveals the support and bond these three men have developed for one another in a relatively short period of time. When Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James slides down the hill to comfort Brian Geraghty's Specialist Eldridge as they clean the blood-drenched sniper rounds, there's a humaneness to the interaction that's unexpected and moving.
The Hurt Locker
Lately all my posts have been WAH WAH but here's one that's going to be pretty unrepentantly positive:
The Hurt Locker's a terrific movie. Yeah, I only caught up to it now, and only because we randomly chose it out of a roulette of on-hand Netflix rentals the other night. But I'm glad I did, because in light of her win at the DGA awards Saturday night, I want to shed light on a certain quality of Bigelow's craft that is going underemphasized.
Normally a bit of a pet peeve for me: like much recent genre cinema, the film operates in what David Bordwell has identified as 'intensified continuity.' The average shot length is probably something around 1 or 2 seconds, and feels especially rushed in the earliest action setpieces. Bigelow uses that great trope of intensified camerawork: the 'humanistic zoom' that attempts to signify the immediacy of the action by drawing an aesthetic line to the camerawork present in documentary footage. As Bordwell notes, the intensification of continuity editing has resulted in a net contraction in film grammar: actors largely work in the close-up rather than the medium shot, and no longer do we see sustained two-shots. But what troubles me most about intensified continuity is the breakdown of mental geography. Bordwell has talked about this problem in relationship to Paul Greengrass' Jason Bourne films, but it's a problem in a lot of films, including recent offerings by Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese.
The directorial triumph of a film like The Hurt Locker, then, is that it can sustain such a rapid clip of editing, but that because Bigelow's staging is based on classical, fundamental technique, we never lose sense for the relationship between characters and their environment. Given the thematic interest of the film - Bigelow is interrogating the narcotic feeling of rush and the emotional drain of a team of expert bomb disposal technicians - it's necessary at all times to understand the physical distances between characters and objects, and Bigelow communicates this expertly. Staging of actors is such a fundamental part of storytelling, and it's the thing that the Cult of the Image has tossed out the window in a really cavalier manner.
Watch this sequence carefully (spoilers, obviously, for those who haven't seen it).
In addition to be an incredible act of sustained tension (in which the lack of non-diegetic music and prolonged downtime make the sequence that much more heartwrenching), it's a masterpiece of staging in which our three main characters are attempting to save British contractors by taking out the long-range snipers who have targeted them in the desert. Bigelow moves her characters, rapidly shifts points of view, and even draws the action away temporarily to a different theater of action (not seen in this clip, but later in the sequence), but we never lose track of the relationship between the characters, and their proximity to each other as they shift around reveals the support and bond these three men have developed for one another in a relatively short period of time. When Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James slides down the hill to comfort Brian Geraghty's Specialist Eldridge as they clean the blood-drenched sniper rounds, there's a humaneness to the interaction that's unexpected and moving.