In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, or oblique angle, is a type of camera shot that involves setting the camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame. [1] This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side. [1] In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. [2] The Dutch angle is strongly associated with German expressionist cinema, which employed it extensively. [1] [3]
The "Dutch" in "Dutch angle" is held by some to be a corruption of the German word Deutsch (meaning "German") due to the supposed popularity of the shot in silent-era German films. Alternatively, the adjective "Dutch" is thought to indicate something out of the ordinary (compare Dutch uncle, Dutch treat or Dutch auction) or, as in this case and the similarly named Dutch roll in aeronautics, something which is out of line. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
The earliest recorded occurrences of the camera technique is to be found in the Edwin S. Porter American film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), itself based on Winsor McCay's comic strip of the same name, already known for its use of surrealist and oblique angles in its drawings. [10] [11]
The Dutch angle is a shot in which the camera has been rotated around the axis of the lens and relative to the horizon or vertical lines in the shot. [12]
The primary use of a Dutch angle is to cause a sense of unease or disorientation for the viewer. [13] Dutch angles are often static shots, but in a dynamic (moving) Dutch angle shot, the camera can pivot, pan, or track along the established diagonal axis for the shot. [3]
Dziga Vertov's 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera contains uses of the Dutch angle, among other innovative techniques pioneered by Vertov. [14]
The angle was widely used to depict madness, unrest, exoticism, and disorientation in German expressionist films. Montages of Dutch angles are often structured such that the tilts are horizontally opposed in each shot – for example, a right-tilted shot will be followed with a left-tilted shot, and so on. [15]
In Hollywood's classic age, one filmmaker who used Dutch angles often was Alfred Hitchcock, whose early career included time at UFA studios in Germany; examples include Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
The 1949 film The Third Man makes extensive use of Dutch angle shots, to emphasize the main character's alienation in a foreign environment. Director Carol Reed has said that William Wyler gave him a spirit level after seeing the film, to sardonically encourage him to use more traditional shooting angles. [3] [16]
Dutch angles were used extensively in the 1960s Batman TV series and its 1966 film spin-off; each villain had his or her own angle, as they were "crooked". [3] [15]
Dutch angles are frequently used by film directors who have a background in the visual arts, such as Tim Burton (in Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood ), and Terry Gilliam (in Brazil , The Fisher King , 12 Monkeys , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland ) to represent madness, disorientation, or drug psychosis. In his Evil Dead trilogy, Sam Raimi used Dutch angles to show that a character had become possessed by evil. [15] In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982), a Dutch angle is used to convey the odd tension that strangers are exerting on the main character.
Tom Hooper frequently uses dutch angles in his work in more creative ways and to reflect the time periods and settings of the stories, as seen in his work on Les Misérables (2012) and The King's Speech (2010). In the 2008 miniseries John Adams , Hooper uses dutch tilts to contrast the American scenes with the more traditional-looking cinematography of the scenes in France. [17]
Power Rangers used Dutch angles frequently under former stunt coordinator and executive producer Koichi Sakamoto.
The Dutch angle is an overt cinematographical technique that can be overused. [18] The science-fiction film Battlefield Earth (2000), in particular, drew sharp criticism for its pervasive use of the Dutch angle. In the words of film critic Roger Ebert: "the director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why". [18]
Dutch angles are often used in horror video games, particularly those with static camera angles such as early entries in the Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises. [19] Similar to their use in movies, these angles are used to bring about a feeling of unease in the player. [19]
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
A point of view shot is a film scene—usually a short one—that is shot as if through the eyes of a character. The camera shows what the subject's eyes would see. It is usually established by being positioned between a shot of a character looking at something, and a shot showing the character's reaction. The POV technique is one of the foundations of film editing.
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
German expressionist cinema was a part of several related creative movements in Germany in the early 20th century that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture in fields such as architecture, dance, painting, sculpture and cinema.
Tilting is a cinematographic technique in which the camera stays in a fixed position but rotates up/down in a vertical plane. Tilting the camera results in a motion similar to someone raising or lowering their head to look up or down. It is distinguished from panning in which the camera is horizontally pivoted left or right. Pan and tilt can be used simultaneously. In some situations the lens itself may be tilted with respect to the fixed camera body in order to generate greater depth of focus.
The Dziga Vertov Group was formed around 1969 by politically active filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their films are defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship.
The over-the-shoulder shot is a camera angle used in film and television, where the camera is placed above the back of the shoulder and head of a subject. This shot is most commonly used to present conversational back and forth between two subjects. With the camera placed behind one character, the shot then frames the sequence from the perspective of that character. The over-the-shoulder shot is then utilised in a shot-reverse-shot sequence where both subject's OTS perspectives are edited consecutively to create a back and forth interplay, capturing dialogue and reactions. This inclusion of the back of the shoulder allows audiences to understand the spatial relationships between two subjects, while still being able to capture a closer shot of each subject’s facial expression. In film and television, the filmmaker or cinematographer’s choice of an OTS shot’s camera height, the use of focus and lenses affect the way audiences interpret subjects and their relationships to others and space.
Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing. It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and brought formalism to bear on filmmaking.
The Kinoks were a collective of Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, consisting of Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
Shaky camera, shaky cam, jerky camera, queasy cam, run-and-gun or free camera is a cinematographic technique where stable-image techniques are purposely dispensed with shaking. It is a hand-held camera, or given the appearance of being hand-held, and in many cases shots are limited to what one photographer could have accomplished with one camera. Shaky cam is often employed to give a film sequence an ad hoc, electronic news-gathering, or documentary film feel. It suggests unprepared, unrehearsed filming of reality, and can provide a sense of dynamics, immersion, instability or nervousness. The technique can be used to give a pseudo-documentary or cinéma vérité appearance to a film.
One of the principal features defining traditional cinema is a fixed and linear narrative structure. In Database Cinema however, the story develops by selecting scenes from a given collection like a computer game in which a player performs certain acts and thereby selects scenes and creating a narrative.
Three Songs About Lenin is a 1934 documentary sound film by Ukrainian-Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. It is based on three admiring songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It is made up of 3 episodes and is 57 minutes long.
Rain is a 1929 Dutch short documentary film directed by Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens. It premiered on 14 December 1929, in the Amsterdam Filmliga's theater, De Uitkijk.
Documentary mode is a conceptual scheme developed by American documentary theorist Bill Nichols that seeks to distinguish particular traits and conventions of various documentary film styles. Nichols identifies six different documentary 'modes' in his schema: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. While Nichols' discussion of modes does progress chronologically with the order of their appearance in practice, documentary film often returns to themes and devices from previous modes. Therefore, it is inaccurate to think of modes as historical punctuation marks in an evolution towards an ultimate accepted documentary style. Also, modes are not mutually exclusive. There is often significant overlapping between modalities within individual documentary features. As Nichols points out, "the characteristics of a given mode function as a dominant in a given film…but they do not dictate or determine every aspect of its organization."
A Sixth Part of the World, sometimes referred to as The Sixth Part of the World, is a 1926 silent film directed by Dziga Vertov and produced by Kultkino. Through the travelogue format, it depicted the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and detailed the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in order to build a "complete socialist society".
Yelizaveta Ignatevna Svilova was a Russian filmmaker and film editor. She is perhaps best known for making films with her husband Dziga Vertov and her brother-in-law Mikhail Kaufman. She is also known for her documentaries about World War II and for appearing in and editing Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas, also referred to as Donbas Symphony or The Symphony of the Donbas Basin, is a 1931 sound film directed by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. The film was the director's first sound film and also the first of the Soviet production company Ukrainfilm. The film's score is considered experimental and avant-garde because of its incorporation of factory, industrial, and other machine sounds; human speech plays only a small role in the film's sounds.
Kino-Eye is a film technique developed in Soviet Union by Dziga Vertov. It was also the name of the movement and group that was defined by this technique. Kino-Eye was Vertov's means of capturing what he believed to be "inaccessible to the human eye"; that is, Kino-Eye films would not attempt to imitate how the human eye saw things. Rather, by assembling film fragments and editing them together in a form of montage, Kino-Eye hoped to activate a new type of perception by creating "a new filmic, i.e., media shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message - a semantic field." Distinct from narrative entertainment cinema forms or otherwise "acted" films, Kino-Eye sought to capture "life unawares" and edit it together in such a way that it would form a new, previously unseen truth.