Amari Champion - Continuity
I never realized how much the camera was narrating with the selection of shots and angles. Furthermore, I've just come to realize how desensitized I am to it. I've come to rely on the script and action sequences and now realize how much I'm taking for granted. It's cool to learn about all these camera effects and see clips from movies I've seen before in a different light now. I like the consistency in framing that the Coen brothers used. I never noticed what the angle of a shot could do for the audience and how it could make you feel more present during a dialog. It's also very interesting how you can give information about a character whether they are the main character or a small role, based on what you see around them. Blocking was what I found the most fascinating. The subliminal messages with blocking is genius in my opinion. That whole scene was extremely boring to me until I finished watching the whole video explaining what blocking was. In the diner scene, it was compelling to watch the tension build and then have it escalate when they leave, following that characters dream that turned into a nightmare. The use of tracking and parallel editing to make it seem like such a long journey in a short amount of time was brilliant.
There's a consistent thread in your takeaways, Amari, and I think it has to do with the powerful persuasion of visual information, more so than written script or spoken dialogue. Lynch is a master of the psychology of film shooting and editing, particularly in regards to his use of trope and formula. By creating a fairly simple and standard dialogue scene, with a fairly predictable order of shot types and rhythms, he is able to build up our expectations about the rules of film—about what is supposed to happen through the language of film—then twist our attention into a knot by the end. This is similar to Wes Anderson's use of blocking as a visual language: the camera itself is a silent, but persuasive narrator of the characters' predicaments, as opposed to just the script leading the way.
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