In the first two parts of our best shots series,
we looked at how film makers made the best of arranging people.
But now, we're going to take a moment to look at places and things.
>From establishing shots, to inserts and cutaways,
these are three more of the best shots of all time, part 3.
(Music)
(Sound) First up, we're looking at the establishing shot.
It is a shot of a place, a location, or space, or geographical point.
Historically and traditionally, the establishing shot comes before a scene,
establishing where that scene will take place.
And originally, this involved a lot of landmark shots.
The next scene is supposed to take place in Paris?
Here's the Eiffel Tower.
Egypt?
It's pyramid time.
At their most basic, they are clever ways to orient the audience on their mental
map, but they can rise above their station as simple pictorial subtitles.
At their best,
they don't just tell us where we are as if it were a mildly relevant footnote.
Instead, clever establishing shots can play off our mental archetypes about
places to create an impression about what kind of place we're about to enter next.
And in doing so, give us an expectation of what's to come.
Establishing shots show us places as if they're possibilities.
They take advantage of our ever-working and guessing and conniving imaginations to
get us thinking about what this place means, who might be in it.
Is it safe, scary, a hidden trap?
They can make us wonder, or hope, or dream, or fear, or dread.
If it's a place attached to a character, it can make us hope, or dream, or fear, or
dread about that character.
Some of our favorite establishing shots come from 'Blade Runner',
'The Shining', and the 'Harry Potter' series.
However, for our first pick, we think one of the best comes from 'The Godfather'.
And what's that you say?
Two shots from two 'Godfathers' across this series?
Look out, 'The Mirror'.
We've got a new teacher's pet because this shot where "Clemenza" searches for
a safe house with the traitor, "Paul Legato", is pure establishing gold.
- Hey, "Paulie", I want you to go down 39th Street, "Carlos Santos",
you pick up 18 mattresses for the guys to sleep, while you bring me the bill.
- Mm-hm, yeah, all right, (Inaudible) the bill.
- You make sure that they're clean,
because those guys are gonna be stuck up in there for a long time.
- They're clean. They told me to exterminate them.
- Exterminate them?
That's a bad word to use.
- (Laugh) - Exterminate, get this guy,
watch out we don't exterminate you.
- You think that's funny, or what?
- Hey, "Paulie", (Foreign) - Hey, "Rocco", what did you do?
- Not me, nothing, it wasn't me.
- It's gotta be him, then.
- Pull over, will you?
I gotta take a leak.
- Even if by some criminal circumstances you haven't seen 'The Godfather',
you surely must suspect what's about to happen here.
This shot and
the way it's composed makes the location an inextricable part of the storytelling.
We don't know for a certainty what's next, but
the tantalizing dangerness of it all is just enough to fill us with dread.
It's like it taps into our animal brain, sending off all kinds of fight or
flight alarms hitting us right in the stranger danger.
It is an establishing shot in a series of progressively
more remote establishing shots.
Peering through the reeds off the side of the highway without anyone in sight
behind the back of Lady Liberty.
It's all perfectly calculated to create a situation where the place tells us
everything we need to know about "Clemenza's" intentions and
suggests just subtlety enough what's coming next.
(Music)
(Sound) Next up is the insert, a shot for items, objects, details, things.
A shot that is inserted amidst the main coverage, the oft-forgotten stepchild of
those glamorous character shots filled with the Hollywood stars.
Frequently delegated to a second unit photographer,
while the director worries himself with more important material.
Because usually, an insert shot is just asking us to pay a little more attention
to an item that has some above average importance, a McGuffin.
Necessary, but far from fancy, but really wonderful insert shots can do so
much more than this.
They can ask us to look closer at an object that turns out to
be more than meets the eye.
Invite us to see things in a new way, and at their best,
reveal information about people through the objects to which they connect.
In this way, inserts aren't just soulless waypoints on the "Rube
Goldberg" machine of the plot, but sidelong windows into characters.
An awesome example of this is the beginning of 'Back to the Future',
which introduces us to "Doc Brown" through one extended insert of his lab
without a person in sight.
Some of our other selects are these from 'Whiplash', 'In the Mood for Love', and
'Citizen Kane'.
However for our favorite insert,
remember when we said we were over 'The Mirror' like two minutes ago?
Yeah, joke's on you, because this scene here,
where the narrator's son reads a poem at the request of a mysterious woman,
has our favorite insert of all time.
- (Foreign)
(Music)
(Sound) In a lesser film,
this might very well be used as some kind of horror blink scare.
However, in the context of 'The Mirror', it's less of a supernatural event and
more of a deeply personal one.
It connects not with the fear of the paranormal, but
with the melancholy of a fading memory.
And the reason we think it's so
breathtaking is because of how it connects the inanimate
insert with the woman before it, how the insert's disappearance expands upon hers.
She has vanished out of frame, but the insert happens in plain view.
So it seems to us that the fog's fading stands in for the woman's fading.
The condensation becomes her, or at least, her memory.
It is the cinematic equivalent of a metonymy,
something represented by an associated object.
A king referred to as the crown, helpers referred to as hands,
the insert representing the person with whom its associated.
It's symbolic in the same way as a locket that reminds us of
the loved one who gave it to us.
The insert is specific, personalized, relevant, and
we were a part of its original association to the referent person.
And now that the association is made, "Tarkovsky" uses the symbol to an effect
he couldn't with an actor, fading organically into the past.
(Sound) And finally for our third favorite shot on this list,
we're looking at the cutaway.
And in a vacuum, the cutaway might not be that distinguishable from an insert or
an establishing shot.
It's a thing, maybe a place, but the difference is the context.
While the establishing shot and the insert show us something we need to know about
the place we're in or something within it, the cutaway doesn't.
It just shows us a place or a thing full stop.
It is definitionally a look at something unrelated to the plot and
the characters and the action at hand.
It is a cutaway emphasis on away.
It is a breath, a break, a distraction.
The cutaway teleports us elsewhere, somewhere outside the scope of
the narrative to an image that is not causally involved.
In its most basic use, the cutaway just says later, or time passes, or
it tells us that we're turning our focus elsewhere.
But it can also convey a feeling, a mood,
provide us with a non-verbal attitude with which to enter the next scene.
It doesn't say something about a place or thing,
it says something about an emotional state.
A moment of visual poetry amidst prose inviting us to take a break and
marinate in it for a while.
Some of our favorite cutaways belong to "Terrence Malick" and "Miyazaki".
However, for our last pick on this list, we're looking at "Ozu".
- (Foreign)
(Sound)
- "Ozu" is absolutely famous for
his cutaways.
Pages of dissertations have been spent scrutinizing their seeming inscrutability.
They even have their own name, the pillow shot, so
titled after the pillow words of classical Japanese poetry.
Extra add ons that contribute little discernible meaning to a phrase, but
add a certain sense or je ne sais quoi.
And while this one is probably our favorite, we would be lying if we said it
were for much more of a reason than simply aesthetic taste.
Maybe we just have a thing for empty places built for
people that makes us feel a familiar kind of loneliness.
The truth is, his films are full of pillow shots, much like this one.
Each with a similar quiet emptiness, yet each with a look at a different corner of
the world in a different way, giving a space in a different context.
It is like an unguided meditation, an opportunity to float adrift in whatever
direction our mind is heading without constant new stimuli.
They turn us back to the world outside the narrative,
invite us to take the larger view.
Some would argue that this 'Late Spring' vase shot is perhaps his most
relevant pillow shot.
Certainly, it is the one that has accumulated the most symbolic and
narrative interpretation, but
we think it is all the worse of an example of a cutaway for it.
The vase shot has tended to collect our attempts at meaning.
The best of the pillow shots avoid them.
They wash over us like a slow breeze, patient and undemanding,
yet subtly changing the entire landscape to come.
(Music)
At their most utilitarian, these shots are visual exposition.
Patent figures, museum placards, delivering information as spectacularly as
a phone book, useful, but nothing worth our fascination.
But as we've seen, they can be so much more, they can build in us expectations
from nothing, teach us about a person from no one, and invoke a feeling from nowhere.
They are deeply emotional messages,
Trojan horsed into our soul on the back of a weather report.
It's not just about people, places, and things, but
about the feelings that arise in their midst.
And we think these shots manage them better than much else,
which is why they're our picks for three of the best shots of all time, part 3.
(Music)
So what do you think?
Disagree with any of our picks?
Have any other inserts, cutaways, or
establishing shots that really get you going?
We're taking a break from shots for next week because we're starting to see funny,
and I've started dreaming in diagrams.
But we'll come up with the fun diversion while we recover.
Let us know if you have any ideas, and be sure to subscribe for
more at Cinefix Movie Lists.