Scene in Cinema | Advanced Research Project Reflection

For my advanced research project in the ‘Scene in Cinema’, I wanted to do something that would push me to reimagine the actor to camera relationship by focusing entirely on the way in which actors can be shot moving around a space, with little to no emphasis on what the characters represent and the greater narrative. My main source of inspiration for my final assessment in this course was the work of Antonioni which we focused on in week 9, and how he makes the bizarre and at times senseless movement in the frame look so natural to the viewer. This was particularly apparent in his 1964 film ‘Red Desert‘ starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris, heavily inspired by Antonioni’s roots in postwar neorealism. I took special interest towards the scene we watched in class in which Monica Vitti and Richard Harris basically walk around a blank room with no apparent motives whilst they talk. It’s incredibly well produced in how fluidly they flow from space to space. Even when one character moves out of the frame into a blank corner of the room, the camera positioning is so fantastically well done that you still understand where they are in relation to the other actor. This is largely down to the phenomenal acting and partly the specific choice of location. This is the only place I could find the scene online:

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/1099292/Red-Desert-Movie-Clip-Maybe-Light-Blue-s-Better.html

For my scene, I decided to shoot it at home because I wanted a location I had complete control over which couldn’t be replicated at uni, and it also allowed me to custom envisage the actor movement in the room. Living in Geelong, it was too difficult to get one of our proper cameras down from Melbourne so I shot on a DSLR. The image quality isn’t a big deal for this exercise however it made it slightly more difficult to pull the focus from actor to actor, as well as having some bizarre exposure issues in which some shots became incredibly dark. However, these technical elements are not important to what i am trying to display, just something to keep in mind. I used members of my family as actors (god bless them), so they did a lot of smiling and non-professional things like that, so I just focused on what I could control.

In the Red Desert scene, businessman Zeller visits Ravenna at her shop for no apparent reason, so I’ve employed a similar plot decision here and made the detectives motives for investigation unclear. Zeller is used as a ground anchor in Red Desert, as he barely moves around the space compared to Ravenna. This makes it easier to establish where Ravenna moves in the space as the viewer has a fixated point to identify where she is in relation to Zeller. This is true in my scene however the roles are reversed and the detective is the one moving around the space. Eyelines a critical to make this movement seem legitimate, so I ensured the actors never left their positions so those in the frame had a point to lock on to. The young girl doesn’t move throughout the entirety of my scene, and it makes it easy for the viewer to establish where the detective is in the space as he keeps looking back to the same spot where the girl is established in the first shot.

The second shot is taken just to the right of the girl, hence it’s almost a point of view shot which is used to once again clearly establish the detective’s position in the room even though it wasn’t shown in the previous shot. Being a DSLR the video exposure was rather difficult to adjust mid shot so I accepted the dark silhouette around the investigator as he looks out the window. In a way, it works as it paints him as a dark and untrustworthy character.

The scene is essentially the investigator doing a circle around the room in front of the girl, and the simplicity of doing it this way makes him easier to track, as the viewer can almost anticipate where he’s going to end up. I really wanted to do a pullback shot to bring the girl into the frame in this shot, and I did this by using the detective’s movement towards the camera as a means to force the camera back to keep him in the frame, pushing the camera into an OTS of the same character in the one shot. As the camera pulls back, the windows position in the room is also established for greater context.

The last few shots are simple shot-reverse shots of the two characters in conversation, and upon closer reflection, something about it doesn’t look quite right. The way in which both characters are framed screen left in both shots looks cramped and looking back on it, rather crap. This applies particularly to the shot of my sister, in which there is so much blank screen real estate on the right that it looks like it was shot in another house completely. Frankly, it pisses me off that I was so blind to it at the time at least it’s something to reflect on.