Last night I started watching The Third Man because I wanted to hear the opening musical theme and the closing one where Anna walks out of Holly's life. But I got trapped and wound up watching the entire movie again - for perhaps the fourth or fifth time.
The nice thing about rewatching a classic movie is that it is no longer necessary to pay attention to the storyline, and therefore it's easier to study and enjoy the other aspects of the film, such as the cinematography. My attention last night was on the rather dramatic angles of some of the shots (reiniscent of Citizen Kane). A brief search of the internet yielded the proper technical term: the Dutch Angle.
"In filmmaking and photography, the Dutch angle, also known as Dutch tilt, canted angle, vortex plane, oblique angle, or a Durkin, 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. This produces a viewpoint akin to tilting one's head to the side. In cinematography, the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. The Dutch angle is strongly associated with German expressionist cinema, which employed it extensively..."
The video embedded at the top offers a concise 5-minute discussion of the technique, and the video embedded below presents just for fun clips from dozens of movies showing the ever-increasing angle of the shots - the final one being a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Where implicit or explicit, tension is why we love movies (and art).
ReplyDeleteNot sure if that last one counts a true Dutch Angle, but it certainly isn't vertical!
ReplyDeleteSandra
Reaching way back, it cracked me up as a youth when I realized the reason for the angled scenes in the original Batman series was cuz that's when the crooked guys were on.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Vox for reminding us how often (American) English speakers confuse the Dutch with the Germans. We are not the same! Well, at least since about 1648 or so. Or 1815. 1944-45. Well, at some point!
ReplyDeleteI decree that this is an inadvertent call to (re)watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a masterclass in German expressionism.
ReplyDeleteOther things to look for are super subtle changes in editing pace that lead to using a dutch angle, and/or a dolly zoom (Hitchcock zoom). There are lots of variations of the dolly zoom, in which it's so subtle to be barely noticeable and/or used repetitively like in "One Battle after Another" (the car chase over hills scene). There's a general rule that it can only be used once in a film so use it well. Those rules are meant to be broken.
Fun discussion. Thanks for sharing.