Dollars on the screen

Looking at this shot from Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, I wonder how many dollars are up there on the screen -- the total investment of money required to put that vision on celluloid.  You've got the crew, the equipment (including a crane, in this case), the salaries of the four stars striding across the busy Chicago street to meet their destiny, the period cars, the costumes, the extras, the permits and expense of having the location cleared of everyday traffic -- to say nothing of pre-production and writing expenses.  On top of it all you've got the expense of paying Ennio Morricone to write the shimmering music that can't be experienced in a screenshot but which puts the capper on this swaggering, unabashedly Hollywoody moment of classic spectacle.  A lot of dollars got sunk into these few seconds of film.  This is one of the strengths of a big, expensive, technically proficient film industry.  For large-scale spectacle, accept no substitutes.  Hollywood, in aggregate, gets a lot of things wrong; and when there's so much money invested in any given project, it's too easy for artistic daring to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate caution.  But every now and then you see a grand gesture like this shot and you feel an adolescent swell inside, a lift, that only The Movies, not cinema or film but The Movies, can trigger.

I've never been a big De Palma fan, all things considered, but at his best he can teach many useful things to a budding filmmaker.  One of the lessons that a director ought to learn, I feel, is how to make the work truly "cinematic" -- how to invest the compositions in the frame with a heft and force that serve the story but also can exist in no other medium.  When you've got a bunch of script pages and a bunch of actors and a looming deadline, it's too easy to slap the camera on a tripod, put one actor here and another actor there, and go Master Shot, Over-The-Shoulder Over-The-Shoulder Over-The-Shoulder, Closeup Closeup Closeup, Inserts, and so on.  Your basic coverage -- catch the action of the scene, go home, let the editors sort it out.  It's passable, but it's not really cinema, unless the actors are so good that their faces become cinematic visions in their own right, which can certainly happen but probably isn't wise to depend on.  For images that burn themselves into the brain, that mark what you're watching as a capital-M Movie, it helps to pay very close attention to the position of the actors in the frame, the relative importance of foreground and background and how these placements can serve the emotional undercurrents of the story, and to get beyond the routine "camera on tripod at eye-level" approach to coverage.  Indie and low-budget directors, in particular, are at mortal peril of relying too heavily on bland static coverage -- partly because it's more expensive and time-consuming to do anything else.  If they want to shake things up visually, they go handheld, which imparts spontaneity and neo-New Wave cool to the proceedings, but can also easily slip into an amateurish cliche.

De Palma likes to break up the monotony by placing the camera at unexpected spots along the Y-axis -- instead of keeping it at eye level all the time, he'll move it high up in the air and look down upon his characters (an effect which, overused, quickly becomes mannered, but which in judicious doses can provide enormous visual punch to a sequence), or he'll rely on looming low-angles such as the shot below:

This shot has stuck with me ever since I first saw it in a trailer back in 1987.  It just feels ineffably, indescribably, cinematic.  It's not a particularly fancy shot nor a particularly expensive one; the camera doesn't move.  It's all about the framing, the choice of the low angle, and of course that wonderful church ceiling behind them, which imparts not only a confessional quality to Costner and Connery's rather unholy conversation about getting Capone, but also implies a higher moral arbiter looking down upon our heroes and judging their choices.  It is an operatic sort of composition -- of course, most of what De Palma does can be lazily described as "operatic" -- and it's appropriate for a scene in which a man explores his own conscience and arrives at new self-knowledge about just how far he is willing to go to perform the task he's set for himself.

On a side note, I should mention that The Untouchables, along with Paul Verhoeven's superlative Robocop, was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw in the theater.  Between the two of them, these ultra-violent films were a baptism by fire.  In both cases I walked out of the theater a little staggered, maybe even a little traumatized.  To this day I don't see many films -- at least not outside the horror genre -- which are more violent than this pair.  Based on the television ads for The Untouchables -- which included shots from the third-act trial sequence -- I went into the theater under the mistaken impression that the film would be mostly a courtroom drama.  It didn't take too long for me to be disabused of that particular misapprehension.

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