About

tracking shot I want to speak today. On Sunday I took the train to reach the shooting location. Driving with the metros all the time I almost forgot how beautiful is to travel with the train and to look outside the window. It's just a loooooooong tracking shot. Ok, it's not exactly 1:1,85, even less a wide screen, but still: moving images par exellence. And then, the real beauty comes out when you start to combine those shots with other camera movements. I guess, sans precedent was Orson Welles' opening shot in Touch of Evil, over a 4 min long shot in which the frame heights are changing all the time and we travel through the whole city, through many different atmospheres, hundreds of extras and at the end, still in the same shot, we even change the country. Although Hitchcock shot Rope in 1948 (the whole film in 9 shots), it's impossible to compare those shots with Touch of Evil in a way of richness of the mise-en-scene. Robert Altman's opening scene in Player is a great hommage to Orson Welles and I like it a lot. As I also like the opening scene of Kusturica's film Time of the Gypsies where (I'm just speculating) they did a good job together with director of photography Vilko Filac. After all, I'm not a great lover of Sokurov's Russian Ark, because he had to help himself with a kind of narrator, and for me, it was a bit of just showing the muscles. I got the same feeling with Haneke's Code inconnu.
Anyhow, I shot quite some of my films by myself and, especially in my student's years, I did some camera work for the other directors also. Here is a shot I did in a short film by Shailesh Macwan and there is some motivated camera movement. The idea was to have steady shot at the begining (we shot with Aaton A-Minima S16 mm camera so it wasn't really steady :)) and when the actor approaches we start with dolly and it finishes with hendheld when the fight starts. I was assistant director on Slovenian film Headnoise directed by Andrej Kosak, where director of photography Dusan Joksimovic had done something similar and I just wanted to try it by my self.

J.J.B.