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Greg, if it's not too late, I wanted to say earlier that the description of the famous overhead shot in Hitchcock's THE BIRDS as a 'God's-eye view' is Hitchcock's own - as reported to a round-table discussion on Hitchcock in the 1980s attended by former members of Hitchcock's crew and by Bill Krohn of 'Cahiers du Cinéma'. For what seems to me an apt comparison, I have sometimes invoked the description in Turgenev's 'Ghosts' of (to quote Bryan Magee) 'the earth as seen from above, when the humans look small and unimportant and are locked in eternal struggle with blind forces which they cannot control' (Magee, 'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer', Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 381). Magee suggests that Turgenev was influenced here by the famous first paragraph of the second volume of Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation'. Of course, such a description by Hitchcock does not preclude that such shots in his work (e.g., VERTIGO, PSYCHO) also have pragmatic functions (e.g., subjective to a particular character, such as a shattered Scottie after the apparent suicide of 'Madeleine', or designed to distract the audience, or to set up the close-shot that may follow). - Ken M * * Film-Philosophy After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask] Or visit: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy.html For technical help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon * Film-Philosophy online: http://www.film-philosophy.com Contact: [log in to unmask] **