'Homicide: Life on the Street' was a landmark in shaky-cam at the time
(1992-98): the Greengrass 'Bourne' films go well beyond that.
Greengrass's 'Bloody Sunday' (2002) was done (iirc) with steady-cams,
Alan Clarke-style. So not sure where the extreme blurriness of his
'Bourne' work comes from.
On 11/14/07, Herbert Schwaab <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It's an interesting question because it points us to recent evolutions in
> film style. But I don't think that its sources are to be found in the dogma
> film but in television (not to forget that Lars von Triers first use of
> handheld camera in his THE KINGDOM was inspired by an US-Crime series whose
> name I don't remember).
> SYRIANA and TWENTYFOUR as well are using this style. It's quite
> entertaining when used in films, in the same way television is entertaining,
> although I must admit, that I got completely confused and lost in THE BOURNE
> ULTIMATUM. Documentary style action films could be regarded as examples for
> what David Bordwells calls intensified continuity used in films such as
> Michael Bays ARMAGEDDON or Tony Scotts ENEMY OF THE STATE (you may get
> confused from time to time, but the films don't aim at a deconstruction of
> cinematic space).
> I thought that SYRIANA and UNITED 93 were very good when first seeing them,
> but now I am quite alarmed about their film style. This use of handheld
> cameras, which is based on the discovery that you can shoot with many
> cameras and combine any frame you want as long as the camera is moving,
> gives the films some kind of selfsufficient aesthetic gloss, which lead to
> artistic disaster like BABEL. The film always look kind of 'important' with
> the documentary style and the episodic structure showing us how tragedy and
> globalisation go together. But if you look closer, not only the montage of
> handheld camera shots comes from television, but also the episodic structure
> finds it sources in the 'segmentalisation' (using a concept by John Ellis)
> of television story telling in news, commercials and serial TV: Due to the
> short attentions spans of their viewers television puts together short
> segments which have some kind of narrative closure in theirselves. In
> TV-series, segments are followed by other segments, taking over new
> narrative threads. I was wondering whether all those ambitious epic films
> with episodic structure (a recent exampte is the Fatih Akin's AUF DER
> ANDEREN SEITE), confirming their arthouse status with every single frame
> (though Akin's film is much better than BABEL), have more to do with
> television aesthetics than they might think and know - no problem for me
> because I often prefer television to cinema.
>
> Herbert
>
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