What Do We Mean by CAMERA?

How You Show What You Show

From The Man with the Movie Camera: Director Dziga Vertov, Cinematography Mikhail Kaufman.

Most social media posts, when discussing camera, refer to the physical entity, a device for capturing an image. Such posts are usually concerned with models of camera. Alexas, Reds — what have you. Filmmakers like to post pictures of themselves alongside a camera — una macchina fotografica, as an Italian would say, a machine, an object, a thing. Just as a guitarist might be pictured with their Fender Strat, a violinist with their precious Stradivarius, so cinematographers like to be seen with the tool of their trade. And why not? Theirs is a dignified craft, the camera its instrument and symbol.

Next meaning: camera as gizmo for navigating the physics of light. How it works in terms of lensing for example, whether tight, neutral, wide, fish-eye, macro, diopter, prime (of differing vintages), zoom; the relative depths of field and the compression or expansion of perspective each afford; how the stop controls the amount of light let in and how this affects the image. All of this is complex, fascinating, illuminating (literally as well as figuratively) stuff. The camera, for all its technical complexity however, is a tool for artists — cinematographers and directors — and it is that aspect which is the topic of this article.

There’s the action, the event, the place or object seen, and there’s the camera, the apparatus that sees it, capturing it as as an image. Obvious! you might say! Simple — what more is there to talk about? Actually, a great deal if we were to ask what the relationship of the camera to what it sees might be, and what possibilities exist for this precious bond.

When a camera is static, when it simply observes the action, the place, space, or object in an uninflected manner, perhaps in their entirety in terms of framing, with the lens at eye height, we might think to call that camera an observing camera. We might also call it a passive camera, a minimal camera maybe. It doesn’t do anything but look, doesn’t pass comment, doesn’t interact with what it shows, doesn’t reflect in any way the energy or emotion of what it sees. This camera stands back, remains neutral, dispassionate, does not impose. (The lighting of a scene is a separate consideration and may not on be passive of course, even while the camera might be — a topic I’m leaving to one side here.) This doesn’t mean the filmmaker is necessarily passive too — theirs may be a deliberate choice, perhaps to avoid passing judgment, perhaps to offer a neutral, objective view, or to allow for a cumulative engagement with story and characters on the part of the audience: you watch, you wait, but before long you find yourself drawn in, held for the rest of the movie…

When the framing is more deliberate however, perhaps not showing an entire event, perhaps seeing it from a particular angle, raking maybe, or as in the case of an overhead shot, god-like perhaps, or maybe even looking away from the event, or concealing it behind some foreground obstruction, obscuring it so that the audience has to do the work of imagining it — then the camera is doing something more than observing. This camera has become an active camera — not merely capturing the event so that it can be passed along by way of the screen to the audience but putting itself between the event and the audience by presenting what’s going on in a selective manner.

Such an active camera might at times also be a critical camera. What do I mean by that? Take a look at the final moments of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, say. Frank Sheeran, by now toward the end of his life and holed up in a rest home, is seen through a partially open door. Earlier in the film Jimmy Hoffa has explained to him that he cannot sleep with the door closed. The door must always be ajar, maybe as a means to escape or perhaps so that any malefactor lurking beyond might be spotted. By this point, Sheeran himself has become subject to the same paranoia, trapped by the need always to have a means of escape. Here the camera is a critical camera, I might also describe it as a moral camera — not one that moralizes but offers a moral perspective. The critical camera makes some comment on the film, its world, its character, perhaps counter to that held in or by one or other, maybe moral, maybe ironic, maybe both. It’s a camera that inflects — perhaps the framing is “precise to the millimeter” (Godard’s words) and thus makes its comment, or the juxtaposition of elements in the mise-en-scène is designed with a critical agenda in mind, and/or maybe it’s the camera’s placement (as in the case of that Irishman shot, outside the partially-closed door and peering in) that does the work of commenting.

The terms motivated camera and unmotivated camera are well known.In the case of the former, the camera takes the cue for its move from what it shows. A seated character rises and the camera dollies back to contain them in the frame. Someone walks down a corridor, and the camera follows. Where a character moves in one direction, perhaps toward the lens, while at the same time the camera moves towards them, perhaps meeting them, then panning to hold them in the frame as they now move away, this is referred to as a counter move. The camera is motivated by the energy of what it shows but chooses to move in a different, even opposing direction. In the case of the unmotivated camera, it moves of its own accord, independent of what it shows, its energy, its movement or stasis.

In either case, one might describe this camera as active or dynamic, as opposed to the passive camera mentioned earlier. It’s a camera that appears conscious, has an energy, an agency, whether of the movie or its own, motivated or unmotivated, is visible — unlike the invisible passive camera (although the judiciously motivated camera may indeed be rendered invisible) — and either collaborates with, runs counter to the material it shoots, or decides on its own journey.

An active camera, when entering the world of the film and its characters, when it’s motivated by or reflects its energy in some way, and when it connects with the emotion or visceral sensation of an event, we might call it a complicit camera. This camera might be going along with some game the film is playing, by angle, lensing. movement, framing, by mise-en-scène. In some instances, it might be adopting what I call hyper POV — placing itself in the most dynamic position, the most kinetic, the location of the most intense action, the greatest, most extreme physical drama. It might thrust itself forward to reflect the vector of a projectile for example or be situated smack in the path of an oncoming explosion. Less sensationally, it might relate to the narrative POV of one particular character, its progression of placement and/or movement the foundation for the cutting that will connect the audience to that character above any other, perceptually, in terms of action, viscerally, or/and most importantly — emotionally.

Ari Aster, the most literature-literate as well as film-literate student I’ve worked with, once reminded me of Nabokov’s term “ecstatic prose.” Might we not also talk of the ecstatic camera? The camera that weaves and swoops and soars. Might we also call this a flamboyant camera,the resource of flamboyant style? This is the very opposite of the aforementioned observing camera. It takes us on a journey rather than simply showing it. It has us tighten our seatbelts. We travel with it at our own risk, as if on a fairground ride. Even so, we cannot resist its heady voyaging.

And yet the observing camera, by patience and stealth can bring us also to a place of emotional peril. Observing/passive/minimal camera, critical/moral camera, complicit camera, dynamic camera, ecstatic/flamboyant camera — no particular kind is necessarily better than any other but when the camera knows what it is doing, when it knows what it is, just as when a film knows what it is, then that camera functions to the best effect. How the camera chooses to capture the image by means of relating to it, renders it not so much a gizmo for the nerd or the fetishist but an instrument of storytelling, potent as the painter’s brush, the eye of the soul and at the same time the eye into it.

Camera! Treasure it! Revere it! Make mischief with it! Hide with it! Reveal with it! Dance with it! Watch with it! Spy with it! Fly through the heavens with it! But know your camera at all times.

Peter Markham April 2021