Joris Ivens shoots traffic in Paris from a variety of angles.
Some people think of this as experimental cinema, an attempt to investigate how things look on the big screen when shot at other than mid-distance and level. Like those who praise the Academicians in Russia for discovering the power of editing, they ignore the fact that this had been going on for a long time; George Albert Smith had begun investigating the impact of differing camera positions in 1898, Billy Bitzer had invented the moving crane shot in 1904, and so forth. D. W. Griffith had begun regularizing these methods into a grammar in 1908, and there has been a lot of reinvention subsequently.
Ivens may have been interested in seeing how the film audience, now far more sophisticated than it had been a quarter of a century earlier, reacted to such things, and that's an interesting question. But when it comes to claiming this is a daring experiment, I cry nonsense.
Some people think of this as experimental cinema, an attempt to investigate how things look on the big screen when shot at other than mid-distance and level. Like those who praise the Academicians in Russia for discovering the power of editing, they ignore the fact that this had been going on for a long time; George Albert Smith had begun investigating the impact of differing camera positions in 1898, Billy Bitzer had invented the moving crane shot in 1904, and so forth. D. W. Griffith had begun regularizing these methods into a grammar in 1908, and there has been a lot of reinvention subsequently.
Ivens may have been interested in seeing how the film audience, now far more sophisticated than it had been a quarter of a century earlier, reacted to such things, and that's an interesting question. But when it comes to claiming this is a daring experiment, I cry nonsense.
