Cinematography technique · used in 3 films
Using lighting, framing, editing and acting to make a character's slide into extremism look exciting at first. You feel the pull yourself before the film shows you the consequences.
Examples
Brian De Palma · 1983
De Palma films Tony's rise with the look of glamour: the mansion, the suits, the fireworks. His climb through the criminal world looks irresistible even as the moral cost piles up. The film's style helps seduce you too.
Where to see it: Tony looking over his mansion and his empire from the stairs. He is shot to look like a king in his castle. It looks so good that you only see the critique of the American Dream when you think back on it.
Tony Kaye · 1998
In the flashbacks, Kaye makes Derek's neo-Nazi belief properly magnetic. Edward Norton plays him as fully intelligent and physically commanding. The film earns the right to criticize the ideology because it refuses to make it look cartoonishly ugly. The horror is that it works on Derek, and for a brief moment, on you.
Where to see it: Derek's dinner table speech. This is the ideology argued at full force.
Shaka King · 2021
King shoots Hampton's speeches with the tools of great cinema. There are close-ups of faces in the audience, low angles that give him physical presence and editing that builds each speech to its peak. You feel what O'Neal feels when he hears him.
Where to see it: Hampton's 'You fight racism with solidarity' speech. It is framed and cut so that the political argument is impossible to deny on screen. You understand exactly why O'Neal cannot fully give up his conscience.
Questions