The Stuff That Dreams are Made On

There is something almost holy about a dolly shot, as if the camera were being carried by angels. The viewer floats towards or around a subject as if on a cloud.

A zoom is robotic, mechanical, produced within the technology of the camera. The human eye has no zoom capability. A zoom is almost like a gunshot; The camera is aimed at the subject and the view launched like a bullet towards the target. It creates excitement, and sometimes comedy in films like "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Kill Bill" where the clumsy showmanship of a quick zoom becomes the cinematic and emotional equivalent of a Magician's "TA-DA!"




The Dolly-Zoom may be the most famous camera technique in film, used probably to the best effect in Vertigo and subsequently in films like Goodfellas and Jaws. A reverse dolly zoom gives the viewer the impression that space is folding in, bearing down on the subject. The world is accordion-ing, shrinking rapidly.

A Pan is almost surveillance. The steady rhythm of the pivot approximates a robot turning its head. The camera is searching. When I think of pans, I think of the end of "The Conversation", where Francis Ford Coppola posts the camera high on the wall in Harry Caul's apartment and pans back and forth as Harry tears up his floors, paranoid that he has been bugged, poetic justice, as Harry makes his living spying on others. In a way, all film is voyeuristic; It is invited or artificial surveillance. The audience spies on the most dramatic moments in the lives of the characters, fictional or not.

And yet the mechanics of the camera can be manipulated to create the most divine effects, can turn men into gods. How magnificent it is to see Jean Taris twisting and falling in slow motion in Jean Vigo's film!

A lap dissolve is a dreamy transition. The screen becomes a pond that ripples, a windshield splashed with rain, an eye full of tears. The eye is wiped clean and we are gently whisked into the new scene, the new time and place as if out onto streets washed clean with rain, as if we were emerging from a car wash. A lap dissolve is a baptism, a cleansing of the informational and emotional residue of the previous scene.

A fade is a descent into sleep, or an awakening. A birth or a death. Shakespeare may well have been talking about movies when he said they "are the stuff that dreams are made on and their little lives are rounded with a sleep". The light rising up from the blackness at the beginning, and falling back into it when the story is over is the most natural, beautiful framing a film could take, a perfect imitation of life, of each day of our lives: A morning, a sunrise, an awakening, a birth; the story of life, the day; the drift back into darkness, nightfall, sleep, death, never knowing the precise cleft between consciousness and unconsciousness. Film has brought us closer than any other medium in history to seeing our dreams made real, to creating a worldwide mythology, to bringing the images that we see in our mind's eye into life, into light. Films are almost tangible, but not quite, like water in a raincloud.

Film is a Frankenstein monster resurrected from limbs of celluloid and charged with the flowing currents of words, emotions, ideas.