Hollywood: Too Much Handheld, Not Enough Grip

Kyle Smith, film critic to the New York Post recently wrote an article, “Handheld Cameras Are Officially Over,” partly in response to the lukewarm reception of Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams’ latest soon-to-be forgotten marketing masterpiece, shot entirely with the effect of a shaky handheld camera.



A lot of people cite The Blair Witch Project - equally forgettable - as the beginning of cinema’s obsession with the shaky-cam, but I remember the first big-budget foray one year earlier with Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, particularly in the infamous Omaha Beach landing scene.



Spielberg commercialized the fly-on-the-wall style of cinema vérité, replacing the fly with Tom Hanks and the wall with a legion of German mortars, giving to the war genre the effect of gritty realism and first-person presence.

Private Ryan’s shooting style foreshadowed the onslaught of Fox News’ own gritty and realistic war coverage as journalists reported from their “embedded” infantries in between gun-battles and car-bombings. Through overexposure, the shaky-cam has entered our visual lexicon and has come to be equated with veracity, courage and truthfulness uncontrived.

The Mancurian author Anthony Burgess labeled America’s demand to “face up to reality” as Nixonian; that is, a nation led by the lying smile of a president thug and fed on the monochromatic bloody images of the Vietnam War is a nation with a predilection for suffering.

On a hesitantly zooming lens, we watched the reality of a Boeing-767 marrying metal-to-metal as it collided into Tower Two of the World Trade Center. Camera phones provided the first glimpses of the 2005 London bombings. All over South East Asia reporters-for-the-day emailed and SMSed anxious holiday footage of a 30-metre wave.

Indeed, the world has become Nixonian. Through images, we deal with the harsh and visceral truth of all things. We have a propensity towards the real, so much so, that all images become a function of the real, particularly those steeped in fiction. We say the computer-generated images of the latest action blockbuster are “so real”. J.J. Abrams goes so far as to produce those effects in the lens of a handy-cam, as if we might be able to recall the images of 9/11 as mere phantasmagorias, conjured up by some studio lot in Burbank.

Perhaps a detriment to Cloverfield, is that for all the reality it professes - heightened by the promotional image of a battered Statue of Liberty (no doubt exploiting the visual unconscious of all New York’s observers) – it treads too close to what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the “hyperreal”, a reality exploited to the point of nonsense. Hollywood dreams of a reality so real, it ceases to be real, or as another post-modern theorist put it, we exist in the “desert of the real.”

Compare the action sequences in Private Ryan and Cloverfield with the impossibly smooth and flowing images of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.



In Children of Men D.O.P. Emmanuel Lubezki also utilizes a handheld approach, giving the appearance of documentary. Almost every scene is contained in a single tracking shot, but a single cut where the camera moves seamlessly and unshaken within a chaotic environment. There is an ethereal dream-like quality as the camera pans and follows the protagonist, seeing what he sees and observing what he observes.

Now watch this seminal scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 masterpiece Paths of Glory.



A reverent irreverence or solemn nonchalance characterizes this style. The camera reflects the humorless demeanor of our protagonists as he walks pensively down the trench. Unlike in Saving Private Ryan, it reflects contemplation, not action.

Reality (and I mean hyperreality) stupefies the viewer into shock, causing him or her to reject the experience, alienating one from any deeper understanding. The difference between gritty realism and the ethereal dream is the difference between suffering and contemplation. We contemplate the dream. We attempt dream interpretation.

With hyperreality, we are lost in the moment, lost to the emotive purge: fear, love, dread… we risk seeing reality taken to such a horrifying extreme, that we lapse into apathy: “this is just the way things are.” Or, we go into shellshock and deny the world’s malevolence altogether and simply await Tom Hanks to come pick us up and bring us into the third act.

Perhaps audiences are becoming jaded with hyperreality. In our current wartime, we are constantly bombarded by images on our TVs and in the cinemas dictating to us the veracity of reality. What filmmakers such as Cuarón and Lubezki are doing - and others including Joe Wright, Todd Haynes and Julian Schnabel - is recalling the contemplative and inspirational styles of Fellini, Kubrick and Hitchcock, where dreams have as much validity as reality does.