I greatly admired the hand-held camera-work in this movie, which in English translation is called "The Son." I was brought so far into this movie’s world by some of the opening scenes that when I became bored with some later scenes, it did not even occur to me that I had the power to turn the movie off and find something more interesting to look at.
I was reminded of that experience, and more generally of how much I like to watch well-made movies shot with hand-held cameras, when I watched "Friday Night Lights" the other day. I don’t know anything about movie-making, but I imagine it would take great skill to do a good job filming with a hand-held camera. Your whole body, I guess, becomes the camera: If you jerk unexpectedly, the camera jerks unexpectedly, and the audience is immediately reminded that it is watching unreal, made-up events. That’s why they invented the "steadicam," I guess. But when done well, those little jerks can foster, rather than dispel, the illusion the movie aims to produce. After all, in the real world, one’s eyes are continually darting here and there, and routine movements of one’s body are continually causing one’s field of vision to jerk this way and that, so we should expect to see the movie-world in the same way. When it’s done well, then, I think hand-held cinematography allows us to see the world of the movie in a way very similar to the way in which that world would look, if we were really in it, watching the people and looking around.
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