Gordon Willis again!

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Well, I hadn't seen The Parallax View before, so I got it on DVD.

 

As usual, Willis blows me completely away. His framing is so precise, so daring and

so before it's time I actually feel we haven't even caught up yet.

 

The film is mostly told in very wide shots, peppered with the occasional close up.

Almost no medium shots in it. And what I really like, and try to do myself, is to shoot

wide shots with longer lenses like Willis does in this one, which is almost impossible to

do unless you're shooting on a set and can fly walls. There's even a fair amount

of traveling "wide" shots with quite long lenses, which is refreshing to see. But then

he isn't afraid to throw in a very wide, bending lens for the appropriate scenes (I'm

thinking about the committe reporting scene mainly).

 

His subjects are very often just silhouetted against windows - faces, even on lit sets,

often in darkness. Gordon seems to light the set (and not very much at that) and not

his subject. It adds a lot of paranoia and adds to the doom of the film. It's a very

natural way of lighting - it feels more real. Not a backlight in sight. Today, his style has been more absorbed by contemporary DP's, but it must have been extremely daring (I can just imagine the fights with the studios) at the time.

 

He must also have been a pioneer in incorporating florescent lighting into his frames

at that time - there's a scene in the airplane where Beatty tries to write something on

the toilet mirror that's just lit with the built in flourescent which gives a beautiful cyan

look to the frame.

 

There's a particular shot where an aircraft takes off - the control tower is in the lower right

of frame as the plane passes diagonally through behind it and out of frame. The camera lingers and lingers on the frame where the plane was and the suddenly quickly pans to

another position, capturing the same plane again but this time from behind doing its diagonal move. I mean, that's just unseen of. Who does that today?

 

The film isn't brilliant, but the cinematography is.