Camera Work


I really enjoyed the film but was offset by shoddy camera work.
If I'm not mistaken Renoir is usually known for his flawless imagery, so I wonder why this film contained so many mistakes? At times I felt as though I were watching an amateur run the camera!

First, lets start with the shaky camera. It worked...but not that often. Though, this is only because it fit in with the rough city atmosphere. Regardless, it was strange to see so much shakiness in an early film.

Next, there is the jerky pans and tilts. They didn't appear just once but on several occasions. I don't know what was going on, but there must have been some sticky substance in the gears. There really is no excuse for that.

Then we had the out of focus images, especially a select few towards the end, which really bugged me.

The only reason I can come up with for all these issues, is the fact that this is an early sound film, and maybe Renoir, who is versatile with the camera, was hampered by the clunky new sound equipment. Just a guess...

Please, someone enlighten me? Any guesses?


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Strange, all of those things were positives to me. I thought this thread was going to be about the great camerawork.

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I too have often been puzzled that what I was told about some "old masterpiece" didn't match what I actually saw for myself. I eventually figured out many such evaluations are not about the film in the context of other films _today_, but rather in the context of other films _at_that_time_.

Renior gets high marks for creativity, for imagining and composing shots in ways that were totally new at that time. In Boudu two things in particular stood out to me: One was to shoot an actor amongst a crowd of unwitting extras without those other people having any awareness at all of a camera. For this Renior pioneered the use of a very long lense. The other is the frequent composition involving some sort of frame (door, window, archway, a window through another window, a window through an archway, etc.). Most likely Renior got the knack of imagining such compositions from his father.

Renior's high marks for technique come from what he managed to produce given the poverty of the equipment of the time. The Steadicam was many decades in the future. Even the sort of commercially available dolly tracks we're familiar with didn't exist yet. So producing _any_ indoor tracking shot -even one that was a little unsteady- was a triumph.

Here we see creative and technical ideas still on the way to reaching their full flower in "The Rules of the Game". There especially -even all these decades later- a viewer like me wonders "how did he do that?"

My understanding is sound equipment was indeed rather clunky at the time, but didn't affect Renior's camera. He pioneered things like off-screen voices, overlapping dialog, and microphones hidden in the sets. (While we associate some of these techniques with Robert Altman, they were actually invented much earlier by Renior.) Renior was somehow able to compose on location very naturalistic and inventive soundtracks _despite_ the clunkiness of the sound equipment.

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yes, makes sense.



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