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Film Directing Fundamentals
The first dramatic films were rendered as if through a proscenium. The camera was placed in position and all the action in the scene took place within that camera frame. The audience’s view was much the same as a theater audience sitting frontrow center. The American director D. W. Griffith was one of the first to move the audience onto the stage with works like For Love of Gold (1908), The Lonely Villa (1909), The Lonedale Operator (1911), and the highly influential, but strongly racist, Birth of a Nation (1915). “Look here!” he said to the audience with his camera—“Now, here!” Griffith was not only moving the audience into the scene; he was then turning their seats this way and that—moving them into the face of a character, then in the next instant pulling them to the back of the “theater” to get a larger view of the character in relation to other characters or showing the character in relation to his or her surroundings.
The reason for putting the audience into the scene is that it makes the story more interesting—more dramatic. But by moving the audience into the action, and focusing their attention first here, now there, the director can easily confuse and disorient the audience. The geography of a location or the wholeness of a character’s body becomes fragmented. Whose hand is that? Where is Character A in spatial relationship to Character B? Usually the director does not want to cause confusion. Rather, she wants the audience to feel comfortable in this film world—to be spatially (and temporally) oriented—so that the story can take place unimpeded. Usually, the director wants the audience to know, “That is Bob’s hand, and Bob is sitting to the right of Ellen” (even if we haven’t seen Ellen for a while). There are times, however, when we will use this possibility for confusion and disorientation to our advantage to create surprise or suspense.
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