compostion continu34d
Height ALWAYS comes before width...
So the movie is a good thing to study for any photographer using the Lumix or any other panoramic or near-panoramic frame.
The other movie to study this in is Tartovsky's "Andrei Rublev"
And the painter to study for wide frame compositions is, of course, the 15th (or 16th?) century Venetian painter Carpaccio.
The thing that makes BREACH so fascinating is that whereas Carpaccio, of course, and Tartovsky, use classical compositional means to make their panoramic and wide-frame compositions...
The director and cinematographer of BREACH used entirely modern means
So modern thqat,k together with the modernity of their subject matter (FBI, Spies, Sex, Guns), their modernity diguises the virtuosity of the compositions.
I suggest that anyone who wants to study this movie whose visual intelligence, naturalism, realism and virtuosity are at least FIRST RATE if not sometimes charged with GENIUS should watch the movie wearing a set of those noise reduction/elimination earphones that are so strenuously advertised in Airports these days ... BOISE is the best known maker...I think
So that you can watch the movie without hearing the dialogue and, therefore, without getting caught up in the plot, which is trivial, and in character development, which is almost non-existant.
As a drama, it's really bad, this movie.
But as a visual composition it soars into the stratosphere, well above most Hollywood movies and certainly is to the academy award films that I've seen what Mount Everest is to an ant hill.
Movies are, after all, pictures that move. Take away the sound track and you still have a movie, probably a better one than with the sound track.
Take away the visuals and play only the sound track in a dark theater and you have only a radio play and, in most instances from Hollywood, an incomprehensible radio play at that.
So, Mr Bussa, if you want to work harder at understanding visual art you could do worse than to watch BREACH wearing noise-reduction ear phones, or with wax in your ears (like Odysseus passing by the straits of the sirens).
Another good film for watching without the sound track is FULL METAL JACKET. You'll see how good it is if you pay attention to the backgrounds, ONLY THE BACKGROUNDS in the first half, in Marine Boot Camp, and, in the second half, the long sequences of a) the interviews with the soldeiers and b) the advance against Hue, or wherever they are, that very very long scene shot in I think one piece of film.
]A third film to watch w/o the sound track is Alfred Hitchcock's early B&W Thriller THE THIRTY NINE STEPS. You[ll find you can understand about 95% of the story WITHOUT WORDS. And without words you see what the film really is: A LONG COMPOSITION BASED ON INDIVIDUAL STUDIES OF THE HUMAN HEAD AND THE HUMAN HAND.
Happy Trails to You
I've got to take some medicine and get to sleep. If I can. Can you imagine? You're driving down CT Route 2, a 4-lane divided highway, and suddenly you can see the road as though only through a glass darkly, through a veil as dark as those on Gloria Swanson's hats, through several chain link fences jammmed up against each other, through spider webs, and you have to struggle to stay in your lane and you thank God you're alone on the North Bound side and the highway is divided by a 50 foot woodland strip right there. And you make it through the 5 second almost-black-out
without incident or harm
but still
leaves you a little jittery
anti-anxiety medicine surely do help
yrs
ben
www.benlfson.com