Sun, 27 Jan 2008
Cloverfield
I saw the film Cloverfield this weekend. If you haven't heard of it, the plot has a monster come and tear up New York while yuppies film it on their videocam. So it was your typical Godzilla film (although they never say the G word, but with the interesting twist that it's told from the first person point of view. From the comments on the film over at IMDB, some people loved it and some hated it, mostly for the same reason, the unconventional point of view.
It's interesting what works and what doesn't in the film. First, the character in the film who carries the camera is "sacrificed" because you only see him when he drops the camera. They handled that by making the camera guy (Hud) a dumb lunk, and thus less of a sacrifice. The single camera point of view made the film seem claustrophobic compared to most films. Usually films will interleave shots of both two characters when they're talking. And in a stage play you see the whole stage at a distance. In Cloverfield the camera is close in on the action. There are no distance shots of the main characters or shifts between points of view, and that's what gives the film its claustrophobic feel.
Somehow a typical film, with its omniscient point of view, seems more real than a first person point of view. This is sort of like how we stitch together our experience with a running narrative, so instead of experiencing things directly, we do so through a story line. Our story about reality seems more real than experience itself. Just a thought.
