5 Brilliant Moments In Film

For this week's list we want to take a break from sorting things out and spend some time appreciating the beauty of the details, pointing out some of the subtle ways movies speak to us in these little

moments

you might otherwise have missed. lost. These are five unranked little shining

moments

. In great

film

s, cinema is a clearly active visual medium where novels have the ability to devote pages of their story to the internal and complex cinema is forced to find a way to show what happens, so one of the things we really wanted to highlight with this.

The list is how smart

film

makers have found ways to visualize the invisible, how films manage to reach beyond the surface, how they present the internal/external in a clear and understandable way and what gave us this idea was a little Crouching moment Tiger Hidden Dragon by Angley. When a masked thief steals the sword of Green Fate and the thief is tracked down until the governor uses a state jewel to quietly investigate the governor's house, including his suspicious daughter Jen, now Xuan has already fought the thief and has already realized that these particular martial arts skills, then we get this sequence and something important happens to the music.

Angela, without saying a single word, we can see Yulin realize that Gin is a talented martial artist and possibly the thief in just a few simple shots. Angley has made the realization visual now. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. He has already set up the shul under suspicion, but let's look at this brief moment and how it works. After establishing the scene, he cuts to a close-up of the tip of the brush and what begins as a fairly ordinary static shot lingers longer. Than you might expect, voting more time to glide along with the brushstroke, this extra time tells us to mark the beauty and rhythm of the writing and pay a little more attention.

The film cuts to the top of the paintbrush and Jin's hand holding it too close. successive shots of different parts of the same object, which would be a relatively unusual coincidence in a well-made film, of course, it is not a coincidence, a well-placed close-up does not just show us an arbitrary detail, but it shows us a way specific and in a place where we would not normally expect it, the foreground insists on itself, asking us to consider why we are looking at this foreground, giving an ordinary object extraordinary importance, not only that, but this background excludes specifically the brush we are focusing on a handle and how its movement is sustained its precision apart from its use as a writing instrument with this amount of time dedicated to it it is difficult for the audience not to start making connections to finally complete the sequence we cut to a medium close-up of Schewel shifting his eyes from the brush to Jen, revealing that the previous shot is a point of view, this extra importance we've given to the tip of the brush and the handle of the brush, that it wasn't just us , we can conclude that the importance with which we consider that object is the same importance with which chullin did it and in three simple shots we see that Xu Lin is paying special attention to the way Jin holds his brush and with little inference he has realizing that Jin knows how to handle it. a sword of course as an added bonus and if anyone hasn't learned it yet watch what Xuan says below so you can see Jyoti what kind of joint or shoe fatiha Paulie how do you tell them what's really saying?

There it is, now I know you know how to use a sword and from the look on Jin's face, we're not the only ones realizing it now as we speak, realizing that the Crouching Tigers remind us of another one that's even more technical. and precise because while it cannot be denied that the wonderful human performances of michelle yeoh and ze zhang help us, could a film show us the realization in the mind of a character who has no emotion and obviously cannot, as seen in lip reading? scene from 2001, A Space Odyssey, when Bowman and Poole enter an isolated capsule to talk about their concerns about their artificially intelligent computer system, how without him listening things don't go as planned, something else just occurred to me hmm, well, as far as I don't know, fools.

The home computers have been disconnected. Not even a thousand computers felt it before. That's not what I mean. Hmm, well, I'm not so sure. Would you think about it first? The configuration. The two astronauts speak privately about their concerns about how and traditionally, they would be the focal point of this shot, but the deep focus framing in the center of how, along with their constant glances towards him, keeps us ominously shifting our focus to him. throughout the entire conversation and without batting an eyelid and an ever-present threat and then we cut. a close up of how the sound is dead silent, eerie silent and there's something strange about this at first, it looks like we're getting this close up of the astronauts' reference to it, it's a sight to think about but If we were still operating from their perspective, we would expect to continue hearing their voices in the background as if this were their point of view, but we don't and soon realize that it is not.

We have changed the perspectives to the point of view of the house, which immediately tells us that something else is happening and when the shot cuts again we see what he is doing something from his point of view, we see that he is following the entire conversation and no, we can't hear it, but the ultra-tight framing on her mouth tells us that it's focusing on her lips, it's an unusual composition, it's not the way normal people experience a conversation, whether in real life or cinematically, and This traditional gap lets us know that something different is happening, allowing us to infer that he is reading their lips, imagine the shot if it were just a close-up back and forth between their full faces, we would read it in a completely different way. , it might seem, what it was like to struggle and not be able to follow the conversation, helplessly looking back and forth, but focusing on exactly what matters to them. lips, we get the real meaning, next we want to take a look at the scene in the damned bastards pub when Lieutenant Hickox goes to a German tavern to meet with an undercover agent Bridget von Hammersmark, Gestapo major Dieter Hellström, He suspects his accent and invites himself to investigate. and while Hickox manages to explain the accent, something else happens that gives him away early at the end of the last day in the same shot of Java whiskey, there is an Auckland who is actually Manhattan who is curiously stomping on some eggs and then stands up about the first Iranian Glaser of each deceased.

Ryan dry Sagayam idiom desert of blue together son Nick Nick Nick mark whiskey whiskey McNicholas hmm it's all meat pepper I'm the shampoo guy Glaser sometimes it's useful to think of each shot as a close-up even the mids even the two shots even the by That's because a director who truly controls his medium is trying to show you exactly what he wants you to see at any given moment, nothing more, nothing less, if you're supposed to pay attention to just one thing, it excludes everything else. if you want to connect. to things, put them together in a frame if you want to see a big picture, you put everything in the frame this way a double shot is a close-up of a relationship in a wide shot is a close-up of a whole room in a closeup is a closeup of, well, the closeup, so how does that play out here?

Well, it mostly depends on a single shot, this one breaking this moment into plain English as we come to understand it, major hellström. he notices Lieutenant Hickox's distinctly English gesture and realizes that he's not German after all, rather than splitting it into three different shots, Kubrick Tarantino probably tries it in one. The shot begins as a close-up of his fingers holding three and then turns to a look over his shoulder at Hellström as he looks between Hickox's fingers and his face, which stops the conversation. He notices how this shot begins with the snap of Hellstrom's sperm head.

His attention shifts quickly and he obviously lets us know that something important has happened. Also, the fact that Tarantino is over his shoulder here gives his real insight into what Hickox is doing by being wide and focused enough to read, as opposed to what is over his shoulder at the beginning of the scene, which provides much less information, which keeps us thinking about the dramatic relationship between the two men rather than simply hellström, it also induces in us the change in the nature of the scene by the immediate rhythmic and sonic change of what was previously a scene of agile back-and-forth dialogue ragazza fun a Needle he He mocks cultures when he grabs his left knee and becomes silent.

All we can hear are glasses clinking with falling water and a low murmur in the background, while Tarantino's directorial choices here are certainly more efficient than our previous examples, we're not sure they're clear enough. convey specifically enough that Commander Hellström has noticed Hickox's hand gesture to all but the most intelligent audience members on a first viewing, while we certainly notice an abrupt change and immediately understand that the The party is over and Hellström is now a dangerous enemy. This is probably all Tarantino was doing. for the how is better explained later in the dialogue how the English shooting star did another way of doing it, he ordered three glasses, the order for fancy glasses, that's the free German, he verbally pings us and asks us to remember the shot above, which we do because it caught our attention. but it wasn't enough of a breach of expectations at the time to bring us to fully conscious understanding, enough realizations, what about another unfilmable assumption?

How about a decision where godfather Michael has volunteered to kill a rival of his family? and the dirty cop who works for him during an apparent truce, Michael has never worked for the family before nor murdered anyone and although the plan was for him to go to the bathroom, retrieve the plan, a gun and come out shooting, he doesn't After from a

brilliant

moment of indecision, we don't have time to unpack here, but extra credit if you do in the comments. Michael sits in a simple over-the-shoulder shot on the table, but what once included Solano's shoulder connecting him with Michael and pointing towards the dialogue between them soon becomes a clean single when the camera pushes, too bad that stahma want to avoid it becoming even mm-hmm.

I mean yamadutas after Stevie's study according to the concept of each shot, one close-up excluding the other. characters at the table the movie is telling us that they are not important right now the plot is not happening with them, it is only happening with Michael and centrally pushing inward reinforces intensifies and lets us know that this is intentional, makes our closeness closer asks us to concentrate more to exclude more to distract less invites us to increase our focus on the subject by excluding the environment this leads us in words and to Pacino's performance here everything is in the eyes now I I don't know if it's fair To call this performance realistic or not is certainly believable.

No one questions whether Pacino is convincing us here, but someone making a decision moves his eyes like that in real life. I'm not sure it's hard to remember seeing it. anyone can do this and even harder to do it yourself what it is is expressive look at it without your eyes and see how much difference it makes McKellen connected pause tell us internal movement the wheels are turning you are deciding something and not It doesn't take much effort for the audience intuit what and, finally, there is the sound idea. What if we extended our concept of foreground to more than just the image?

What if you could make a close-up with sound? What if you could make a sound cushion? As the camera gets closer, Solano's dialogue becomes quieter, almost further away, even if it were in our language, we could hardly hear it anymore, we no longer pay attention to the words, just like Michael and not just them. words. The fact that the words are not the point is not the point Coppola is drawing our attention to Michael's inattention and then there is the sound of the subway that overwhelms the soundscape of the scene, an aural close-up of a pot bubbling over the unrealistic volume and The gradual nature of the sound intellectually signals a dazed thought and emotionally pushes us into illness.

Putting it all together, you have a handful of simple cinematic language signifiers that combine to communicate the complex notion of Michael deciding to murder two men, all without a single word. expository diet, so we lied a little when we said that cinema was only a visual medium, it is sound; although people often forget thesound in favor of its eye-catching image, is often just as important, if not more so, so consider some of the low-budget found footage films like Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch Project, the visuals are shaky, low fidelity and, sometimes incomprehensible, filmed for thousands, not millions of dollars, when acquired by studios for wide release;

The same studios invest a couple of million more to polish the film, but it doesn't go into the film, no, the money goes to making the sound tolerable. If you have to choose between two movies, one with bad image and good sound and the other vice versa, you will find that you gravitate more towards the movie with better sound, so For our last little feature, we want to look at how sound can elude the logical, the intellectual and, as we hinted with the Godfather, communicate with us on a visceral and emotional level to paraphrase the famous sound editor Walter Murch, while images tend to knock on our front door and catch our attention, sound sneaks in through the from behind and acts on us without our knowledge and one of the most visceral examples of this we can remember occurs in 127 Hours when, after five agonizing days of being trapped under a rock, Aron Ralston finally cuts through his arm, does he?

How does a film communicate intense pain? Simply put, you can show someone else experiencing it and rely on our empathy to fill in the blanks, but there's a limit to the discomfort our mirror neurons can create, so first watch the moment Aaron cuts his arm without a mediocre visual sound zone, true, we know he feels pain, but we can't completely. experience it with it now take a look with sound it's very different isn't it? Your reaction probably ranged from mild shock to actual anxiety to significant physical discomfort Shivering Grimacing and walking away from us Sound Our bodies are strangely programmed to respond viscerally to different sounds, from the anxiety that comes with the inaudible Rumble subbase to the chilling responds to nails on a blackboard, the sounds seem to speak more to our emotions than our intellect, while the concepts of Crouching Tigers take us time to understand Aron Ralston's pain.

It is instantaneous because sounds do not communicate concepts and symbols but rather they communicate feelings and movements consider 2001 to your liking silence tense inglorious bastards jingling the godfathers roaring subway and now 127 hours discordant nervous electric shock we do not look at them and think of For us, this silence It's disturbing now, which means something bad is afoot because we don't have to. We intuit it directly, which when combined with the logical communication of a series of images constitutes an incredible set of cinematic tools. You like this type of list. To see more like this, any ideas for other lists you'd like us to make, seriously, we're running out of ideas here, let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for more sin effects movies lists.