The Scorsese shot appears to have been done with a Steadicam following Liotta and Bracco in a single direction, much easier to do than the far more complex and intricately choreographed Welles’ shot done with a crane/boom camera moved in three dimensions. Scorsese’s shot follows two subjects on a linear path and the people they encounter on that path are essentially stationary. On the other hand the Welles’s shot involves exquisitely delicate timing of movement of the crane camera, the “movement” of buildings in and out of frame, movement tracking and timing of several actors and the principal motor vehicle, and even entrance and exit timings of at least a score of extras. In short, Scorsese’s shot juggles one ball in the air, while Welles’s shot juggles about a dozen balls in the air.
NovadogMay 11, 2019, 5:32 PM
AA; that was an amazing dissection/analysis of those films. I’ve always been a fan of Wells and found your post fascinating. Thanks.
ghostsniperMay 11, 2019, 7:22 PM
The thing that has always attracted me to the older films and to a lesser degree, older TV shows, is the duration of the shots that allow you to see as much as you want rather than having that decision made by others. I think it was Hitchcock that emphasized the idea that the viewer needs to be a contributor, and will, if the filmer will let him, thus, hitchcock rarely showed any actual violence in his films and TV shows. Your imagination is much more intense if spurred by the director.
I don’t watch much TV and almost no modern day TV. My wife watched a show called “BlackList” and it came on last night at 8pm. We were yappin’ on the couch when it came on so I watched about the first 30 seconds of Blacklist. That’s all I could stand before I had to literally flee the room. She sat there and continued to stare at it, mesmerized. The edits were in the 1 to 4 second range, rapid fire, with some sort of escalating music overtaking the background and I suppose they were telling a story but with that “style” of editing it was like listening with the eyes to an auctioneer while the ears were blocking just about everything out. (Like driving slowly past a car wreck and everybody in the car is yapping so you yell, “SHUT UP, I CAN’T SEE!”) Again, devolving of an art. And I’ll waste little time on it.
Auntie AnalogueMay 11, 2019, 8:40 PM
My dear Novadog, thank you for your kind compliment.
Another contrast between those two shots lies in their scores. Scorsese used a girl group pop song (The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me”) to suggest how Bracco is falling for Liotta’s showy effort to sweep her off her feet, while Welles used the percussive Latino syncopation of Henry Mancini’s score to add extra tension to the viewer’s awareness of the ticking time bomb in the convertible’s trunk. Indeed the opening close-up of the time bomb is scored with the bomb clock’s own ticking, which almost immediately shifts to Mancini’s Latin percussion, and when the couple who will get into the convertible enter the frame, the score introduces its menacing swell of trombones.
FrogdaddyMay 12, 2019, 7:26 AM
@gs
I’m beginning to think the opposite sex can not extricate itself from garbage. Mine was watching a remake of “The Predator”. I could only take so much of the gutter dialog, if you even want to consider it dialog. No substance whatsoever. I’m not an old guy and certainly not a prude. But, I was born and lived in NJ for some of my youth, I know shit when I see it. Thank God for discernment.
Another homage to the Wells shot is the openng shot in Robert Altman’s “The Player”. He tracks Tim Robbins across the area in front of the offices at 20th Century lot, from pulling up and parking his car thru the walk across the grass, into the offices, finally sitting at his desk. If there was a score, I don’t remember it, but there was constant chatter between Robbins and the various people talking at him. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151/
RichardMay 12, 2019, 8:57 AM
The edits were in the 1 to 4 second range, rapid fire, with some sort of escalating music overtaking the background++++++++
Two thoughts:
1) Such is required to “hold” an audience that has had its attention span altered by the array of electronic gewgaws that hold them captive.
2) The noise and sensory overload compensate for the dearth in quality of the writing.
Like you, I cannot bear to have the toob on for any appreciable length of time, unless it’s something from my movie library. Said consists mostly of older offerings.
I may be an old dude, but I’m a discerning old dude.
Richard, like you I have a movie ‘library’ of films. The films were selected with one criteria, would I like to watch it again someday.
The people at my physical therapy office are nice young folks but I was shocked that none of them own any DVD’s or CD’s. Nor the equipment to play them on (so much for my offer to lend “Rob Roy” and “The Court Jester” from my library). They stream everything. If it’s not on the playlist, they don’t know about it.
Most of the films I like to watch don’t ‘stream’.
Nifty form of censorship by the way.
ghostsniperMay 12, 2019, 10:50 AM
The only time my wife and I watch TV is at supper time and we don’t watch the ongoing commercial stuff. We have 5 DVD players, 1 does international stuff, connected to a 48″ Sanyo wall mounted. It’s kind of a PITA to keep all of it organized but the alternative is not bearable.
All of the DVD players have old TV show series in them from the 40’s, 50’s, and a few 60’s and we rotate through them each night. Most are 30 min episodes and some are 60 mins. Here’s the current line-up:
1. The Loner, Lloyd Bridges, a 30 min western from the early 60’s. His son Jeff was in one of them and Beau in another. 5 thumbs up!
2. High Chaparral, Leif Ericson, a 60 min western from the mid 60’s. 3 thumbs up!
3. A Man with a Camera, Charles Bronson, a 30 min NYFC action/drama from the 50’s. 2 thumbs up!
4. Tombstone Territory, Pat Conroy, a 30 min western from the late 50’s. 5 thumbs up!
5. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a 30 min suspense from the late 50’s with a variety of actors in each show, last nights episode had a young Robert Redford. 5 thumbs up!
When amazon finally drops the price per volume (2 volumes per season) below $20 I’ll order the 14th season of Gunsmoke, as we’ve bought and watched 1-13 so far. We’ll just keep living in the past until it overtakes us, for the present isn’t living at all, not by a long stretch.
Gordon ScottMay 13, 2019, 10:07 AM
Wasn’t there also a rather long shot of Bruce Willis in the opening of “The Bonfire of the Vanities?” Again, more like the Goodfellas shot than the Touch of Evil shot.
Old movies and cinematography competed very well for our attention. Now, that has to happen on YouTube. It’s a brave new world but damn I miss the old shows.
Recently I watched a 1992 movie (I think it was) with very long shots of the artist’s hand with the charcoal, pastel or brush. Also of the model. It was risky stuff for the director but worked great for me.
Russian Ark was a full length movie (not five years old) all shot in one take by a guy wearing a monster camera with a counterbalance to control the weight. A full-length tour of the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Every room enters a different historical era, and there is grand pageantry with dancing, drama, etc. Insane good stuff only made great by the effort, but then you have to remember what turd-sniffers the Russians are.
SkorpionMay 13, 2019, 5:09 PM
Welles was a genius, and TOUCH OF EVIL was a brilliant cap to his career. But GOODFELLAS has always seemed to me to be one astonishing scene after another, where the cinematography, direction, dialogue, acting, and action combine to put the viewer in the dead-center of Henry Hill’s world. My personal favorite sequence is the “Last Day as a Wiseguy” drug-bust narrative; by the time the narc points the gun at Henry, my heartbeat and pulse were racing from the almost unbearable rush of the events.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
The Scorsese shot appears to have been done with a Steadicam following Liotta and Bracco in a single direction, much easier to do than the far more complex and intricately choreographed Welles’ shot done with a crane/boom camera moved in three dimensions. Scorsese’s shot follows two subjects on a linear path and the people they encounter on that path are essentially stationary. On the other hand the Welles’s shot involves exquisitely delicate timing of movement of the crane camera, the “movement” of buildings in and out of frame, movement tracking and timing of several actors and the principal motor vehicle, and even entrance and exit timings of at least a score of extras. In short, Scorsese’s shot juggles one ball in the air, while Welles’s shot juggles about a dozen balls in the air.
AA; that was an amazing dissection/analysis of those films. I’ve always been a fan of Wells and found your post fascinating. Thanks.
The thing that has always attracted me to the older films and to a lesser degree, older TV shows, is the duration of the shots that allow you to see as much as you want rather than having that decision made by others. I think it was Hitchcock that emphasized the idea that the viewer needs to be a contributor, and will, if the filmer will let him, thus, hitchcock rarely showed any actual violence in his films and TV shows. Your imagination is much more intense if spurred by the director.
I don’t watch much TV and almost no modern day TV. My wife watched a show called “BlackList” and it came on last night at 8pm. We were yappin’ on the couch when it came on so I watched about the first 30 seconds of Blacklist. That’s all I could stand before I had to literally flee the room. She sat there and continued to stare at it, mesmerized. The edits were in the 1 to 4 second range, rapid fire, with some sort of escalating music overtaking the background and I suppose they were telling a story but with that “style” of editing it was like listening with the eyes to an auctioneer while the ears were blocking just about everything out. (Like driving slowly past a car wreck and everybody in the car is yapping so you yell, “SHUT UP, I CAN’T SEE!”) Again, devolving of an art. And I’ll waste little time on it.
My dear Novadog, thank you for your kind compliment.
Another contrast between those two shots lies in their scores. Scorsese used a girl group pop song (The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me”) to suggest how Bracco is falling for Liotta’s showy effort to sweep her off her feet, while Welles used the percussive Latino syncopation of Henry Mancini’s score to add extra tension to the viewer’s awareness of the ticking time bomb in the convertible’s trunk. Indeed the opening close-up of the time bomb is scored with the bomb clock’s own ticking, which almost immediately shifts to Mancini’s Latin percussion, and when the couple who will get into the convertible enter the frame, the score introduces its menacing swell of trombones.
@gs
I’m beginning to think the opposite sex can not extricate itself from garbage. Mine was watching a remake of “The Predator”. I could only take so much of the gutter dialog, if you even want to consider it dialog. No substance whatsoever. I’m not an old guy and certainly not a prude. But, I was born and lived in NJ for some of my youth, I know shit when I see it. Thank God for discernment.
Another homage to the Wells shot is the openng shot in Robert Altman’s “The Player”. He tracks Tim Robbins across the area in front of the offices at 20th Century lot, from pulling up and parking his car thru the walk across the grass, into the offices, finally sitting at his desk. If there was a score, I don’t remember it, but there was constant chatter between Robbins and the various people talking at him.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151/
The edits were in the 1 to 4 second range, rapid fire, with some sort of escalating music overtaking the background++++++++
Two thoughts:
1) Such is required to “hold” an audience that has had its attention span altered by the array of electronic gewgaws that hold them captive.
2) The noise and sensory overload compensate for the dearth in quality of the writing.
Like you, I cannot bear to have the toob on for any appreciable length of time, unless it’s something from my movie library. Said consists mostly of older offerings.
I may be an old dude, but I’m a discerning old dude.
Richard, like you I have a movie ‘library’ of films. The films were selected with one criteria, would I like to watch it again someday.
The people at my physical therapy office are nice young folks but I was shocked that none of them own any DVD’s or CD’s. Nor the equipment to play them on (so much for my offer to lend “Rob Roy” and “The Court Jester” from my library). They stream everything. If it’s not on the playlist, they don’t know about it.
Most of the films I like to watch don’t ‘stream’.
Nifty form of censorship by the way.
The only time my wife and I watch TV is at supper time and we don’t watch the ongoing commercial stuff. We have 5 DVD players, 1 does international stuff, connected to a 48″ Sanyo wall mounted. It’s kind of a PITA to keep all of it organized but the alternative is not bearable.
All of the DVD players have old TV show series in them from the 40’s, 50’s, and a few 60’s and we rotate through them each night. Most are 30 min episodes and some are 60 mins. Here’s the current line-up:
1. The Loner, Lloyd Bridges, a 30 min western from the early 60’s. His son Jeff was in one of them and Beau in another. 5 thumbs up!
2. High Chaparral, Leif Ericson, a 60 min western from the mid 60’s. 3 thumbs up!
3. A Man with a Camera, Charles Bronson, a 30 min NYFC action/drama from the 50’s. 2 thumbs up!
4. Tombstone Territory, Pat Conroy, a 30 min western from the late 50’s. 5 thumbs up!
5. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a 30 min suspense from the late 50’s with a variety of actors in each show, last nights episode had a young Robert Redford. 5 thumbs up!
When amazon finally drops the price per volume (2 volumes per season) below $20 I’ll order the 14th season of Gunsmoke, as we’ve bought and watched 1-13 so far. We’ll just keep living in the past until it overtakes us, for the present isn’t living at all, not by a long stretch.
Wasn’t there also a rather long shot of Bruce Willis in the opening of “The Bonfire of the Vanities?” Again, more like the Goodfellas shot than the Touch of Evil shot.
Both now on my watch list. Thanks.
Old movies and cinematography competed very well for our attention. Now, that has to happen on YouTube. It’s a brave new world but damn I miss the old shows.
Recently I watched a 1992 movie (I think it was) with very long shots of the artist’s hand with the charcoal, pastel or brush. Also of the model. It was risky stuff for the director but worked great for me.
Russian Ark was a full length movie (not five years old) all shot in one take by a guy wearing a monster camera with a counterbalance to control the weight. A full-length tour of the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Every room enters a different historical era, and there is grand pageantry with dancing, drama, etc. Insane good stuff only made great by the effort, but then you have to remember what turd-sniffers the Russians are.
Welles was a genius, and TOUCH OF EVIL was a brilliant cap to his career. But GOODFELLAS has always seemed to me to be one astonishing scene after another, where the cinematography, direction, dialogue, acting, and action combine to put the viewer in the dead-center of Henry Hill’s world. My personal favorite sequence is the “Last Day as a Wiseguy” drug-bust narrative; by the time the narc points the gun at Henry, my heartbeat and pulse were racing from the almost unbearable rush of the events.
P.S. Here’s the sequence I referred to above: https://vimeo.com/134835336