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| Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present (Vishnevetsky, 2013) |
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| Les Miserables (Hooper, 2012) |
The image-text relation in
film and theater is not a merely technical question, but a site of conflict, a
nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves
out in the materiality of representation…The real question to ask when
confronted with these kind of image-text relations is not “What is the
difference (or similarity) between the words and the images?” but “what
difference do the differences (and similarities) make?” That is, why does it
matter how words and images are juxtaposed, blended, or separated?
-W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory:
Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation
I was briefly struck while watching Jonathan Rosenbaum, Present how much the main shot used to
represent its ontological subject: a single light with a mostly out of focus
background, the camera handheld, often attempting to re-frame its subject. Of
course, it reminded me of Tom Hooper’s Les
Miserables, which used a similar shot for the film’s apparently “big show stopping”
moment of when Anne Hathaway[1]
sings “I Dreamed a Dream.” At the time, I shouted at the screen (I was at
home), “Holy [explicit]! Just keep the camera still.”
Jim Emerson nails exactly the problem with this, beyond the content of what she is singing: “On the most obvious level, the actors are
playing to the balcony while the camera (and those wide-angle lenses) push their
faces into ours. It's like ‘Full Metal Jacket: The Musical!’ with all the parts
played by R. Lee Ermey.”
