March 02, 2006
The Blair Witch Project
The Broken Promises of the Moving Camera
Last Friday, by sheer coincidence, my grandmother was admitted to the hospital on the same day that I went into the hospital to have some dizziness that I've been dealing with checked out. I had initially self diagnosed it as Benign Positional Vertigo, which is supposed to go away on its own, but that was over three weeks ago. After a series of ridiculous but entertaining tests, I was told my problem wasn't neurological and was referred to an inner ear specialist.
My grandmother was in the hospital because she had suffered a stroke. My parents had found her in her apartment, unable to speak or move the right side of her body, and bruised from the fall. I found out about it the next morning. Thankfully, she didn't break any bones when she fell and I'm told she's making good progress. She's alert, smiling, and still has feeling in her right side even though she can't move it.
I went on with the rest of my weekend trying to keep myself occupied in order to avoid the sense of helplessness that I was experiencing. It was the a result of being across the country when a loved one is suffering and knowing that I wouldn't be able to do much even if I was there. I periodically called home to get updates on her condition and watched some movies and immersed myself in HTML and CSS when I wasn't spending time with my girlfriend.
I had a lot of my mind and wasn't in a particularly great mood. I had suddenly become aware that the human body is so susceptible to falling apart in so many ways, whether it be dislodged crystals bouncing around in your inner ear and throwing off your balance or the bloodflow to your brain suddenly stopping. It was in spite of all this that I went to my horror film class Monday night.
In class we watched the much hyped at the time but now much maligned Blair Witch Project. Although I didn't see it in theaters when it initially came out, I saw it on video soon after and actually enjoyed it and found some moments to be genuinely terrifying. My latest viewing was more of the same and to my surprise it seemed to have worked on the rest of the class as well since the occasion was marked by silence throughout the duration of the doomed expedition.
What made the film so succesful, was that in a medium that appeals to the senses of sight and sound the film deprives you of them. What does that leave you with then? Shakey camerwork and sound design that's only as discernable as it needs to be to let you know you should be scared even if you don't know why.
In the grammar of film, camera movements are used to reveal things. A move of the camera might reveal a bomb hidden underneath a table or a monster hiding in a dark corner. Even if a typical viewer doesn't always think "something is about to be revealed to me" when a camera starts to move, a viewer does think "that's awfully pretentious" when a camera movement does take place and nothing is revealed. That's because people are trained to know that's what a move is supposed to do and when it doesn't it comes off as straying from filmic conventions, something generally frowned upon by an audience used to nothing but conventional films.
One innovative use of camera movement that comes to mind is the track away from Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver when he's on the phone. The camera moves to the right and stops on an empty hallway. Although it doesn't reveal anything visually, it takes you into the character's psyche and it's one of the most inspired moments in a film that is itself brilliant. Another masterful use of camera movement (or actually lack therof) is in Rosemary's Baby when Rosemary is on the phone. The shot is of her sitting on the bed talking on the phone but the door frame into the room cuts down the middle of her body. You expect the camera to track and reveal her but instead it just sits still making the viewer anxious with it's atypical framing and lack of movement, just as I suspect Polanski was trying to do.
With the Blair Witch Project, the camerawork is so chaotic and inept, even when it's not shakey, that you can't really focus on anything. Especially in the most intense scenes, there's light flashing at you from the screen but it's almost abstract with little bits of pieces of the world that you can pick out. You're seeing things but you're not really seeing anything. It might as well be an experimental film (okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration). The sense of security you would get from being able to see your surroundings is subverted first by the oppresive darkness that one finds in the middle of the woods at night and also by the broken promises of the moving camera. The film is nothing but camera movements but nothing is revealed.
Even after ones eyes are rendered useless by the dark you can still hear things. And boy do these characters hear things although the viewers aren't so lucky. The sound design for these parts is purposefully frustrating (I'm giving the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt). The moment you begin to hear something faintly, one of the characters screams "HOLY SHIT WHAT WAS THAT" and the sound is gone. Everytime you start to hear something one of the characters screams something or some other noise covers it up. It's like being on the playground when you're younger and you hear a teacher scream your name. You don't know who said it or where it came from but you know you should probably get the hell out of there.
Ultimately, the film is a bit unsatisfying but it's good for some scares. By never revealing the monster, the film keeps you searching through the depths of your own unconscious for an answer to what it is that's terrorizing the three campers. They supply the creepy location, you supply the villain. The stylistic choices that I mentioned are effective but can also grow a bit tiresome. In my case it also caused a little motion sickness. But, in the context of my recent life outside of the film world, it was a welcome escape and yet another humbling reminder of the things I take for granted.
