Cinema: Technical Flaws Reconstrued as Style

Cinema: Technical Flaws Reconstrued as Style

Anamorphic lens flare in MOONLIGHT, 2016, Writer-Director Barry Jenkins, Cinematography James Laxton.

Years ago, too many you might say, while doing the BBC Director’s Course in London, I was told to read the BBC manual for the director. This well-intended handbook might well have been the worst, most damaging tome of filmmaking instruction ever printed.

You can’t cut from a moving shot to a still shot, it proclaimed.

Wrong!

You can’t cut from a wide shot to a close up, it instructed.

Wrong!

Camera movement must always be motivated.

Wrong again!

You can’t this, can’t do that…

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The premise behind all of the nonsense presented year after year in that guidebook of erroneous diktats was that the task of the filmmaker constitutes the strict observation of some form of tyrannical decorum.

It does not. There is no decorum, only the cinematic language the filmmaker chooses as they formulate the visual approach to their movie. The task of the director is to tell the story, engage the audience, conjure emotion and, hopefully, reveal something of the human soul, its paradoxes, mystery, and universality by whatever means they might render effective, by what works. It is not to obey bogus sets of rules and win marks for good behavior.

Martin Scorsese says There is no manual. If he’s right—and I believe he is—then filmmakers should be wary of any such proscriptive vade mecum that comes along, imposter as it’s most likely to turn out to be.

One of the most telling rejoinders to the good behavior and correct grammar mindset of that BBC pedagogy is the evolutionary nature of cinematic aesthetics throughout the decades—and in particular, the way by which technical error or flaw can be the source of fresh visual tropes. Such evolution—from fault to utility—defies any notion of technique set in stone.

An unsteady camera, for example, usually handheld, was long regarded as anathema. Later, it was understood as an invaluable resource for the documentarian, then a means of showing unsteady or violent action in a fictional context. After this, it became an element of style in itself, conveying perhaps a sensibility, perhaps a world free from set form, social, cultural, in which the filmmaker is free to explore, speak, think, feel.

A handheld camera, when not stable, can be a powerful means of expressing a subjective POV, although in this respect it isn’t essential. (I recall the aforesaid Martin Scorsese asking me to shoot an insert — a subjective POV shot to be cut into a scene of high drama — with absolute rock steadiness and not with the panicky shake I had anticipated.)

The handheld camera has indeed for some time been seen not as faulty, as lazy, not as a compromise down to budget or time but as a valid resource, maybe for a scene or sequence, even in the making of an entire movie. With increasingly portable cameras, it has become currency rather than heresy.

This is not to suggest that filmmakers are obliged to employ handheld camera work or that those who do not are somehow missing out or somehow retrogressive. Recently, for example, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door demonstrates fastidious precision in its framing and camera movement. To me, it’s sublime. RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys by contrast, also a current favorite of mine (for what that’s worth), makes use of a highly unstable camera in its adept articulation of subjective POVs.

Documentary, the French New Wave, and the growing imperative to make a movie by whatever means possible have proved instrumental in the acceptance and later mainstream embrace of the unstable perceiver, the unsteadycam.

Soft focus is another manifestation of the slip-up-made legitimate stylistic feature. In a scene I use as a teaching tool, a character, seen in medium close-up, leans forward, and as he does, the focus on him is lost for a split second. Students used to question that. It seemed to them a mistake, something the filmmakers should have corrected on a subsequent take.

No one comments on it these days. They accept it without question. Actually, it never was a mistake, even if it happened without forethought. The movie in question is based on factual characters and events so its style incorporates this element of documentary footage to good effect. The imperfection lends both the staged material and the celebrity star playing one of its main characters the authenticity of a documentary’s captured reality.

This works on the viewer subliminally. They don’t give it a second, even a first thought. Style creates substance. What was once acceptable in documentary — and even there it was once seen as unacceptable—has long since spread to fiction. Or been stolen by it. The inevitable compromises accepted in the former have enriched the designed visual terrain of the latter.

A failure in technique has morphed into a visual device to convince the audience that:

What you see is real. The focus-puller’s blip confirms it!

Before long, this glitch spread to most genres, to fantasy, to horror.

The validation of the error. The endorsement of the blemish.

Look at how lens flares have been similarly accepted into the lexicon. Once the bane of the cutting room, an effulgent smudge or blazing flash can prove gold to the cinematic stylist. Look at the instances in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight for example. A frame obliterated by the ectoplasm of an errant flare. A shot severed in two by the luminous blue streak afforded by an anamorphic lens. (See the screenshot above.)

Consummate work! A real movie! Nobody can argue with this! So the assumptions go.

(Disclaimer: I love it!)

Anamorphic lenses—there's more to consider in this respect.

The distortion of horizontals and verticals to the edges of the frame with these, for example, such as the subtle nuances seen in Anora. (And let’s not forget wide angle, even fish eye spherical lenses and the caricatured geometry they contort into shape. The Favorite, anyone?)

The bokeh of the anamorphic lens comes to mind too: the rendering of spots of light as oval-shaped—this is particularly effective given the reduced depth of field these lenses create. Not an error as such but a distinctive feature now absorbed into the discourse of the movie screen.

The “breathing” inherent in the anamorphic racking of focus—the vertical shift of objects along the deep axis that it causes—has also become familiar. Look at how this insidious spasm animates the frame when the viewer’s attention is drawn from one object or character to another as they subtly adjust along the vertical axis.

There’s yet a further phenomenon in our category of misfit manifestations, again once rejected in the cutting room. Over-exposed frames, the culprits from an unshielded lens, have long been integral to cinema’s ever expanding patois, adding the dynamism of blinding light to the list of the screen’s now respectable transgressions.

The shaky camera, soft focus, the lens flare, lens distortion, anamorphic bokeh and “breathing”, over-exposed frames. It’s not decorum, not set method, but in these instances, it’s error that yields the key to fresh style.

Because when something goes wrong, that something can later go right.

Peter Markham

February 2025