Blog
Number Two.
Cinematography.
OLDBOY/2003/Chan-wook
Park/South Korea
Cinematographer
– Jung Jung-Hoon.
Firstly I will start
with a little bit about cinematography. Cinematography (which means literally,
writing in movement) is the filmmaker controlling the cinematic qualities of
the shot. So its not just looking at what is filmed but how it is filmed. So
when watching a film you are looking at the photographic aspects of the shot,
the framing of the shot, and the duration of the shot.
SO, after learning a
bit more about cinematography from the book Film Art: An Introduction by David
Bordwell and Kristin Thomson I felt confident with picking a scene from the
Film OLDBOY (2003, Chan-wook Park).
The scene I will
talk about is quite a famous scene within this film. It’s about 40 minutes into
the film and it’s his first real act of revenge within the film. The main
character (whether or not you can call him a protagonist is debatable) has
discovered the location of one man who kept him captive for 15 years.
As the elevator doors
open immediately the colour changes, you have the bleached out fake lights of
the elevator drifting into the dark, grey, moss green hallway from where the
rest of the action will take place. The next main shot is of a still frame,
where it slowly pans out to reveal what is happening. The
cinematographer has taken away a wall in which we are aloud to see through, so
we almost have this wide angle shot to contain a tense moment within the film.
Special effects are
then used to signify a dotted line from the hammer to the guard’s head, the
dotted line signifying the thoughts and mapping out clear in the main
characters head.
After a short torture
scene we are introduced back into the hallway. This time showing the real density
of it by filling it with other guards and henchmen. This is framed in such a
way for you to see the length and the width of it before the next scene.
When the fighting
begins, the music heightens (although that’s for another blog) and we are
then entering a single wide-screen shot with lengthy duration (from the side
again). The reason I feel the cinematographer has done this is to show the
realism of what you are seeing. You are seeing a constant shot of fighting;
there are no edits to speed up the shot or to change any mistakes. This is one
man, whose odds are clearly against him.
The colour scheme remains the same, the saturation low, the contrast
high. But we have the shadows from underneath the floor and above the ceiling
to frame the shot into a cinematic moment.
So when your dry eyes
are finally treated to a well deserved wet edit, you feel exhausted, like you
were panning through that corridor too, getting punches thrown at you and
knives plunged into your back. I find that the duration of the framing to be
extremely effective in many situations.
“In any image, the
frame is not simply a neutral border; it imposes a certain vantage point onto the material within the image. In
cinema, the frame is important because it actively defines the image for us.”
“Laugh and the world
laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.” - Dae-su Oh – OLDBOY – Chan-wook
Park
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