The Director Who Revolutionized The POV Shot

 


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MUSIC (via Epidemic Sound)

Particle Emission - Silver Maple
Tread Lightly - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen


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The Nerdwriter is a series of video essays about art, culture, politics, philosophy and more.

[colorfilm]

The Pogo Cam was created by a man named Fred Waugh. Those aren’t actually gyroscopes at the bottom they are counterweights. The Pogo Cam actually works because it is somewhat heavy. Your arm and the weight is what stabilizes it. That’s why phones or extremely light cameras are so shaky to shoot with. Anyone who has used a professional dolly knows the heavier it is the smoother the motion will be. It’s quite a workout to shoot with a Pogo Cam for an extended period of time but the results can be amazing!

[phemyda]

"Point Break was inspired by Mr Toad's Wild Ride" is not the kind of revelation I was expecting from this video

[Realistic_Management]

Wish Kathyrn Bigelow would direct more often, she's a criminally underrated director.

[gabpintov]

What is great about Bigelow POV is that it doesn’t shake (therefore: distract you) as much as things in Nolan’s movies and all the Bourne stuff.

[marley]

Strange Days really is so underrated, out of the countless cyberpunk/hacker/sci fi/dystopian future movies from the 90s its head and shoulders above the rest, recommend it to anyone that hasn't seen it.

[ciupenhauer]

Even without POV, Kathryn was a monster director. That bar scene in Near Dark is still one of the most visceral, violent and scary scenes - I have no idea how she does her magic but so glad she got this shoutout

[alejandrovillegas]

This film blew my mind when it came out, as the advertising said it was pure adrenaline from start to finish. The script, casting, editing, sound, cinematography were superb and it amazed me that it was directed by a woman. Get me right, it was back in the 90s most action movies were directed by men, this was better than any of those in everything she did, and also, I was 15 years old. She became an example to follow from then on... I teach film now and every time we analize the opening sequence of her other masterpiece "strange days". take a look at that one is just amazing.

[hugodbs]

This shot has stuck with me too ever since I saw this film. Somehow, I thought it was the cameraman getting tired and taking a little bit more time before getting back to the chase. Great work!

[Desert_Gump]

New Nerdwriter! What a great start to the day on the West Coast.

[miked]

To some extent, Point Break did for skydiving in the early nineties what Top Gun did for naval aviator recruitment in the mid-eighties, and for the same reason - they presented those activities in such a compelling and visceral way. I am part of that Point Break generation of skydivers.

Many have pointed out that the skydiving scenes in Point Break are preposterous, and they are, but that's not the point. I've never seen a movie before or since that captures the _feeling_ of freefall like that one does.

Props to Bigelow for choosing to do it right, and to Tom Sanders for capturing it on film.

[samfilmkid]

80’s and 90’s Bigelow is incredible! Point Break, Near Dark, Strange Days, Blue Steel etc.
She brought a level of grit and reality to genre filmmaking. Her last couple of films that focus on real events are fine, but I do wish she would make a real genre piece again

[Desert_Gump]

I’m really glad you mentioned music videos, and I had been waiting the whole video for a Hardcore Henry reference so it was hard to miss! Music videos were early adopters of the POV. Videos like Prodigy - Smack my B**** Up and Gomez - See the World come to mind, but even more recently with Tove Lo’s - Habits being a more modern day evolution of the turned around POV that’s now so popular with influencers on Instagram. That would actually be a super interesting follow-up video! An exploration of the evolution of POV meaning “first person view out of my eyes” to “third person view looking at me”.

[Mr_ssement]

Nice analyze! And it still feels shaky without the nauseous part. Too often, movies use a shaky cam to create a feeling of emergency but all it produces is nausea. Bigelow's approach allows the eye to always catch an obstacle or use wide perspectives to open up the shot.

[VasudevAnandcva]

Great video! especially to watch after Patrick Willems made the video about the film that revolutionised car racing/chase scenes

[Aloddff]

I was obsessed with this stuff in the early 2000s before GoPro was invented

[Novastar.SaberCombat]

Don't forget Raimi's work on "Evil Dead", and the Coen Bros. on "Raising Arizona". ;)

[unodestosdiaz]

Great to have you back! Talking with my wife about films from yesteryear she hadnt watched, Strange Days came into the conversation, and it is indeed a cotinuation of Bigelow's experiential proposal in filmmaking. Great video and higlight on one of the lesser talked about directors in that generation of inventiveness.

[darthbakercamelia]

For me the best use of POV was in Moustapha Akkad's The Message. Incidently, he also produced a couple of years later a little film called Halloween, which had a pretty memorable first scene. 😊

[rottensquid]

Regarding the theory that everything will be VR in the future, I'm not so sure. This may be an example of old-fashioned thinking, but I don't see cinematography giving up its most important constraint: the frame.

We take for granted just how crucial the frame is, as it's defined by absence. But literally ask any DP in the business what their most important tool is, and they'll all say the same thing. The frame defines the shot. Without it, there's no composition. I think there's a reason that, after two tries, 3D film never caught on. Immersion in a movie doesn't happen because everything looks literally real. Hell, the catastrophic failure of 48fps proves that. No, film must involve a certain amount of remove. It's a curated piece of art, not a lived experience. It's a chance to step back from reality, allowing us to process it with an omniscient detachment. That's how we find beauty in tragedy, meaning in suffering, humor in misfortune. I think we take that remove for granted, just like we take the picture's boundary for granted. But that boundary is a huge part of it. It tells us what matters to the art. The frame of an image separates what the artist is seeing from the irrelevant background of reality. Removing it takes away the artist's guiding hand.

The whole point of art is to see the world through the eyes of someone else, so you can catch things and gain insights you might not otherwise notice. It's an act of empathy, a participation in the communal experience of life, rather than the individual one. When the audience is encouraged to choose their own adventure too much, to look at whatever they want and decide for themselves what it means, that guidance disappears. It stops being art, and becomes just a bunch of random stuff. Which I think defeats the purpose. I can do that all day, for free, without VR goggles.

[GuineaPigEveryday]

Kathryn Bigelow has really not been examined properly, I think specific films of hers are video essayed and lauded to death, but as a whole her filmography has been so seemingly random that few people have really sought to study all of it. Especially when she goes from movies like Near Dark to Strange Days to K-19 and Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty and then Detroit, its a very odd progression in her career that makes it hard to track down a certain style.