Echo

________________________

Two Mules for Sister Sara (Don Siegel, 1970)

&

Predator (John McTiernan, 1987)

Tension, Release; Mapping; Geometry, yadda yadda John McTiernan

One feels compelled to breathlessly shout hyperbolic praise when witnessing the shot above. The fluidity, the way the camera is attuned to the motion of each individual, the effortless conveyance of action geography, the tension-release-tension of spacial information and developing threats, etc. Watch this shot silently (and indeed, watch it, the stills above do no justice). One elegant, simple movement (I am reminded of a tremendous shot in Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz, but alas, I cannot find the individual scene). 

McTiernan is a dynamic, his cinema an accretion of steadicam precision, character kinetics, and editing that straddles the line between intuition and orchestration. In the Die Hard scene, we get spacial relationships and character interplays in one shot: McClane flees/shoots at two henchman, before dollying up to reveal Karl, whose single-minded need for revenge actually slows the shot, the camera in turn tracking him from a distance. Chase given, character motivation, all in fourteen seconds. 

In the sequence from Nomads (1986) above, we see this dynamic as a series of shots. In one of the film's many hallucinations, Pierce Brosnan's protagonist throws one of the titular evil spirits off of a building. There is a sense of aesthetic starkness and architecturally sterilized expressivity that reminds one of Michael Mann's film from the same year, Manhunter (indeed, both films are their directors' most headspace-oriented work). The slow motion, the vast negative spaces of California sky, and the potent artificiality of the falling man heighten the unreal, the individual shots flowing together with liquidity. But what struck me most here, was the cut that ends the sequence. An unsettling hallucination, emotionally tumultuous but formally serene, cuts to a woman (Lesley-Anne Down) awaking with a start in bed. We've seen it countless times, the shocked awakening from nightmare. But McTiernan plays it like a note, that musical composition he espouses time and again. A man falls, a woman exhales sharply. 

The Jungle

I'm working on two larger pieces on John McTiernan's Predator, so I've been immersing myself in the film routinely in recent days (though you could say I've been immersing myself in this film since age ten). Rewatching, rewatching, watching specific clips, watching edits in slow motion, getting a feel. I think it's fair to say I know Predator more intimately than I know any other film. I'll save my larger thoughts on it in the two upcoming pieces. As I was watching this sequence, the simple elegance of these three shots, and their relations to each other, took me aback (a great deal of Predator has this effect on me). I guess I'm leaving this small note as a sister to my Memoirs of an Invisible Man post. The sheer elegance of craft, a simple zoom, something that alone really shouldn't register as profound or worthy of praise, but as wielded by a true artist becomes almost endlessly mysterious and compelling. To give substance and presence to something that isn't there at all.