Handheld camera aesthetics
The hand-held camera aesthetic is a form of cinematic image design that is conditioned or made possible by the use of a hand-held camera .
Characteristics
Because a handheld camera is not mounted on a tripod or a dolly , but is kept free by the cameraman , it is very mobile. This enables very dynamic pans and journeys . If the camera is not stabilized (e.g. with a steadycam ), however, the movements are often uneven and can have abrupt changes in direction.
If the camera settings are not moving, a hand-held camera means that the image section is never completely stable, because you can hardly hold a camera completely still for a long period of time. Film recordings with a handheld camera therefore appear more or less blurred.
Occurrence
The hand-held camera aesthetic is typical of television journalism on the one hand and amateur recordings on the other. In both cases, the use of a hand-held camera is usually not an aesthetically justified decision, but the only practicable option.
However, there are also genres and groupings in film art that consciously use the hand-held camera aesthetic. Manifest Dogma 95, for example, only allows the use of handheld cameras, and handheld cameras were a style-defining element for films from the Nouvelle Vague . The first feature film to make consistent use of portable cameras is The Last Man from 1924.
Handheld cameras are also often used in documentaries . In part, this is a technical necessity, because only then is the cameraman agile enough to spontaneously follow a non-staged course of action. This applies in particular to films from Cinéma vérité or Direct Cinema , which wanted to have as little influence as possible on the events. Sometimes the handheld camera is also used for design reasons, because the shaky images suggest authenticity. This viewing habit is in turn exploited by films that only pretend to be documentary (e.g. The Blair Witch Project ).
literature
- Markus Kuhn. The narrative potential of the handheld camera: for the functionalization of handheld camera effects in feature films and fictional film clips on the Internet. Diegesis 2, no. 1 (2013)
- Benjamin Beil, Jürgen Kühnel, Christian Neuhaus. Study Guide Film Analysis: Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Feature Film. Munich 2012.