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124 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
Point-of-view angles. Camera angle is also invaluable in establishing and directing the audience's point of view. Just as a high overhead angle can endow them with a feeling of transcendence, a low angle can give them the point of view of a child looking up at a much taller person. This effect was successfully achieved in the British film The Fallen Idol when the adults were photographed at a low angle— from the boy's viewpoint— in order to stress the difference in size and, hence, the differences in thought process.
Conversely, a high angle shot of the child staring up into the camera can give the audience a sense of the adult's point of view. This effect was also used to advantage in the above-mentioned film. It is with this adjustable point of view that the screen-play writer can subtly incise character identification into the audience, and prepare them, physically at least, for an emotional identification.
Murnau's Variety was a forerunner in presenting startling and unusual angles. Previously, in circus pictures, the viewpoint of only the audience had been given. But Murnau shot his scenes from the viewpoint of the performer, so that the audience was enabled to identify itself with the performer by means of extremely distorted camera angles.
He accomplished this because he was aware of the properties of the human eye which automatically compensate for distortion by rectifying it to a permanent eye level. Things viewed from an unnatural angle automatically adjust for normality. Thus, the eye can adjust for foreshortening when one part of a person— his feet, sayis in the foreground while another part is in the background. A camera shot could present an unusual effect by showing enormously large feet in the foreground with a smaller torso behind. The eye, however, automatically adjusts so that no such distortion is present. But distortion is eye-catching, Murnau reasoned, and as a result he shot many of his scenes with deliberately distorted effects, not only to achieve shock, but also to give the shots new meanings.
Change angles. Finally, the writer should realize that the camera lens should be treated as though it were the eyes of the audience, as far as angles are concerned. Normal eyes scanning any scene see that scene and its various elements from a number of ever changing, self-adjusting points of view. They may start to view a room and see, first, a mirror hanging over a fireplace, from a head-on, eye-level