Theory of the film : (character and growth of a new art) (1952)

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN OPTICAL TRICKS, COMPOSITES, CARTOONS It has already been mentioned that the camera possesses many technical means of injecting the cameraman's subjective viewpoint and mood into the picture of the object. Fades, dissolves, slow-motion, time-lapse, soft-focus, distortion, double-exposure and many others — these camera effects can express many things but they do not depict some phenomena of reality. They are visual indications of the thoughts and emotions of the film-maker and hence they can be classed as 'absolute' film effects. significance of camera tricks For this reason the same optical trick can mean a great variety of different things. For instance the picture of a man on the screen might dissolve into a tree. This might be a scene in a fairy-tale, and in that case it would mean a miracle, or rather a piece of magic. But such dissolves are often used in the film to mark a simple change of location. Just now we have seen a man in a room and the next minute the story is continued in a forest. In such cases the dissolve means that a deeper connection is suggested between the two objects : man and tree. But if I see a man-into-tree dissolve in a dream sequence or a sequence indicating a train of associations, then I regard it only as a presentation of an associative process. Fourthly such a dissolve may be merely a form of joke and nothing else. In the first case, that of magic, the change-over is a real happening, only it is real in a fairy-tale sense, not a natural sense. In the second case, when the dissolve is intended to convey a 185