![]() Spielberg plays with the motif of prefiguration throughout, a cut to a pair of scissors piercing the eye of a mask and the killer’s assertion that he’s blind without his glasses pointing forward to Cruise’s own passion play to come. Spielberg’s crosscutting between locations grants a spatial awareness to the audience that he denies his protagonist the tension drawn from our – and the murderer’s – position a heartbeat ahead of Cruise. What ends in a race to catch up with time begins with a fragmented visualisation of how the scene will play out. ![]() It establishes the film’s future milieu, introduces the players and lays out the rules of engagement: the process by which Tom Cruise’s ‘pre-crime’ unit can predict and intercept a murder before it takes place. The sheer volume of information transmitted in Minority Report’s 15-minute prologue makes for one of Spielberg’s most complex set-pieces. ![]() The film quickly settles into a jingoistic trudge, but the sheer scale of its opening gambit makes as strong a case as any for Spielberg having taken over where David Lean left off. Janusz Kaminski’s desaturated palette serves to deglamorise combat – as if the multitude of blown-off limbs didn’t already – while Spielberg double-prints his way through shell-shock effects and questionable ironies. We’re still feeling the aftershocks of its influence: its handheld, vérité style now the go-to shortcut for kinetic immersion in action filmmaking. The 20-minute-plus sequence remains a staggeringly visceral achievement, Spielberg arriving tooled-up with a full cinematic arsenal to ensure a startling present-tense immediacy. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)īy the end of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Saving Private Ryan may emerge confused as to what it means to say about war but at the end of its opening (godawful prologue aside) siege of Omaha Beach, there’s little confusion as to what it means to say about the set-piece. Tension mounts as the harpoon’s rope is fastened to a barrel, and released with a successful shot and pursuit, as Williams’ trumpets shift from stabbing anxiety to triumphant fanfare. Grace notes texture the scene – a slipped foot, the point of a harpoon – as a breathless tour of the boat serves up a complete sense of the space of the upcoming battleground. An iconic close-up leaves space for the 20-footer (“25! Three tonnes of him!”) to breach the frame, a startled Roy Scheider backing up into immortality: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Spielberg sets the stage for the simpatico rhythms of editor Verna Fields and composer John Williams as our mismatched on-screen triumvirate prepare for the first-wave attack. His problems with ‘Bruce’ the mechanical shark were famously legion, but Spielberg knows all too well the power of the unseen, holding back a proper glimpse of an entire generation’s thalassophobic poster boy right up to act three. His building of tension and its often euphoric release is, quite simply, peerless.Īs if you needed reminding, we took a look at a dozen sequences that see him at the height of his powers. It’s in his set-pieces – those sequences that mark a dramatic apex – that Spielberg most brilliantly and iconically demonstrates his mastery of the medium. Few filmmakers transcend questions of viewer demographic quite like Spielberg, and his films are an irresistible invitation to surrender our cynicism in exchange for the promise of awe. There’s little escaping the impact Spielberg’s greatest work has when viewed on the big screen, a two-month retrospective at BFI Southbank this summer offering just such an opportunity. ![]() Not since Alfred Hitchcock has a director so consistently and spectacularly fused formal mastery with mainstream appeal the success of his 1975 film Jaws reshaped the landscape of event cinema and created the blueprint for the modern blockbuster. He’s the most successful commercial filmmaker in the history of the medium, with the upcoming release of his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG likely to see his total box-office haul pass the $10bn mark. With 45 years in pictures and counting, Steven Spielberg remains less an island in popular cinematic culture than a continent. A Steven Spielberg season plays at BFI Southbank throughout June/July 2016.Ĭlose Encounters of the Third Kind is back in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |