I am a bit of a film buff and have lots of DVDs of films I have bought over the years. (Too many in fact - how the heck to store them accessably is the problem!)
Like many film buffs I have become interested in foreign movies (well, there are only so many crappy Hollywood comic book based movies one can watch in his life and have any hope of not reverting to the mental age of a 13 year old boy). I recently stumbled on the work of a Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. Ozu started as a cinematographer in the silent era when cameras were very static (almost no camera movement, no panning and even very few tracking shots) and he carried this style through out his life - even with more modern cameras. As a result he developed a style of camera work very, very like a stills photographer. He shot almost exclusively with a 50mm lens incidentally to keep it "real".
Here is a nice video on him and you will see immediately how so many of his shots look like stills. In fact this is a theme of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ra0xEQ8yaU
And another video on how he interspersed his movies with little scenes that often seemed just to have the purpose of making it contemplative and to set the movie in a time and place. You can readily see how many of these are composed as a stills shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQwFxhiVQs
As I posted in the comments section of the first video, at 0.57 seconds into that video, for example, there is a scene with a woman and man in the mid range eating from bowls and in the background a child. He has aligned them diagonally with their bodies broadly describing a line from top left to bottom right and they are framed by the door of the home and the dark interior of the home - all of which add visual interest. It is pretty much exactly how I would aspire to compose the shot if I had a choice. And the same goes for the shot that precedes it at about 0.52 seconds - two people on a seawall fishing framed by the rockwall below them and the two verticals of the lighthouse and the electricity pole. Ozu, unlike almost any other director was about composition of the shot - aiming for beauty. Just like a stills photographer.
I thought I would share these videos (and some others may find Ozu's work interesting though his movies are very quiet and some would say boring though I love them when I am in the right frame of mind - quiet, contemplative etc) but I also thought I would ask - is there anyone else who directs and shoots more or less like this? Ideas?
Kubrik a little, perhaps???
