Staging That Scene from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

A bit less visual, but that’s how it happened to me with music. There was even some guy on reddit who decided to go through the entire history of hip hop and listen to every single influential album chronologically [1]. From what i remember him describing, it was a completely different experience listening to newer hip hop after going through all the earlier works, as a lot of it was built through the same techniques of self-referencing and trying to be meta.

1. https://reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/448wl4/man_who_knows_no...

https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting

The guy has impressive storytelling, video editing and narration skills; so he can make you believe in things that are not there. But I usually do see what he is showing and it all seems to be very reasonable (and interesting).

He discuss other subjects, not only movies, but all cool stuff

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErSSa3CaP_GJxmFpdjG9Jw

Beyond YouTube, you might start with something like "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112120/

In some senses, it's all trivia if you're not making movies, but it can be fun.

There are plenty of textbooks out on the subject, and about any college textbook can give you an overview of the technical stuff and the general history.

Personally, I've read a lot about film criticism and made some movies. Both taught me a lot. I was writing a book for a PhD in literature that focused heavily on film as literature, and took a bunch of graduate classes discussing it. I also made a lot of short films and worked on other peoples' films as well.

Both of those paths can teach you a whole lot about film, depending on what you're interested in.

But that's no different than any other thing that people might know about. I know a lot about web-oriented programming tools, because I have to do it every day. It's just the product of reading a lot of books and daily practical application.

Film just has fewer obvious daily practical applications.

Consider the opening shot from Boogie Nights (1997) which is available here [0]. If you watched it and came back here, would you have noticed that it was done all in one take (without a single cut, until the one right before the end of the video) aka the 'long take' technique. Apart from the fact that it was a crane and a steadicam being used, think of the immense work required to coordinate all the actors and crew so that a minimum of takes were required to achieve this desired outcome. (And, that director Paul Thomas Anderson was about 27 when it was shot.) This is the stylism of the director shining through.

One blog's assessment of the best movies openings is in [1] and might offer some insight as well...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiXtFyZqvQQ [1] https://youtu.be/dEXX7w2la0Q

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7GV-3hrA9kDKrren0QMKMg/vid...

The scene feels so out of place, it's like from another movie.

It is. The sequence is a carefully done adaptation of the deer scene in Tarkovsky's S.T.A.L.K.E.R - itself an absolute masterpiece of slow, visual storytelling.

These are usually elements of cinematography like lighting, composition etc or element of direction (framing a shot, blocking the actors etc). Video essays such as "Every Frame a Painting" usually have comparisons where they pick up the same plot device from two different films, one shot normally and the other using the innovation, and delineate the difference between the two.

Since you're asking about cinematography specifically, this is a great start to understand some techniques and where they originated:

"Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors" by Blain Brown.

http://a.co/ctdtK14

I'm a newbie exec producer on a film which just completed production, entering a few festivals. Also did the color for the same film. And about to start shooting shorts for fun. Aspiring DP.

ie, if you've seen a hundred movies that utilize a specific technique it seems far less consequential when you see film in which that technique was used for the first time.

Like any field it takes study. If it's something you care about and is important (because you want to break into the field), you're probably more likely to remember and apply yourself than if it's just a passing interest and something you wish you knew.

Acknowledging that all the elements in a scene aren't accidental and are deliberate is the first step - timing, lighting, framing... People did this. People who have dedicated a whole career to their fields considered all the elements (theme, setting, mood, plot etc) and drew on their experience in applicable techniques (or innovated upon these) to decide where to put the camera, how to move it, how to focus it, what kind of lights to use, makeup, costume, props, words, sound effects, music etc. Things you wouldn't think of in post production like using 10 rapid-fire high-exposure photos in a transition instead of just cutting or fading to the next scene, colour grading, etc.

These days there's a huge amount of techniques and the understanding of how these influence viewers' perceptions of a piece constantly improves. Long gone are the days of straight landscapes for exposition and close-up shots for dialogue.

Really if you want to get into the field, you'll have to fully immerse yourself in it, join forums, ask questions, watch movies with a critical eye, etc. Join local film clubs, take a course, etc.

Practically you could do much worse to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematic_techniques and then google for yourself "xyz history" or "how to xyz" for everything listed there.

I love Lucy was the Star Wars of its era in terms of revolutionizing the industry technologically. It's why you see it so much in reruns: It's the very first show filmed with archival quality materials such that you can watch it over and over.

Before that, two TV shows a day were broadcast live, one for the East Coast and another three hours later for the West Coast. The two time zones in between got a low quality recording.

Lucille Ball was an actress. Her husband, Desi Arnez, was a musician. She was past 40, wanted to have children and their careers were making that impossible.

TV schedules were so grueling, it was less work to revolutionize the industry. Desi had a home office and worked evenings and weekends a lot, but it allowed them to have kids, have dinner with the kids, tuck them in bed, etc.

I love Lucy invented a lot of modern staples of TV, including filming with three cameras and the rerun. They began playing reruns to accommodate Lucy's pregnancy. As an older woman with a first-time pregnancy, she couldn't keep the schedule they set.

It turned out to be a huge benefit to the show because the show was gaining in popularity and it allowed latecomers to see the earlier episodes. It was so successful, it rapidly became a TV staple to just broadcast reruns in the off season, etc.

The show seems campy and the black and white film is boring to most people today, but it was as exciting at the time as the special effects of Star Wars. It was groundbreaking technically and in many other ways.

However, if you arent satisfied by these films but want something that provides more in terms of story, originality, verisimilitude, revelation, or some other of a lot of possibilities, youll look out at the hige catalog of films that have been produced and find only dozens that are really something you enjoy. Theyre hard to make, and so theres only a few directors who have made them. When you watch eyes wide shut, you know you cant get ot elsewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRS6spe6xaI

I believe there is deeper subtext revealed here by Kubrick related to the tensions between petite bourgeois morality (and "Dr. Bill" is solid Upper East Side petite bourgeois) and the moral position held by "Hungarian" aristocrats who may or may not wear red robes while playing Grand Master in a ritualized ruling elite social gathering.

A tearful and oddly emasculated "admission" by Dr. Bill follows.

Because I took the mask to mean the wife participated in the orgy, so the rest follows accordingly

Anthony Frewin (assistant to Stanley Kubrick):

I had a friend who lived in the south of France, G. Legman. He supplied us with a lot of information about secret societies and sexual mores in Vienna at the time of Schnitzler. He also sent over a lot of illustrations of secret-society rituals and the Black Mass, mainly from the 19th century. We had a lot of illustrations, contemporary and even much older, of some ceremonies.

If there was a way to condense that one to just a few words, it would make one hell of a T-shirt slogan.

Seems a caricatured femininity has taken over the real thing (and not just in men's minds!) and I never hear it questioned.

Also large boobs hurt. A girl I know in her early twenties has plenty of, and she's considering breast reduction surgery because of back problems.

To be clear here, the issue is not about breasts but stereotypes coming to dominate without question, at a human cost.

(and in a british court I can imagine a case might be construed against those shitty agents for assault)

There was more of that sort of thing back in the 1990s. It was never that big. An event organizer once told me that the pool of people who go to things like that in SF was about 400. If you went to the SF Fetish Ball and the London Fetish Ball, you saw many of the same people.

It kind of died off with goth.

> I wish we could get, in the US, what are certainly the best versions of Kubrick's work.

You can always torrent a European Blu-ray.

Everyone in the movie is clearly from one social class or another and is made starkly aware of it.

The men are buying power over one another while the women are literal whores - even the doctor's wife - sex toys & arm candy for whomever they can gather the most status/money from.