Pan shots

[Aaron Gerow]

> When studying Japanese films made during the Occupation years, I 
> noticed several times the use of a pan following a close-up or medium 
> close-up of a character, edited so the pan appeared to be from the 
> character's point of view.  However, as the pan continued it would end 
> up back at the character--i.e., the same character would be the end 
> point of the shot, often in full or even a long shot, thus denying the 
> POV implication that was at the beginning of the pan. 

I do not recall a lot of prewar examples of this, but one is in 
Dreyer's Vampyr.

It was nice to hear Kitano brought up in this discussion. He does many 
interesting things with point of view, but I would argue they 
participate in a larger feeling among many Japanese directors that 
cinema is an "external medium" that can never truly get inside 
characters (this is a basic Hasumian stance that many directors from 
Kurosawa to Aoyama repeat). It is then interesting to see directors 
attempting to imply internal states without following the classic point 
of view structure, creating either very odd point of view structures 
(one good example is Masaki "looking" at Uehara's death in Boiling 
Point, but another is in Bright Future) or undermining them in mid-shot 
(for the same kind of shot Joanne sites, one can look at Aoyama's 
Chinpira or Waga mune ni kyoki ari). Kitano likes to play with 
impossible POVs (the POV of a car wheel or of a dragon fly, etc.). One 
also sees a lot of half-POV structures, where the first shot is of 
someone looking, the second of what they are presumably looking at, but 
the third being of a different character or space.


Aaron Gerow
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu