Pan shots

[Joseph Murphy]

Markus,
The essentialist tag is a pretty tough rhetorical maneuver (who wants 
to be essentialist?), but why is it culturally essentialist to relate 
it to another medium?  I haven't read O'Leary's article, but the 
point does not appear to be that the pan is essentially western, but 
that the left-right pan is western, "based on the left/right writing 
system of western languages."  Let's say the pan has something 
(essentially?) to do with the idea of looking around, but the 
investment in that is culturally determined (what I understand to be 
the purport of the subsequent discussion, cf. your discussion of 
Hiroshima/Nagasaki is in terms of "pan," not left-right pan).  But 
the difference between left-right pan and right-left pan, given this 
looking around function, would seem to be the one point that is 
completely arbitrary (given bilateral symmetry as a constant of 
vertebrate perception), hence if as a matter of fact Euro-US film 
does exhibit a preponderance of left-right pans, and I'm agnostic on 
that point, that needs explaining in any case.  Maybe someone flipped 
a coin.
yours,
Joe Murphy


>On Jul 30, 2004, at 5:24 AM, tim.iles at utoronto.ca wrote:
>
>>
>>But I don't think this is particularly "Japanese"--this seems to be a
>>technique I can recall from American or even European films, where the
>>return to the character gives us the character's reaction to the POV pan.
>>
>
>Just as you are careful not to attribute a particular Japanese-ness 
>to that technique, you should be careful about accepting O'Leary's 
>argument. It's basically using an essentialized Western-ness "based 
>on the left/right writing system of western languages," to analyze a 
>common camera technique. Remember, this is where Burch got into 
>trouble. Joanne is right on to ask us to think about cultural and 
>historical context. I don't know about her own question, but I can 
>give you one that shows how it might work. The cameramen that 
>photographed the remains of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945-1946 shot 
>many pans. They clearly felt the pan was the best way to capture the 
>astounding spectacle of a leveled city. Being a westerner myself, 
>I'd suggest that the reason you find pans in westerns has to do with 
>the sense of space you have in the West. It's different. It's 
>typical to be able to see tens of miles, sometimes a hundred miles, 
>wherever you stand. I get nervous whenever I cross the Mississippi. 
>Japan drives me nuts!
>
>Markus


-- 


Univ. of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32601, USA
<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jmurphy>
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