Contextual Studies- Filming style

Obsession (1976)
Director-Bran De Palma
Psychological suspense thriller
Homage to Hitchcocks Vertigo

Starts off establishing visual motifs
Camera moves forward, then circular movements with couples dancing. The shot the closes up to the waste of a man  with a gun who turns around. All done in one shot, tracking. De Palma sets up visual motifs with forward momentum tracking shot taking the audience close to the action.
Continuation of camera moving. As the dancers move around the camera follows around. De Palma foreshadows by setting up the father and daughter at the start and again at the end.
Chekhov's Gun is a narrative literary trade. Anton Chekhov in drawing room of his plays tends to be very dark. Gun in frame, don't put in frame without having any significance. Dolly takes you into ransom note.
The film does a great time leap in one sequence. Memorial park.
Reminder of opening titles, showing us significance of first opening shot.
Dolly shot of inside religious building; continuity with movement
Power position of businessman and Italian art student is reversed. She's on platform above talking to him, so in terms of power dynamics she is important,nad will be more later on. Psychologically wants to show what their relationship potentially might be.
There was an original thing painted, but something was then painted on top of it.
Dolly shot. Looks at family painting. Zooms in on eyes of woman in paintings eyes to the artists eyes. They go back and forth. Forward dolly carry into scene, but can be done just as effectively with just a zoom.
Interesting camera movement whenever entering a new space. Spinning track shot always has psychological significance. Its no coincidence with their stylistic choices. They are repeating that same circular narrative.
Putting on the dead woman jewellery - shot in matter that has been staged there but gives a sense of the thought process behind the character. She enters locked room she shouldn't be in, but she invades her space. She therefore beginning to adopt her persona's?
End circular motion repeated at the end as is with his daughter at the start. The woman he loves and slept with is his daughter.

De Palma uses all the sense of a romantic drama with shots (soft focus) and music. But it is a psychological thriller.
Genres often have a technical style, but visually you could deceive those expectations. Why not shoot a Thriller in the style of a Western.

Pennies from Heaven
Identical classroom scenes-Hollywood vs British film version
But how do they differ?
Bigger budget
Hollywood was less subtle
Different times- Hollywood version probably had more technology available to them
Why does drama use thee types of fantasy sequences?

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