Camerawork
Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.
- camerawork
- reference
- technical-code
Shot size, angle, height, movement, lens choice, focus — the technical code that decides the audience's physical relationship to the story. Every setup is a claim about who is looking, from where, and with what right; the theory-side extension of that claim is The camera as voyeur.
What to look for
Whose eye-level does the camera adopt? When does it move on its own initiative rather than following action? What does a high or low angle do to power?
Canonical cases
The crane that drifts over Phoenix and slips through a window in Psycho — the opening — the camera as uninvited watcher. The low angles that grow on Norman through Psycho — the parlour scene. The gliding studio-crane classicism of Alice — the prologue, moving the way cameras moved in the films it quotes.
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art for the standard taxonomy; Truffaut on point-of-view cutting.