Gimbal Cinema and Point of View

Hey, everybody’s talking about it, this mini flying drone “tracking” shot (can we retire that term? how about “oneshot” or something?). It zooms through a bowling alley, flying down the lanes, zipping behind the scenes; it was evidently the 10th take or so, which sounds about right. I think of this aesthetic as gimbal cinema. It’s not disparaging; it’s descriptive. Drones and other popular types of modern camera support often use electronic gimbals to stabilize the camera element, whether the camera is built-in or attached to the drone.

Yay, Minneapolis, for one. I want to fucking go to this bowling alley immediately—it seems there’s a theater, bar, maybe restaurant. I am hungry and I like movies and bowling. And alcohol. Yes, so all the things. Naturally the video also includes an homage to The Big Lebowski, an inevitable but charming moment. The video is too long—it wouldn’t be quite like this in a movie; it would be shorter—but it’s a great demo. I expect to see A LOT more of this kind shooting in the near future. I am reminded of…

David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002) does not make use of a tiny camera drone, which could not accomplish this “impossible shot,” anyway. This video shows what it looks like with and without the CGI. Fincher’s shot is interesting in part because it’s a use of CGI in a realistic setting that does some of what fantasy filmmakers were doing at that time, and ever since, that is, using conventions of cinematography to show us things that are not there. But, in this case, what’s not there isn’t the matrix or an X-Wing but the ordinary parts of a house.

Showing us what’s not there is the amazing thing that CGI can do—think of the wonder of seeing the giant dinosaurs for the first time in Jurassic Park (1993) or the entire environment of Pandora in Avatar (2009). (Or it can show us what’s not not there—like Gary Sinise’s leg in Forrest Gump.) Fincher’s use of CGI in Panic Room accomplishes something else as well. It creates a shot that is impossible to achieve with a camera. Filmmakers have been thrilling audiences in this way for a while, too, even when the shot is not technically impossible…

Filmmakers can use these shots in different ways. Fincher uses his shot to show us burglars trying to break into a house in a few different places until they find an opening. The shot also shows us the layout of the house, of course, and underscores his theme of privacy and the violation of privacy. In other words, sometimes these shots have an aesthetic as well as a narrative purpose. (Whereas the innovative drone shot in the bowling alley has less of a narrative purpose than a demonstration purpose, an “isn’t it cool what we can do” purpose.)

Where a filmmaker chooses to place the camera is, of course, one of the most significant choices they will make. They choose to reveal or not reveal crucial pieces of information, they frame characters in specific ways that affect how the audience feels about them and they also suggest a psychological point of view. This is different from the kind of point of view shot (POV) in which the camera is literally meant to be the eyes of a character or show us directly what they see. Psychological point of view asks us to think about whose experience or emotions are being reflected in the way a scene is shot. This can be used to reflect characters’ fantasies, such as this sequence from Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But… (1932), in which two young brothers going to a new school worry about bullies attacking them. When they reach the schoolyard, they see it’s an all-out brawl, so they run away. Are we meant to believe that a brawl of this magnitude is truly taking place? Or is this simply the brothers’ perception of what’s happening? The ambiguity in that question suggests that, in this moment, we are seeing things from the brothers’ psychological point of view, rather than some kind of objective point of view.

Psychological POV can be more subtle, too. In the Copacabana scene from Goodfellas (1990), Martin Scorsese and his DP, Michael Ballhaus, created one of cinema’s most famous tracking shots, an unbroken take that travels from the street outside the nightclub into a side entrance, through the corridor and into the kitchen then finally into the club itself, to the table placed specially for our characters right down front for Henny Youngman’s standup routine. The scene could be said to be from Karen’s point of view—not literally, but psychologically, in terms of what it shows her about Henry. The scenes preceding this one have primarily centered Karen’s point of view (using her voiceover, too) to describe her first few dates with her future husband, gangster Henry Hill. Those dates did not go well. But in the Copacabana scene, Henry dazzles Karen with his money and his backstage access. The floating camera—a gimbal-like Steadicam shot—mimics Karen’s lighter-than-air dazzlement, the magic of this man who is sweeping her off her feet, and we experience it with her in real time.

But what about the shot from Citizen Kane (1941), above, from the lightning-lit poster of Susan Alexander Kane, “singer,” up and over the building, through the nightclub sign and down into the nightclub (the latter part accomplished with a cut)? What is this shot’s point of view? It’s a wonderfully showy bit of camerawork, made possible using a breakaway model and disguised with light and noise—it’s a classic Orson Welles “train-set” shot—but does it reflect the psychology of any character? Is it pure show? What is its narrative meaning or purpose? Without diverting into that side discussion, I will assert that there is a great deal that can be said about this question that begins to get to some of the core questions raised by Kane, but the question itself is one that might be asked of many shots, particularly these kinds of fancy shots enabled by modern drones and gimbals.

Drone shots have already become an eye-rolling cliché in documentary filmmaking, so quickly have they proliferated. In narrative filmmaking, at least, drones are being used with a larger palette. For example, in The Vast of Night (2019), drones and other gimbaled camera support are used to create a series of shots of very long duration, repurposing and expanding the kind of visual language used previously, for the most part, in classics of “slow cinema,” such as the films of Béla Tarr. What does this kind of shooting tell us about what’s happening in The Vast of Night? How is it used? Whose is the point of view, if anyone’s, and if it’s the director’s omniscient, godlike point of view, which is both inside and outside the movie, in a sense, in what way is it related to any narrative purpose?