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While watching the post-cinematic HD movie “District 9”, the viewers come across a low-resolution hand-held camera used in the shape of news reportage. The above scenes show similar footages, in which case, the camera itself seems to appear as a separate character with discoloured images. Why a separate character, because it seems like the footage comes from somewhere outside of the movie, as if some news reporter or a news channel intrudes in and suddenly starts showing its own footage. Aesthetically speaking, the scenes take us from the post-cinematic digital cinema of the 21^st century to the old cinema of the 20^th century. Shane Denson (2016) calls these “crazy cameras” which do not seem to know their position regarding the separation of non-diegetic and diegetic planes of reality. Further, these hand-held cameras leave the viewers in a disturbing situation as they suddenly deviate from the latest high-resolution camera scenes to the low resolution.

Conversely speaking, these low-resolution footages might help create more realistic, natural-world scenes by switching between the interplay of a high and low resolution. The viewers might become more attentive due to a quasi-objective scene and start looking through the scene as a token or sign of “realisticness”. The paradox is that the camera itself comes as a new character, signifying the importance of a “close-to-reality” scene and occupying both objective and subjective positions for the viewers. Overall, this kind of cinematography where a hand-held camera appears as a separate character and closer to reality might not be a crazy camera, but rather another realistic representation of the post-cinematic movie scenes. This might relate to social realism, a ‘slice of life’ (Hayward, 2006). These post-cinematic camera scenes do not blur the lines between digital cinema and the old cinema films. But rather, joins them to create a hybrid kind of a new perception, a split between digital cinema reality and the reality proposed by hand-held cameras.

References:

Denson, S. (2016). Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect.

Hayward, S. (2006). Cinema Studies: the Key Concepts, (tr. 2012). Seoul, Hannarae.

Written by Yihan Xu (33675720) 13/11/22