Vive L'Amour
Muriel
The two clips above illustrate the use of extremely long takes (Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour) vs. extremely rapid associational montage (Alain Resnais's Muriel). These two great directors use vastly different styles to great effect in analyzing the thought processes of these women. Resnais has always used a combination of montage to travel freely in time and space, and extremely fluid, beautiful tracking shots to immerse the viewer in a particular location. Tsai's style has maintained a largely static, carefully composed, contemplative style, although this early film has a more mobile camera as it follows this lonely woman through the park, before settling in for a powerful, seemingly endless still shot of her crying.
Au Hasard, Balthazar
The Long Day Closes
Above are two of the cinema's great uses of music to underscore dramatic action. Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar employs a Schubert sonata mixed with natural sounds (bells, the donkey's braying) to create one of the most shattering, transcendent endings in all of cinema. Terence Davies uses a pop song, Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy," over a series of overhead tracking shots that ritualistically portray and link together the confines of a young boy's life: the bars on which he plays at home, the rows of desks at school, rows of pews in church, cinema, and back home. Davies creates hypnotic visual and aural rhythms unique in cinema.
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