Watching the movie Dogville on DVD, I was intrigued by some comments of director Lars Von Trier. He talks about the difference between framing an image, the typical approach of arranging stuff in a balanced, pretty, thoughtful way, and what he calls pointing, i.e. pointing the camera at what is important dramatically, to the story. Pointing of course tends to put the primary subject in the center of the image, while framing is more concerned with the arrangement of the background/secondary subjects around the edges. His idea is that in terms of telling a story, framing introduces an added level of artificiality that dilutes or obscures the story telling.

LVT of course is shooting a moving image, in real time, and using a nervous, panning, hand-held camera and constant focus pulls, so when he says "pointing" it means just that, pointing. And he is telling a 3 hour story. How relevant are these thoughts to the (relatively) static world of large format? In general, how much can we learn from film makers?

Is it possible to ignore framing when creating an LF image? Well, if you allow cropping, then no. Maybe the best that can be done is to develop an "anti-framing" approach to framing, to achieve that "pointed-at" look. Of course that would be only more artificial, but then again I don't care about artificiality, or truth, or story telling, in a still image.

Just the musings of a Monday morning...