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Finch wrote:Playlist review [of the 2013 Evil Dead remake] is damning.

During the Q&A someone asked Alvarez why he felt it was okay to break the 180 degree line in the film, to which he responded that it hadn't really occurred to him and you can see this kind of sloppiness throughout the film. He didn't set out to break the rules, he just didn't really understand them in the first place. On a smaller debut he could've worked out some of these kinks out before transitioning onto a larger effort but here his inexperience is glaring. Horror is tension and release, anticipation and delivery, so despite throwing 100,000 gallons of blood on the screen, Alvarez doesn't seem to grasp these most basic fundamentals. Instead his film plays as a series of scenes where intense "stuff happens" and at times it's disgusting but never scary or fun.

CSM126 wrote:I'm not entirely sure what they mean by "breaking the 180 degree line", but if they're literally referring to camera motion, I'm pretty sure there's no rule for how far one may turn their camera. Or else we'd all need to lambast Godard for the 360 spin in Week End.

swo17 wrote:It is, like many other rules, meant to be broken, but when you are breaking it you should know that you are doing so and why.

Roger Ryan wrote:There are many ways you can effectively break the 180° rule (and good filmmakers do), but you need to understand why the rule exists first before you can do that!

jindianajonz wrote:

Roger Ryan wrote:There are many ways you can effectively break the 180° rule (and good filmmakers do), but you need to understand why the rule exists first before you can do that!

I'm sure nobody wants this to get philosophical, but this just leads back to the question of how connected art is to the artist- can an artist unintentionally stumble across brilliance? I wouldn't be so quick to say anybody "needs" to do this; I'd much rather approach it after the fact from the point of view "I saw it, and it didn't work."

On a related note, how long has the 180 degree rule been around? Somebody pointed out Joan of Arc as a movie that constantly breaks it, and my first question is whether or not Dreyer was consiously aware that he was breaking the rule, or if he just made a film in a way that pleased him and it just so happened that this meant breaking the rule in the process. Had the rule been established in 1928, and did Dreyer ever say that his intention was to break it?

Gregory wrote:The examples of the moving train, the football match, and the Shining bathroom scene all involve opposite side-views that are 180 degrees apart ("on the line" one might say). But the practice of Ozu and others of filming 2 people who are speaking to one another by having each directly face the camera as it points in opposite directions on the line of a 180-degree axis seems to me far less disorienting than the opposing side views. So it seems to me there's more than one type of phenomenon here, depending on how the scene is set up.
As to when and where the rule emerged, Bordwell actually refers to it as "Hollywood's 180-degree system" in the Ozu book (emphasis added).

Gregory wrote:The examples of the moving train, the football match, and the Shining bathroom scene all involve opposite side-views that are 180 degrees apart ("on the line" one might say). But the practice of Ozu and others of filming 2 people who are speaking to one another by having each directly face the camera as it points in opposite directions on the line of a 180-degree axis seems to me far less disorienting than the opposing side views. So it seems to me there's more than one type of phenomenon here, depending on how the scene is set up.
As to when and where the rule emerged, Bordwell actually refers to it as "Hollywood's 180-degree system" in the Ozu book (emphasis added).

...the overall cutting logic within scenes of any length is often designed to take the spectator around the entire group involved in the action, so that the room, the characters and the settings are seen from all sides. This position also gives a sense of epistemological command, insofar as the spectator can receive the impression of being able to see everything there is to be seen. This pattern occurs in all the films in the sample [Bridge, The Unfailing Beam, Li Shuangshuang, Woman Basketball Player No. 5, Early Spring in February, Two Stage Sisters]. For example, in the scene at the beginning of Early Spring in February [1963] where Xiao Jianqiu is in the Tao family home, the camera begins with an establishing shot showing the table with the men arranged around it and the door through which Tao Lan is soon to enter along the left hand wall. After her entry, the characters get up and move around, and the cutting takes the camera round the room, so to speak, moving to the right of the table and round behind it, all the while giving the spectator good views of relevant facial expressions, be it a speaker or someone who is reacting, as it also gives an all-round view of the scene.

This method appears to exceed the 180-degree rule of the Hollywood classical cinema, which forbids cutting over an imaginary 180-degree line corresponding to the axis of action for fear of changes in screen direction that might confuse the viewer. However, most cuts that go over the 180-degree line in the Chinese classical cinema avoid confusion, partly because the large number of characters interacting and moving about in these scenes often make it hard to establish a 180-degree axis in the first place, and partly because prior establishing shots and full shots have provided the spectator with sufficient orientation.

Most shots that go over the 180-degree line in the Chinese classical cinema are not used in any particular meaningful or systematic manner, but are subordinated to the principle of maintaining frontality and motivated by character movement. The one exception is when a large angle of cut over the 180-degree line is used to mark a sudden dramatic shift. For example, in the scene of Li Xia's departure in The Unfailing Beam [1958], a frontal shot of him with one other soldier on either side of him cuts as they turn to a shot from a position directly opposite. This marks the significance of Li Xia's leaving Yan'an, symbolically suggesting a clear line between two spaces, one now behind him.

Similarly, in Early Spring in February, an example is connected to Tao Lan's flashback to a scene by a lake where she saw Xiao Jianqiu before. This occurs as he is playing a piano piece called, significantly in terms of the overall concerns of the film, "Hesitation." The cut over the 180-degree line marks her sudden memory and also the dramatic shift from him playing the piano to her remembering. At the beginning of the scene, Tao Lan enters and stands to the left of the piano as Xiao begins to play. The first four shots of the piano are from the right side of the piano. The fifth shot cuts over the axis to a position behind Tao on the left side of the piano. She walks across the room, and the sixth shot is a close-up of her face. The seventh shot shows us what she is looking at, namely Xiao Jianqiu playing the piano, and the eighth shot is another close-up of her face, which then dissolves into the flashback. After the flashback, the film dissolves back into a close-up of her face. She is then shown walking back over to the piano, the camera moving with her, and to the left of the piano. The camera finishes in a position similar to that of the fifth shot on the left of the piano, and so this shot is a sort of reverse of the procedure. The next shot cuts back across the axis of action to the right of the piano, the side it was on at the beginning of the scene.

Mr Sausage wrote:But if you have a first time filmmaker like the Evil Dead director who doesn't even understand it, then you're much more likely to get continuity issues and a general awkwardness that may not serve the film well.