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Ethan Coen Filmography
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Ethan Coen: Camera techniques
Visually, the Coens favor moving camera shots, especially tracking shots and crane shots; when the camera is "static" it is often still drifting slightly. Their films are also distinguished by cinematic visual flourishes that mark turning points in their films.
Occasionally in their tracking shots they "rush" the camera forward, as in the scene in
Raising Arizona where Nathan Jr. is discovered missing; the Coen brothers dubbed the rush forward the "Raimi cam" in tribute to their longtime friend and director
Sam Raimi, who used rushes extensively in Evil Dead
(which Joel Coen helped edit). The Hudsucker Proxy features not one but two consecutive rushes when Norville shows Mussburger's secretary the Blue Letter: first on the mouth of the lady screaming on the ladder, and then on Norville reacting to the scream.
The Coen brothers' earlier films made extensive use of wide-angle lenses. Cinematographer Roger A. Deakins (who replaced Barry Sonnenfeld when Sonnenfeld left to pursue a directing career) has been trying to wean them off the lenses since he started working with them (the lenses allow great depth of field but also cause considerable distortion in the apparent size of objects based on how far they are from the camera). Deakins has been working towards longer lenses, which appear to shorten the distance between objects, but have shallower depth of field.
The Coen brothers use camera angles which sometimes hide rather than reveal information, as in
Fargo when Jean Lundegaard is hiding in the shower, in Miller's Crossing when Tom goes into his room after Leo leaves, (Verna is on the bed behind him), and in Blood Simple when Abby is sitting up in bed with Ray and the Volkswagen pulls up outside her window.
They also frequently "hide" their cuts in a close-up on an object, in the style of Hitchcock's Rope
: one occurrence of this is obvious in Fargo, when Carl is banging on the television to get it to work (when the picture finally comes in clearly it is in fact a cut to Marge's television as seen from her bed). The brothers make a similar cut in Miller's Crossing when the close up of the window at Vernie's house pans away to show a man dead on the floor at another; in The Hudsucker Proxy when Amy Archer is cheering "Go Eagles!" after Norville hires her (the film cuts to her showing the same cheer to her coworker at the newspaper); and in Blood Simple when the "close-up" of the ceiling fan over Marty's head at the bar turns out to be from Abby's point of view on the couch at Ray's house.
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