Week 89 posts include shots from The Naked City (1948); Pachinko (2022-current), Dickinson (2019-2021); Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009); and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).
Dickinson
This short and sweet scene from Dickinson 1.02 "I have never seen 'Volcanoes'" has so much going on; it starts and ends with a door closing, keeps camera and/or characters in motion, and strongly contrasts Lavinia (orange, circling) and Emily (blue, pivoting) against blue wallpaper in the hallways and orange in the sitting room.
Continuing on from this (and set just before a much more serious and fraught exchange between Emily and her father), Dickinson gives a fun sight gag;
Lavinia sits into a closeup, and her ponder "have I been knitting all day?" cues a camera move to show a preposterously long scarf trailing out of the room.
A smash-cut-to-wide would have also delivered the joke, but a move gives the sort of 'dawning realisation' vibe Lavinia gets.
Now you can really appreciate foreshadowing in the first clip; when Lavinia gets up, the scarf is clearly draped over the edge of the chair.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Bad Lieutenant uses incredibly particular lighting in this scene.
First we see McDonagh (Cage) in a shadowy storage room from the approximate POV of the door before the scene cuts to a closeup of a door.
At the door, the light is carefully calibrated to enable Mundt's (Michael Shannon) to transition between faceless shadowy shape to muddled expression then back to shadow.
Next is a low angle which keeps the 'light block' of the door within frame; even as Mundt steps in darkness obscures his face while lighting McDonagh's. We can't read Mundt's expression, only his body language. The lighting locks us on on McDonagh's response, before he sits up, the camera cuts to a new medium angle.
Even in the new angle McDonagh leans between light and dark. This play of light and dark is atmospheric, thematic, and keeps us the audience straining to 'read' the men's expressions.
The Naked City
The Naked City uses a match cut from bathtub to street cleaner to start its opening montage.
The narrator talks as city vehicles move Right-Left: trains to trucks, mail to milk delivery.
The cut moves us smoothly from the film’s central murder to the rhythms of life going on, as it does, every day, for everyone left alive to live it.
Glengarry Glen Ross
When Detective Baylen (Jude Ciccolella) comes to investigate theft and fraud, Roma (Al Pachino) first ignores then attempts to shut him down.
As Roma pontificates, Baylen is framed Right just over Roma's shoulder, while Baylen's shadow is starkly cast on the wall frame Left - showing no matter how Roma wriggles or what he ultimately gets away with, Baylen is closing in on him, and the truth.
Pachinko
Pachinko "Chapter Thirteen" opens with an extended sequence in black-and-white 4:3 ratio.
After it switches back to its usual full-colour widescreen, several times doors, beams, and other architecture make "false" 4:3 frames.
This framing puts some characters a nostalgic or reflective place, and in other scenes signifies these people are here here specifically because of the 4:3 history which opened the episode.