Week 25.10 - Socials Roundup
Posts from 03 Mar - 09 Mar 2025
Week 25.10 posts include shots from A Colt is My Passport (1967); The Brutalist (2024); Disobedience (2017); Severance (2022-current) and Severance (2022-current).
The Brutalist
Last week we gave you our favourite Five Shots from The Brutalist: here's the chaser.
From composition and blocking to the colours and wardrobe, nearly every shot in this sequence reminds me of a Jack Vettriano painting.
The smoke and film grain in The Brutalist scene combine to give it an especially smeary, textural, oil painting look and feel.
Severance
A powerful 2.06 "Attila" sequence of Milchick sorting paperwork opens with a glass jar of paper clips 'dividing' him vertically and horizontally.
This may / not suggest Milchick is 'officially' severed, but certainly shows how torn he is as he attempts to suppress feelings brought out by his performance review.
A Colt is My Passport
The transitions in this sequence are art in service of its own mini-story as evidence is destroyed — all in a thug's day's work.
The camera pan draws our attention to the crusher and spurting fire, before an insert shot reminds us the importance of a briefcase inside.
The car spins in a still frame, pieces disintegrating before before cutting to only its skeleton; note it’s sliding the same direction it was turning in the prior shot, connecting the idea so we don’t have to wonder ‘is this the same car.’ As it slides, the camera tilts with it . . .
Off the car slide / camera tilt downward, the sequence cuts to a still frame where a crusher continues the downward motion; again, keeping the idea ‘this is the same car’ through similar movements across cuts. Dust puffs as the crusher fully closes, and then . . .
Dust puffs transition into smoke rising as the now-cubed car emerges from the crusher moving L-R. This movement eases us into to a wider shot, the first without the car where both camera and two characters are moving L-R.
The camera quickly pans back and forth between characters: L-R, R-L. We expect another L-R whip, but! at 0:35 instead it hard cuts to one of those characters now in a car. We’re still moving L-R, as conversation continues unbroken.
The scene ends as the character leans and camera pans to a carphone, then there’s a hard cut into the shiny carphone speaker.
All along the motions have compelled us from cut to cut.
Disobedience
Disobedience (2017) constantly reframes its three main characters - childhood friends, one now estranged, two married - in different ways as their dynamics shift.
Here, as Ronit (Rachel Weisz) and Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) reconnect, their connection is broken by Esti (Rachel McAdams) literally coming between them, at a distance.
Severance
This split diopter show from Severance 2.06 accomplishes so many things at once:
shows us Mark's bloody nose (and twitching eyes) and Helly's nervous fingers all at once
reminds us her hands were on his face when his nose started bleeding (!)
'connects' the two of them even across the room, where a rack focus would remind us how far apart they are