The photographer of "American Beauty" is Conrad Hall, who has won the Oscar for Best Photography three times in his life, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Photography seven times. In 2009, the Society of Cinematographers of America initiated a vote to select the ten best photographic films in the 1998-2008 film, and "American Beauty" was selected tenth. And in 1994, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Cinematographer Association. He has always pursued to build his own photographic mansion with simple light, color, and intuitive composition. We have always said that the domestic concept of photography is relatively backward, but in Hall's lens, we can see the originality and foresight.
First of all, in the five consecutive shots at the beginning of the film, there are shots of five kinds of sceneries covering the distance, the whole, the middle and the near, while skipping over a high-class neighborhood inhabited by the middle class, there are wide and straight streets lined with plants. The distant shots of Elm and Platanus appear four times in the film, and they also represent the four different moods of the protagonist Lester, and these four moods are all told from the perspective of the soul of the dead. The first part is a push shot, which appeared in the opening scene, and it seemed that the life of the character was boring; the second part appeared after quarreling with his wife, which made him feel that his life had unexpected impulsive emotions and sexual functions, and began to feel that the characters There was a change in his heart; the third place was the day before his death, during the exercise, he quoted the words on the poster, which made his life short and full of passion; the fourth place was after his death, only this The use of zooming lens to express, has a kind of separation effect, separating the audience from the plot of the film, accompanied by the monologue of the characters, and then giving the audience time and space to think. Such a lens truly has a "soul".
Secondly, in the space composition of a conversation between Leicester and the personnel director, it can be seen that the lens is used to convey more information. In the first conversation between the two, the "head space" of the supervisor completely suppressed Leicester, apparently holding the dominance of the discourse. When Leicester said that he possessed the disgraceful evidence of leadership, the two The composition of people's "head space" is fully consistent, showing the equality of the two people's speaking status. The first few groups of "positive and negative fight" were "internal fight". The two were not in the same frame. They also became several groups of "outside fight" after Lester told the secret of leadership. "It is the two people in the same frame, which shows that the relationship between the two is getting closer.
Hall is also very intuitive in the layout of the composition, and often uses the mirror in the frame. In the opening scene of the dialogue between wife Caroline and neighbors, the husband Lester is always peeping through the window in the depth of field. Tian Zige’s window is a shackle and a cage, but he always looks at the hypocrisy of his wife with contempt. In the beginning, his wife and neighbors were in the dominant position, and as the camera moved vertically towards Leicester, he became the subject of the picture, and the camera's perspective changed to that of Leicester, indicating a change in the status of the characters. And when Ricky was shooting Jane with a DV, what he shot was shown on the TV behind him. It was also a picture-in-picture structure with a unique personal touch.
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