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Spielberg
What makes Steven Spielberg a great filmmaker? A study of the Spielberg face.
There was a time when the arrival of a Steven Spielberg movie was a major event. His films were instrumentalin creating the tent pole and blockbuster mentality of modern movies, where every opening weekend has to break the bank, and better still, has to be a movie with sequel potential. People were lined uparound the block to see Jaws, (and Star Wars, and The Exorcist, the other original blockbuster weekend trendsetters), and nowadays major movies are a failure if they don’t make upwards of $100million their first weekend. And of course, Jaws, Star Wars and The Exorcist all also had multiple sequels. The movies changed a lot in the 1970s. Spielberg is one of the chief engineers of that change.There was a reason Spielberg changed the movies, and at the bottom, it’s because he was (and is) good at making movies. Spielberg brought to his movies a sense of craft that was reminiscent of classicstudio Hollywood. He knew how to arrange pieces of film in such a way that the storytelling was dynamic and rich and never let up, even when it wasn’t a question of mere action; the quiet parts of E.T.are every bit as engrossing as the action and the comedy. As a student of film himself, he learned his lessons well. He knew both intuitively and consciously what the greats like John Ford and HowardHawks and the like were able to do and how they did it, and he built on that. Today Spielberg seems ubiquitous, and we sort of take him for granted. This is a mistake. Go watch E.T. or Raiders of theLost Ark again. These movies are not only great but they remind you why movies can be great: there is an exuberance to the sheer film-making that spills over from the director to the viewer.Spielberg’s love of movies infects you and you start loving movies too.
Caudal recently pointed to a fascinating video essay entitled The Spielberg Face. It looks at how Spielberg took the closeup, which...