Clip aesthetics, mosaic drama, cockney, London, scuffle – we analyze the style details of the most driving director of our time
According to Guy Ritchie himself, the film that determined his fate is “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” – a stylized western about two legendary bandits of the Wild West with an abundance of fights, shootings, pursuits and with overwhelming coolness of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Richie took on many elements of this picture, and above all – a criminal motive. Its heroes are criminals of all sizes, from street punks to large mafiosi and from gypsies to Russian oligarchs. True, if at the early stage of his work Richie was absorbed in the mechanism of showdowns within the criminals, then starting with “Sherlock Holmes” the director changes focus and makes his heroes those who are fighting “bad guys”: detectives and spies. In recent films, Richie continues to pay homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by making buddy movie stories – fighting evil in tandem.
Mosaic drama
Guy Ritchie has a lot in common with Quentin Tarantino, up to the fact that the Briton is called the “copy-paste” of his American colleague. The similarities, above all, relate to the approach to playwrights. Like Tarantino, most of Richie’s paintings are multi-figure actions with multiple overlapping storylines. The difference, perhaps, lies in the fact that Ritchie’s different stories are collected into a single structure not so much due to separate cross-cutting elements, but indirectly influencing each other throughout the entire narrative. For the same reason, Tarantino’s non-linear history after the fact is not so difficult to arrange in chronological order. For Richie, cross-editing of plot snippets, flashbacks, and flashforads makes this task difficult. And although the director was more than once reproached with some vagueness of the stories, he himself, at least in the early films, was obviously not embarrassed by this, because that was his task – to recreate the chaotic state of the world on the screen.
Visual stylistics
Like David Fincher, Michael Bay and several other filmmakers who came to the cinema in the 90s, Guy Ritchie began shooting commercials and music videos. In his own words, he perceived this experience as a way to acquire the necessary practical skills. As a result, mastery of the alphabet of techniques typical for clips and advertisements defined the visual aesthetics of Richie’s films. There are several of the director’s favorite techniques (segmented screen, rapid, parallel editing), but rather it is worth talking about a whole set of tools that he uses like a juggler.
A typical example is the poker scene in the opening “Cards, Money, Two Barrels”. Rhythmically changing frames 1-3 seconds long were filmed with either a static or a panning camera, while the proportions of objects in the frame are distorted. The dynamics of the action is emphasized by rapid, time-lapse and freeze frames. To convey the confusion of the lost hero, a sharp transition to a close-up, contra-zoom, deforming background, the technology of attaching the camera to the actor’s body mount, multiple exposure and, at the end of the curtain, foreshortening are used.
Another striking example is the opening scene of The Big Jackpot. Combining different editing techniques – jump cut, clip editing, visual coincidence, freeze frame – and camera work – handheld shooting, zoom, camera angles – the director not only gets a dynamic pictorial series, but also manages to fit the exposure in just two minutes. opening and opening credits. By the way, Richie pays special attention to the credits, making them independent in almost every film and, what is very rare, a fascinating episode.
It is curious that the complex set of techniques with which the scene will be solved, as a rule, is formed by Richie instinctively right on the set. The director himself describes the process as follows: “I firmly believe that being nervous about what you are going to shoot is an extremely bad idea. I never know what we are going to shoot on a particular day of shooting, thirty seconds is enough to get oriented. The human brain works like this: it turns on here and now. This is the approach to directing that I have been practicing for a long time – it has the least stress and maximum sense of the moment. “
A prime example of this spontaneous approach can be found in “Rock and Roll”. Due to a respiratory tract infection in Gerard Butler, Tandy Newton did not dare to play sensual love with him, so on the day of filming it was decided to shoot the material in such a way that later it would be cut in a clip style. The result is one of the most memorable, albeit short sex scenes in the history of cinema.
