Slow Motion to Speed Ramps: 5 of the Best Shots of All Time | A CineFix Movie List

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Across 5 installments of our Best Shots of All Time series we’ve broken down scale, arrangement, the inanimate, lenses, and movement over the course of dissecting 23 different incredible shots. But the one thing we haven’t touched on yet, is time. Cinema, after all, not only gets to play with space, but it can distort and interpret time itself in some fantastic ways. So these are our picks for 5 MORE of the best shots of all time.

Thinking about how movies deal with time in spatial terms, we’re looking at slow motion as a close up on time. Slowing down an event, magnifying everything that happens to study it more minutely used wonderfully in everything from Seven Samurai to Mean Streets and Wes Anderson films, in particular Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Then there is the extreme wide shot of time through the use of fast motion and time lapse, like The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, or a zoom in on time with the speed ramp made famous most recently by action films like anything by Zack Snyder (although we only talk about 300 here), Guy Ritchie and Sherlock Holmes and ramping into bullet time in The Matrix.

The point is, there are so many ways for a filmmaker to re-interpret how the audience observes an event through time. These are just 5 of them!

The Picks:

Slow Motion - Chungking Express (1994) dir. Wong Kar-wai
Fast Motion - A Clockwork Orange (1971) dir. Stanley Kubrick
Speed Ramp - Contact (1997) dir. Robert Zemeckis
Reverse - The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) dir. Julian Schnabel
Freeze Frame - Charuluta (1964) dir. Satyajit Ray

The video was written and edited by Billy Jackson.

For the rest of the Greatest Shots of All Time series in one easy to watch place, here’s a list!

Pt 1 Scale - The Godfather Part 2, Lawrence of Arabia - https://youtu.be/hWiIEiyWFTY
Pt 2 Relational Shots - Stanley Kubrick, Metropolis - https://youtu.be/vHY1HeaLSL4
Pt 3 Character-less Shots - Ozu, The Mirror - https://youtu.be/Jqx3xb-avio
Pt 4 Camera Moves - The Dark Knight, Taxi Driver - https://youtu.be/yLHNBssyuE4
Pt 5 Lenses - The Graduate - https://youtu.be/dctO0A1-yNQ


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