Dutch angle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)

A Dutch angled shot from Battlefield Earth, a film notorious for its use of such shots^[1]^[2]

A Dutch tilt, Dutch angle, oblique angle, German angle, canted angle or Batman Angle is a cinematic tactic often used to portray the psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed. A Dutch angle is achieved by tilting the camera off to the side so that the shot is composed with the horizon at an angle to the bottom of the frame. Many Dutch angles are static shots at an obscure angle, but in a moving Dutch angle shot the camera can pivot, pan or track along the director/cinematographer's established diagonal axis for the shot.

[edit] Examples of usage in movies

The angle was widely used in German cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, hence its name (Deutsch, meaning German, was often confused with the English word Dutch). Montages of Dutch angles are structured in a way that the tilts are almost always horizontally opposite in each shot, for example, a right tilted shot will nearly always be followed with a left tilted shot, and so on.

The 1949 film The Third Man makes extensive use of Dutch angle shots, to emphasize the main character's alienation in a foreign environment. An anecdote of cinema lore alleges that once filming was completed, the crew presented director Carol Reed with a spirit level, to sardonically encourage him to use more traditional shooting angles.^{[citation needed]}

Dutch angles were used extensively in the original TV series and 1966 film of Batman, where each villain had his own angle. Scenes filmed in any villain's hideout, when only the chief villain and his henchmen were present, were invariably shot at an angle departing extremely from the horizontal. Such was the influence of this series in Britain that the colloquial term "Batman Angle" is still in common use today in that country.^{[citation needed]}

Dutch angles are frequently used by film directors who have a background in the visual arts, such as Tim Burton (in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Ed Wood), and Terry Gilliam, who used Dutch angles in The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland (film) to represent madness, disorientation, and/or drug psychosis. Sam Raimi used Dutch angles throughout the Evil Dead trilogy, to show that a character has become possessed.

The Dutch angle is an overt cinematographical technique that can easily be overused.^[who?] The science-fiction film Battlefield Earth (2000), in particular, drew sharp criticism for its pervasive use of the Dutch angle. In the words of film critic Roger Ebert, "the director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."^[3]

The 2006 film Fay Grim was shot almost exclusively using Dutch angles.