Friday, September 3, 2010

Inspiration upon inspiration upon inspiration


In Wes Anderson’s fourth film, we follow sea captain and oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) as he treks through the sea in search of the illusive Jaguar shark that ate his partner Esteban. In one scene, Steve Zissou breaks the fourth wall and gives a guided tour of his ship named the Belafonte to the audience. The Belafonte set is a gigantic cross-section of a ship, allowing the audience to see simultaneously into every room and compartment. In a long continuous take, the camera pans from side to side, showing all of the rooms and their inhabitants.



Inspired By: Tout Va Bien

The infamous Belafonte set was directly inspired from the sausage factory from Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien. During the film, an American journalist named Susan (Jane Fonda) and her husband Jacques are trapped inside the aforementioned factory when a strike breaks out when they attempted to interview the manager. Intended to promote Godard’s Maoist politics through the use of traditional Western cinematic structure, the film attempted to use the strike as a metaphor for class struggle. The cross-sectioned sausage factory allows the audience to see all of the different stages of the strike as the camera dollies back and forth. But believe it or not, Tout Va Bien did not originate the idea of a cross-sectioned set. This piece of revolutionary cinema was inspired, in fact, by a Jerry Lewis comedy.

Inspired By: The Ladies Man

One of Jerry Lewis’ seminal comedies, The Ladies Man tells the story of Herbert H. Heebert. At the start of the film, good-natured but shy Herbert loses his girlfriend. As a result, he develops a crippling fear of women. Wackiness ensues when he gets a job as a caretaker at a women-only boarding house. The boarding house was constructed as a series of cross-sections, allowing the camera to observe all of the girls at once. This leads to one of the film’s greatest scenes where the girls all wake up in the morning and prepare for the day. The camera glides between all of the rooms and watches as the boarding house erupts into an ant-farm of activity. The catchy jazz tune that accompanies the scene doesn’t hurt, either. The scene in question is listed below, albeit dubbed in Spanish.



Ask @Ebert!

From blog post: Top Ten Famous Scenes (And the Movies They Were Inspired By):  http://bit.ly/auGNvi

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