Steven Spielberg's Style by Stealth by James Mairata

Author:James Mairata
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3. Omaha Beach Landing

This sequence from Saving Private Ryan (1998) uses the wide reverse strategy initially to create a spatial ‘anchor’ that orientates the spectator amid the unfolding chaos. This begins with the first, somewhat indistinct wide shot of the beach taken from the rear of the landing craft (Fig. 6.5a—although there are 18 shots before this of the soldiers travelling in the landing craft). This is tightly reversed in shot two (Fig. 6.5b) and then a wide elevated tracking shot (Fig. 6.5c) from the German bunker that reveals the origin and placement of the firing machine gun. Figure 6.5d is a reverse long lens view of the bunker and reinforces its spatial positioning in relation to the foregrounded soldiers on the landing craft. Spielberg reiterates this positioning and the importance of the bunker by including it in the next two shorter lens shots—one from the right side of the landing craft (Fig. 6.5e) and the next from the left side (Fig. 6.5f). If we consider the position of these two shots as a de facto master perspective and then reverse this with the wide machine gun shots (Fig. 6.5c—and repeated twice more in the scene), we can construct a line of axis between the two perspectives—much like the imaginary line drawn between two characters facing each other and commonly used in shooting dialogue (the axis of action or line). This becomes the line that the character’s eye-lines and camera placements do not cross for the remainder of this sequence (except for two instances I will explore later and excluding the underwater shots where the spatial orientation is arbitrary). All of the action that takes place for this sequence on the beach therefore occurs looking either towards the bunker from the beach, from the beach to the bunker or along the beach to the left (from the landing American soldiers’ perspective). Except for two brief shots, the right side of the beach is never revealed. The wide reverses are also causally significant because they establish the source of the carnage and therefore simultaneously identify the goal for the soldiers and the spectator—to knock out the bunker. The delineation of scenographic space and the nature of the character’s goal orientation are both confirmed in the first seven shots of a sequence that includes some 77 shots.

Figs. 6.5a, 6.5b

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