Question
In Whiplash (2014) at the beginning of the hazing scene around 15:48 there is a frame with a close up of an object on the floor that looked like a fly to me at first. However it does not move and I can not figure what it is or what it means.
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High zoom with some slight Photoshop cleanup…
Answer
Having just watched the scene, I don't think it really means anything. It's part of the 'here comes everybody' setup. The shot is really 'feet walking past'. Equally there are shots of sheet music, sometimes with someone pointing at it. There's a row of empty chairs which trumpet cases are then put onto.
The fluff might have been accidental, or it gave a fixed point to a moving shot. There's also a well-placed off-centre diagonal joint in the flooring - it's a nice shot, but I think it's just 'nicely-framed imagery'. I think we just have a cherry-picked frame of a continuing set of establishing shots.
To bring some comments into the answer… You can "quantify" a shot & there are many compositional theories from way back in the days of renaissance paintings to 'define' how a composition is placed.
This kind of breaks them all. I see it as a really good framing, but it refuses to conform to any of the pre-conceived theoretical 'best practices'.
It doesn't sit in S-curve, quadrant, rule of thirds, golden ratio or golden spiral. It does nicely balance the floor joint, but only in a non-theoretical way. It just "looks nice to me" & blows much compositional theory out of the water, There's an organic balance against the light reflections on the floor, but even those are 'unbalanced' according to the theories. The whole shot is an exercise in negative space, if anything. The 'interest' is passing, not static.
The trouble with theories or rules in art, of course, is that some people always follow them, some people break them by accident & some people break them on purpose… and often you'll never know what the intent actually was.
Sometimes a shot just works. Sometimes things get over-analysed.
Sometimes no matter how much you study something, you just can't get it how you wanted… with apologies to Monty Python
which, if you ignore the dammit & extra hands, nicely sits in golden ratio, just like the classics always usually sometimes occasionally did.
Answered By - Tetsujin
