The Analysis of Camera Movement Aesthetics in Iranian cinema 2001-2011

At dawn of cinema, camera has been one of the most important devices for the directors. The device, with its mechanical structure, would be able to record the moments of life on the raw film. The ability which made the people amazed in the beginning. Across their notice to the nature of camera and deployment of cinematic explanation, the directors found out that they could use camera as the device for better story-telling and the more powerful narrative structure as well. This caused the more creative directors to think of the movement of camera as a tool to record various pictures gradually. The directors found out that the camera movement has a large capacity which had already been ignored. They found out that the narrative and dramatic potentials could transfer a part of their existence to the addressee by means of moving abilities of camera. Thereby, the directors’ attention focused on the phenomenon accumulatively, and various approaches emerged to it. This became so important that some directors began to show their individual genre by using the moving camera, and injected the phenomenon to the aesthetic structure of their movies in order to fill them with artistic delicacy. Besides the facts mentioned, the thing that has always been ignored in the researches of Iranian movies is the aesthetics of camera movements. Camera movement, due to its frequency of application, has changed into a common process and most of the film-makers use it with no regards for its expressive potentials. The main goal of this research is investigation and analysis of camera movement aesthetics in Iranian cinema and it is tried to look at this topic from a scientific point of view. Therefore, six movies which are produced from 2001 to 2011 are chosen as the statistical domain: Killing Mad Dogs (Bahram Beizai, 2001); Bright Nights (Farzad Motamen, 2001); Gavkhooni (The River’s End) (Behrooz Afkhami, 2003); Green Fire (Mohammad Reza Aslani, 2007); About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2008); Day and Night (Omid Bonakdar & Keyvan Alimohammadi, 2008). In the first section, development of camera movement in cinema history is investigated, so that it becomes clear when directors starded to benefit from camera movement. Then, camera movement is referred to as a method which its only application is to follow the actor and therefore it has changed into an automatic process. In this research, some examples of this type of camera movement are cited. Then, a portable camera is introduced as a machine which has a meaningful character and acts in order to increase the pictorial values of the movie. In this section, characters of the expressive camera movement is investigated and its traces in chosen movies are followed. Finally, we focused on those works which have used camera movement as an innovating matter and have challenged the prevailing and common methods. This research, based on camera and its impact on visual aesthetics, is trying to reach a scientific analysis of the methods Iranian film-makers try to benefit from the portable camera