* This is a particularly rambling one, so get a snack or something*
When I was younger (I’m an ancient 26 now if you must know) I was very anti hand held camera.
I do not like extraneous camera movement. I’m not a fan of the hovering camera. There are rarely any truly static shots anymore and this breaks my heart.
In a spirit of instinctive contradiction I am avoiding all camera movement, which is so much in the fashion that the experts think it indispensable.
– Jean Cocteau
First you must understand that everything you read comes straight from the moist soul of a deeply devoted Visconti fan (he is in my gut you know. Helmut Berger lives inside my stomach in purple eyeshadow, while dark and thick haired girls roam the halls of my intestines). Now that you know this, let’s continue.
The hand held camera can easily disguise mediocrity under the veil of artistry. This is where my irritation begins. You will find that many young filmmakers who employ this style are great admirers of the French New Wave. These directors were of course magnificent, but I suspect it is the seeming ease of the style (natural lighting, jump cuts, hand held, improvised dialogue, lack of plot etc) that attracts so many young directors and provokes poor mimicry. It is an avant-garde style that doesn’t take much work to pull off, or so they falsely believe.
Of course hand held can be a good choice, the best for certain stories, but it can also be employed with little thought only because it is simple and in vogue (like turning up the contrast on photographs of yourself, it can easily hide flaws). The same can be said for a host of other shooting techniques and certain kinds of framing, but it is the ease of hand held that makes it such an attractive choice. The moral of the story is, hand held is a device as important as any other, however, its inherent ease lends itself to abuse in the hands of those wishing to be artistic without reason.
…And then I used my first digital camera (had only worked with 16mm until then), and my ideas changed.