Howards End
BBC One, 12th November 2017 9 pm
I set recording for the whole series, and after Episode 1, I’m just off to delete it. I won’t bother with the other three episodes..
Elsewhere people have complained about swelling music swamping dialogue in Howards End, so clarity was thrown away, just as the BBC did with SS-GB last year, where sound recording was simply incompetent. This year it’s the post-production mix that has annoyed people, though actually it wasn’t a major issue on our 5.1 surround system.
Seaside postcard, Quip, early-1970s
My issue is the camera work. Is he going to focus? A good question. Is it the director, or the director of photography? At some point it was decided to film so that the subject is in focus, and the other person in a conversation is in soft focus. Maybe it was to give it a filmic look of 70 years ago. Nowadays we are used to cameras that can keep much more in focus … nowadays? Well, for decades. There’s another issue. With an HD broadcast on an HD screen, the sharp areas are crystalline, pin-sharp, so that the contrast with blurred areas is massive, much more than it would have been on an old 625-line cathode ray TV. The director is fond of people walking across the lens as blurs, blurred bits of furniture.
These are all iPhone examples off the screen. I took several, so blur is not my shaky hand.
Flare on the lens: Most directors would re-shoot the scene!
Enter Mrs Wilcox, seen from the window. Do we assume the viewer was short-sighted?
Focus on dad (movement blur on hand is my iPhone) but the man near right is deliberately blurred.
People cross camera in a blur
So many shots are like this … and it’s Tracy Ullman they’re blurring!
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when most craft film technicians had worked for the BBC or ITV or for film studios, there was a degree of muttering about younger directors, and “Film School” was said as a very strong put down. As the writer on ELT videos, checking scripts and standing by to rewrite to location, I spent most shoots with the camera and sound crew and was party to their disregard for directors who wanted blurred shots, shots where the horizon was not parallel to the screen edges, bumpy handheld camera work. They prided themselves on getting perfection in vision and sound, and saw no reason to make stuff look badly-filmed.
The mantra was ‘You should never be aware of the camera,’ and in Howards End I was constantly aware of it. The director of one of my video series made an excellent point. Filming on bright sunny locations, someone was always checking for boom shadows on screen … the shadow cast by a boom mic needed to capture dialogue. So much was it a problem, that it was habitual for the sound recordist to sing out “Boom shadow … boom shadow” always to the tune of Cat Stevens’ song Moonshadow, if he saw it on a monitor during camera rehearsal. Sometimes he’d miss and in editing there’d be a tiny splash of boom shadow at the extreme edge of a shot. As the director said,”if the viewer ever notices that one, we haven’t done our job and they’re not being held by the action.” He was right, and no one ever commented later … but when you are forced to notice the artifice of the camera, you have lost the story. This programme constantly forced me to be aware of a camera.
Howards End is ludicrously-filmed. Beautiful locations, costumes and a wealth of acting talent, made unwatchable by a wilful choice of blurring.
It’s not art house cinema, it’s mainstream, hugely expensive Sunday night TV, especially in the four weeks leading up to the Christmas period when viewing figures are high. Did no one say after the first rushes,’Hang on … this audience has been watching Victoria and Poldark. This follows on. Do the audience want fanciful film work?’
[…] rant added on the new BBC TV series Howards End. (LINK TO MY COMMENTS) The deliberately out of focus shots annoyed me so much I lost […]
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Phil commented on Howards End – blurred TV
A rant added on the new BBC TV series Howards End. (LINK TO MY COMMENTS) The deliberately out of focus shots annoyed me so …
I noticed the blurring inasmuch as I was wondering if it had been augmented in post – it could have been done using a variation of the tools that produce a 3d version of a film from the 2d original shoot. I didn’t find it intrusive enough to stop watching though.
I have a feeling that, as some of the predominant themes of Howards End are its character’s inability to see either the big picture or beyond their inner lives, the shallow focus is probably deliberate.
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Thanks, Phil. If that was a post-production treatment, then it’s weird how people passing across a frame are blurred, but as you say, it could be similar to a 3D treatment. I still ask why – I don’t think the camera should be telling us how to interpret the characters. That’s the actors job.
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