Checking the definition of “lyrical” is not much help in determining what lyrical style is in documentary cinematography. You find that it is supposedly “expressing…emotions in an imaginative and beautiful way” or “expressing personal thoughts and feelings in a beautiful way.”
Hmmmm… I’m down with the emotion thing. Video is an emotional medium. If your rhetorical goals do not include eliciting some kind of emotional response from the audience, then you’re doing it wrong.
For the moment, I want to slip past the whole beautiful thing by saying, sure, yeah, do all the stuff that classically leads to “beautiful” frames. Stuff like good composition and competent use of the range of visual possibilities given how cameras and lenses work.
Malick’s dogma is about the beauty of cinematography from his artistic perspective. Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the “decisive moment” is about composition and so much more. It’s about a relationship between composition (on the fly, not flying by the rules) and the subject involving a moment that captures “the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” In my own revision of that for documentary cinematography, I replace the idea of capturing an instant to discovering and capturing decisive moments over time.
I think when you jam these two together — Malick’s way of seeing and capturing with Cartier-Bressons’s marrying of form and significance — that something like lyrical style happens.
The video is a new version of my Trinity teaser in widescreen black & white (as I intend the final product) with added scenes that, I think, make the trajectory of the film a bit more apparent. What I’m wanting you to see (because I’ve primed you to see it) is to what extent I may be achieving a lyrical style.
Perhaps I should do a shot-by-shot analysis.
Posts in this series:
Visual Style Conveyed in Words — Maybe | Frame by Frame (rhetorica.net)