lead: The microscopic subject

Aerial shots in cinema often effectively belittle the people it claims to represent

Shardul Bhardwaj

Like most innovations of the 20th century, the aerial shot in cinema came about through military innovation. According to Le Corbusier in his bookAircraft (1935),among several other commentators of aviation, if it weren’t for WWI and WWII, aviation and in turn what we call the aerial shot would have been languishing in some workshop in Europe. It was the madmen with spirit to defeat Icarus that kept on pushing until the governments thought it was a good idea to photograph enemy movements and cities during two of the bloodiest wars Europe ever witnessed. Thus, the fighter plane would emit machine gun bullets on one hand and capture its aftermath on the other through cameras. The fighter pilots became superheroes and their dog fights and bombings became a thing of legend. After the end of WW I there were thousands pilots out of work in America, who were later employed by the film industry to capture aerial dogfighting scenes and its likes. The first consequence of this phenomenon was the filmWings (1927) that eventually won the first ever Best Picture Oscar in the same year. The shooting, however, did cost one life due to the hazardous nature of the stunts and cinematography but went on to spur a whole new industry in aviation which dealt with cinema.

Soon after the coming of multiple innovations like the civilian helicopter and camera stabiliser, the act of filming an aerial shot was no more a death-defying experience for the cameramen. However, the cost of renting a helicopter to film an aerial shot was too high which resulted in only a few productions being able to afford it. Much later at the onset of the 2000s, Hollywood caught on to the drones (another military invention used for spying) and today even a YouTube vlogger uses these to capture larger than life landscapes. Beyond the landscapes, what does the aerial shot mean when the human subject comes into the picture of cinematic fiction?

H.G. Wells’s bookThe War in Air announces a heavy pronouncement on the aerial shots where he states that “people seen from the air lose all humanity”. Taking flight from this thought, when one sees the establishing aerial shot of the Dharavi slums inGully Boy (2019) one might argue that the audience is meant to see itself as not a part of the flat table of subjects that the film attempts to talk about. This aesthetic choice seems to make a statement, “Come, let’s observe these micro organisms laid upon the lab table.” Through this choice, it seems that the filmmaker intends to comfort the viewers that they are not about to see another slow and artsy film about India’s poverty. Interestingly, the aerial shots are also employed to create aspiration amongst the audiences from the story, the umpteen number of establishing aerial shots of New York seen in a number of Bollywood films likeHum Tum (2004) seem to say: “Oh look at this glitzy world, wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of it?”

It’s a small wonder that the most successful use of aerial shots has been seen in tourism commercials. These are able to titillate the audiences into wanting to visit these places.

The implicit nature of an aerial shot where the audience gazes ‘down’ upon its subject has been imaginatively used by certain filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick inThe Shining (1980) but it largely exists as a tool to marginalise the very people one claims to talk about, a tool the militaries of the world have perfected to spy upon people and destroy their lives. It will continue to remain so until and unless one does not try and investigate the fact that the light that permits the scrutiny does not radiate from the observed but rather from the observer. Some directors like Fernando Meirelles have chosen to stay on the ground and take us amidst the chaos of a neighbourhood plagued by poverty and its resulting violence in films likeCity of God (2002) while some like Ridley Scott inBody Of Lies (2008) have decided to show establishing aerial shots of the seemingly far off and dangerous lands of the Middle East.