Compositional Elements: Rule of Thirds

This is the trailer to the 1984 movie The Killing Fields.

I watched this movie in an effort to study the Rule of Thirds in cinema. This movie won the award for best cinematography. It is a movie about journalists in war torn Cambodia, experiencing genocide. It is based on a true story. This is truly one of the most moving war movies I have ever seen, and a great deal of that has to do with the imagery, how everything is shot and framed. A lot of the movie is not in English, so there is a lot of the dialogue that I did not understand, and needed to rely on the imagery to understand what was going on.

I would say that just about every frame was shot using the ROT. This created a sense of balance that was needed amidst the chaos of the story line. The film is based in Cambodia, and there are many landscape shots, and the horizon line always falls just where it should, my eyes are led around the scene in the way it is intended. Everything seemed very intentional. I also felt that any deviation from this would have been distracting, unlike in other movies where it may have worked. For this movie I was able to get completely lost in the story and become attached to the characters because it felt more natural and I was not jerked in and out by a lack of balance. It was the type of movie where I felt invested in the characters.

There were all of the types of shots that we have learned about for the people, the close up, extreme close up, etc., and all of these matched up completely with how the viewer is intended to experience the moment. When a character is showing intense emotion on his face, most likely this is an extreme close up. The interactions between characters is captured well with the formula of ROT and the way the shots are framed. I can definitely understand why this film won as many awards as it did, and was nominated for quite a few as well.

And by the way any photographers need to watch this movie just to see John Malkovich's character make a darkroom out of a bathroom!