The drone shot offers an omniscient perspective as a shot. The aerial shot is different, ‘on high’. The drone shot offers this sense of the third person camera, the floating perspective of an infinite eye. Or an infinite horizon, the intensity of which is not linear, not extending into the peripheral vision to the left and right, but rather iterative intensities of singularity. Variations of flows.
Rarely is the drone shot static. And now, of course, the drone shot is mutating. From offering a third person perspective for us to incarnate briefly, following the flows of the skier or surfer as they create one of those intensities of singularity - ‘a moment’ - the drone shot now encompasses the first person perspective of the flying bomb.
The iconic opening shot by Welles in A Touch of Evil perhaps prefigures the omniscient eye of the drone shot (‘third person version’). These aren’t ‘views from nowhere’ but rather specific ‘views from somewheres’. The interesting thing about shots, however, is that they bring into view a kind of atmospherics of framing. The landscape shot. The close up. The wide angle. The dolly zoom. There’s something like a tone of understanding that is both enabled and prevented by a shot. ‘If you look at it like this’ is a direction to frame your understanding in a particular way.
One of the unfortunate elements of contemporary capitalist culture in the West - amongst all the limitations that come to mind - is that analysis has a connotation of rigidity or simplicity. Clean lines. Clean definitions, in simple forms. Seperating and clarifying the edges of things. Making distinctions by ‘cutting’ and ‘isolating’ objects, entities, elements one from another.
The truth is that analysis is probably closer to ‘direction’ within a creative activity. An analysis is useless if it cannot offer some sense of direction from its results. Which is not to say that there is a simple way of finding a direction. Rather the function of the director - or photography, of the film, of the play - is analytical. At it’s best it is analysis in action. The creation of ‘a way of looking at it’.