Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter film, The Prisoner of Azkaban, is a fascinating study in filmmaking. After repeated viewings, the film’s real magic has become clearer to me; the way Cuaron handles the camera, the pacing, how he establishes physical space and guides us through it, and the way in which visual metaphors and patterns resonate throughout the film. Many of the techniques he would come to use in Children of Men are in use here too. Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about these things, and I’ve decided to try and explore some of them a little deeper here.
The first thing that always stands out to me as a brilliant filmmaking device is the use of the Whomping Willow as a kind of act-break and pause between the action. Like a deep breath, the Willow is used to moderate the pace of the story as well as to punctuate the passing of time, revealing the changing seasons and signaling a new phase of the narrative.
Windows and mirrors are frequently used to demarcate transitions to magical spaces and events, and Cuaron’s camera frequently takes us through the glass in a kind of symbolic passage to ‘the other side’. This technique functions to subtly indicate to us that we are entering a shifted reality, or crossing a barrier. This is especially clear in the classroom sequence with Lupin; the camera pushes in through the glass of the mirrored cabinet at the start of the scene, the magical action unfolds, and at the end the camera pulls back out of the glass to reveal the whole sequence took place in a reflection. The whole scene unfolds flopped, so the images are all mirrored backwards, a trick that’s easily missed but helps suspend our disbelief and adds to the otherworldliness of the sequence. The same technique is leveraged in the time-travel sequence at the end, where the camera takes us literally through a clock-face and into the past.
“One thing that I felt was perfect for Michael was that we have this magical universe that he could really ground. Because he has got that grittiness, and that grittiness comes from the fact that he is a single-source light cinematographer. He’s very naturalistic in that sense. I felt it would be a good marriage with the material.” – Cuaron on cinematographer Michael Seresin, from BBC Films.
Cuaron and Seresin also use the camera to gently direct our gaze from subject to subject, with long fluid shots that move with the action. An impressive, subtle use of visual glue maintains the flow, with a character’s gesture or movement used both as a cue for the camera to follow, and to guide our eyes. Ron’s hand on the train window bridges the cut from interior to exterior, Dumbledore’s hand gestures guide our view to the staff behind him, and the brilliant image of the umbrella in the storm is a visual echo of the Dementors who are about to close in. The Whomping Willow and the small bird are also visual glue, bringing energy, pause and pattern to the narrative.
An unusually large amount of the action is covered using point-of-view shots, the camera looking either directly from a character’s eyes, or back at the character from an object. Instead of the more common over-the-shoulder edits, and avoiding the close ups Cuaron dislikes, characters frequently appear to stare straight into the lens, and then Cauron cuts directly to their POV. This pulls us into the character’s experience in a more intimate way, putting us in their place, letting us see with their eyes. It grants the filmmaker permission to present an altered or subjective view, and indicates to the audience that what we see doesn’t have to be ‘real’, thus helping to sustain our acceptance of the supernatural events.
“I’m becoming very disappointed, very disenchanted with close-ups – more the way that generic Hollywood movies use a close-up. Unfortunately, the close-ups in contemporary Hollywood cinema have lost the strength as close-ups. It becomes such generic grammar; I’ve been more into trying to observe from more of a distance, a character with their surroundings, and allow that openness to convey as much as possible. It also has to do with the rhythm of cuts. Most contemporary cinema is just one cut each half a second – here, I’m curious to see how much visual information you can hold. In my previous film (Y Tu Mama Tambien), I did more – it was very wide and the shots were very long, seven minutes or so. Here, you adapt and serve the material. In Harry Potter, we don’t have that many close-ups – you go in there when it’s relevant to go in there. Or in most of the cases, it’s because the camera has gone very wide and eventually finds that character. It’s about coverage – most of cinema nowadays is about shooting a lot and figuring it out in the cutting room, rather than seeing the film in your head and shoot what you already envisioned.” – Cuaron, from a UGO interview.
These techniques ultimately function to help us experience what the characters experience, to create a real sense of space, to suspend our disbelief so we willingly enter a shifted reality, and bring a visual, almost musical flow to the story. The result – a beautifully fluid, evocative, involving piece of cinema.
For more, there’s an interesting interview with Alfonso Cuaron at GreenCine, his Wikipedia page provides a brief overview, there’s his complete interview at UGO, and another interview at BBC Films.
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