Sightlines · Character course
The Camera and the Crown: Twelve Ways of Looking at Power
No machine ever built has been better at manufacturing majesty than the movie camera — point it up at a man on a podium and he becomes a monument; hand it to someone in the crowd and he shrinks back into a man. That double capacity is the secret subject of this course: across ninety years, from Nuremberg to Hatfield House, these twelve films keep asking where power actually lives — in the ruler's body, in the crowd's upturned faces, or in the image itself — and every answer changes how movies get made. The arc runs from worship to theft to autopsy: one film invents the visual language of the leader as god, and the other eleven spend the rest of the century borrowing it, mocking it, stripping it, and finally bending it until the palace walls curve.
Everything begins, uncomfortably, here: the most technically dazzling documentary ever made is also state propaganda for an evil regime, and the discomfort is the lesson. Riefenstahl fused three inheritances — Eisenstein's rhythmic cutting between single faces and surging masses, the German mountain-film's habit of shooting heroic bodies from below against open sky, and Gance's liberated, swooping camera — into a complete grammar for making one man look like destiny. Watch the opening: an aircraft's cruciform shadow gliding over medieval rooftops, power arriving from above, formless until it lands and resolves into geometric order. Every low-angle podium shot and every crowd-as-pattern aerial in the century that followed is either a quotation of this film or an argument with it. The rest of this course is the argument.
Five years later, the most famous performer on earth stole Riefenstahl's grammar and turned it inside out. Chaplin built his dictator Hynkel's palace and rally scenes as near shot-for-shot inversions of the Nuremberg compositions — the same podium angles and monumental halls, now framing a strutting vanity so vast it becomes weightless. The technique to watch is the film's split visual world, inherited from Metropolis by way of co-cinematographer Karl Struss (who had shot Sunrise): enormous polished emptiness for the powerful, warm cramped rooms for the powerless, comedy generated by cutting between the two scales. And in the famous scene where Hynkel dances alone with a balloon painted like the earth, Chaplin makes his deepest formal joke: the tyrant stops doing anything at all and simply floats, rapt, inside his own fantasy — power as a man playing with a toy. Made independently, on subject matter the studios wouldn't touch, it proved the leader-image could be captured and reversed.
Then the pedestal disappears entirely. Drew's team — Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers — put newly portable 16mm cameras on their shoulders and followed two candidates through a Wisconsin election, and in doing so invented American direct cinema: no narrator's throne, no locked-down tripod, no staged majesty, just a lens hunting for faces at eye level. The shot that changed everything is filmed from behind Kennedy's head, the camera wading through a packed Milwaukee hall in one unbroken take, so that instead of watching a leader you experience what it feels like to be swept along in his wake. Where Riefenstahl choreographed the crowd into ornament, Drew lets it jostle the frame. It's also the first film to catch, live, the thing every later entry wrestles with: political power migrating from deeds into televisual charisma — a theme Being There will pick up and turn into a fable.
From power observed to power mourned. Visconti — an actual aristocrat filming the death of aristocracy — and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno built every frame on 19th-century Italian painting, so that the Sicilian prince at the film's center seems already varnished, already hanging in a gallery. The technique is patience on a scale Hollywood never risked: a final ball sequence that runs close to an hour, the camera drifting through waltzing crowds in the manner Ophüls pioneered, until the party stops being an event and becomes an era exhaling. Watch for the moment the prince steps away from the dancing and studies himself in a mirror — a ruler who can see his whole world ending and knows no action will fix it, so the film simply lets him look. It is the course's great counter-image to Nuremberg: there, power performed for the camera; here, power watches itself fade in the glass.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) — dir. Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick's move was to point the camera not at a ruler but at the machinery of rule — and to shoot each piece of it in a different, perfectly matched style. Gilbert Taylor built three visual registers: jittery pseudo-newsreel for the army base, cramped procedural realism inside the bomber, and for the War Room a vast expressionist cave of black gloss and a ring of light, the single most imitated political set ever designed. The joke, inherited from Duck Soup's war-cabinet-as-vaudeville and Chaplin's Hynkel, is played entirely deadpan: everyone on screen behaves with total professional competence while the system they serve makes competence itself the problem. Peter Sellers's multiple roles extend Chaplin's double-performance trick into something colder — political authority as a set of interchangeable vacant postures, an idea Being There will inherit almost directly. After this film, filming leaders reverently became nearly impossible; the War Room's shadow falls over everything.
Welles takes Shakespeare's kings and does the anti-monumental thing: he films the crown from the tavern floor. The whole picture is bracketed by two old men trudging through snow, remembering — so every rally, rebellion, and coronation inside it plays as something already lost, a kingdom recalled rather than witnessed. The formal split is the thing to study: the Boar's Head tavern shot warm, cluttered, and close, the camera fluid among bodies; the royal court shot in cold stone verticals, the deep-focus and low ceilings of Citizen Kane redeployed to make power look like a draughty cathedral. Its muddy, chaotic battle sequence — cut fast, all struggling bodies and no heroic geography — rewrote how screen combat could be filmed and echoes forward through every later war picture in this course. Shot cheaply in Spanish exile, it proves the opposite of Gandhi's thesis-by-budget: majesty on film is a matter of angles, not money.
Here the throne sits empty and the image rules alone. Ashby and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel shoot a simple-minded gardener — who knows the world only through television — in cool, even, deliberately non-editorializing light: no comic punctuation, no reaction shots to flag the jokes, just wide, calm frames that hold while Washington's elite project intelligence onto a blank. The craft lesson is restraint as comedy: watch the scene where the man points a TV remote at oncoming traffic and Ashby simply holds the shot, refusing every cue that would tell you how to feel. The film completes a line running from Primary (charisma as television) through Strangelove (Sellers's vacant men of state): power no longer needs a will behind it, only a screen in front of it. It is Riefenstahl's nightmare inverted — the leader as pure image, with nobody home.
Kurosawa asks the question the whole course has been circling: if the ruler is an image, can anyone wear it? The film opens with one of cinema's great formal declarations — a single, unmoving shot of three identically dressed men, held so long that "which one is the real warlord" stops having an answer — a thief has been plucked from execution to double for a lord, and the role turns out to be more durable than the man. Watch how Kurosawa stages power at a distance: banners, formations, and color-coded armies rendered in vast telephoto tableaux, the individual dissolved into heraldry, the battle grammar of his own Seven Samurai slowed into ceremony. It is the East Asian counterpart to The Leopard — power as a costume the institution fits over whatever body is available — and its double-as-ruler premise looks straight back at Chaplin's twinned barber and dictator, replayed as tragedy.
The prestige biopic answers with a paradox: how do you make an epic about a man whose power was refusal? Attenborough's solution, carried in David Lean's inherited widescreen grammar, is a rhetoric of contrast — enormous Panavision landscapes, a salt march stretching to the horizon as a human tide, and at the dead center of every composition a small, half-naked figure surrounded by officials dressed for power. The frame keeps organizing itself around the one man doing nothing, and that compositional joke — stillness as the strongest force in a cast of thousands — is the film's genuine invention. Industrially it matters too: a British production co-financed by the Indian government, it codified the awards-season historical epic for a decade and set the template The Last Emperor would both follow and subvert. Against Riefenstahl's leader descending from the sky, here is the counter-icon: authority walking in the dust.
Bertolucci takes the Gandhi-era epic's scale and pours it into the story of a ruler with no power at all — an emperor as ornament, and the film paints it in color. Vittorio Storaro's celebrated scheme renders history as temperature: the Forbidden City of childhood glows amber and gold, warmth indistinguishable from confinement, and the palette cools decade by decade as the world outside claims him. Equally radical is Gabriella Cristiani's editing: the eras almost never cut hard against each other, they dissolve, a grey prison bleeding into a golden throne room, a man's life assembled the way memory actually works. The first Western production granted the real Forbidden City as a set, it stands with Kagemusha and The Leopard as the course's trilogy of gilded cages — power as an environment that shapes its occupant precisely because he cannot use it.
Seven decades after Riefenstahl shot Hitler from below against open sky, German cinema finally shot him at eye level, handheld, in a corridor. Rainer Klausmann's camera stays close and shallow-focused inside the bunker — proximity without sympathy, faces trapped in narrow frames, a technique Hirschbiegel had honed on institutional pressure-cookers and that draws on Come and See's refusal to let the lens pull back. The film's formal engine is the gap between two spaces: a map room where a hand moves pins and orders armies, and the streets above where those armies no longer exist — command as pure hallucination, the last decayed remnant of the confident see-problem-solve-problem grammar that Strangelove had already satirized and Triumph of the Will had celebrated. Its willingness to grant the dictator an interior — banal, sickly, human-scaled — closed the loop this course opened: the same man, the same nation's film industry, and the exact inversion of every camera angle.
And finally the palace itself becomes the distorting lens. Robbie Ryan shoots Queen Anne's court in candlelight (the Barry Lyndon inheritance) but through wide and fish-eye glass that bows the walls outward, so every gallery becomes a fishbowl — grandeur curdling into claustrophobia, a small figure swallowed at the center of her own magnificence, with whip-pans snapping across rooms like a courtier's darting glance. Lanthimos, arriving from the Greek Weird Wave's deadpan cruelty, weaponizes the costume drama against its own reverence: where the heritage film polishes power, this one shows it flowing entirely through intimacy, nursing, and whispered access to a sick sovereign. It is The Leopard's sealed aristocratic world replayed as blood sport, and the fish-eye is the course's last word on the low-angle hero shot: the same lens-worship of rulers, warped until worship reads as entrapment.
Run the twelve in sequence and one story tells itself: cinema built a machine for making rulers look like gods, then spent ninety years taking it apart screw by screw. Chaplin stole the angles; Drew shoulder-carried the camera into the crowd; Visconti, Kurosawa, and Bertolucci turned the palace into a cage and filmed the bars; Kubrick and Ashby emptied the leader out entirely and filmed the vacancy; Hirschbiegel brought the camera back to the original subject at merciless eye level; Lanthimos bent the whole apparatus into a curve. The inventions that stuck are everywhere now — every campaign documentary is Primary's child, every war-room scene is Kubrick's, every candlelit court intrigue owes Lanthimos and Kubrick's Barry Lyndon lineage both. What binds them is a single discovery, made and remade: power on film is never in the ruler. It's in the angle. Watch where the camera stands, and you'll know who's really on the throne.