FILM / The Last Detail

OF LATE, film critics have become increasingly alert to a kind of virtuoso camera movement that is conceived precisely to call attention to itself. No self- respecting reviewer of The Player, for instance, would have dared omit mention of its lengthy sequence-shot in which a long, meticulously plotted scene unreels without a single cut. There was, too, the strange and no less self-conscious overhead tracking-shot through schoolroom and church in The Long Day Closes. And, as a rule, complex camera movements are now regarded as an essential test of their movie manhood by an entire generation of cineliterate directors.

The recently re-released Singin' in the Rain belongs, of course, to a more 'primitive' stage of filmic evolution, when the virtuoso shot was less the object of a directorial cult than a mere serendipitous by-product of narrative energy. But the musical does contain one of the greatest camera movements (or rather, camera gestures) in the medium's history.

It occurs in the almost too famous title number. At one point, if you recall, after sashaying along the glowingly rainswept, studio-reconstructed sidewalk, Gene Kelly suddenly takes a stand in the middle of the street, ecstatically swings his umbrella around his body - and the camera, as though with a huge intake of breath, cranes upward to encompass him in a slightly tilted high-angle shot.

What is so beautiful about the movement is not its inevitability but its un-inevitability, the fact that, unlike the examples cited above, the sequence is in no sense constructed around it and arguably does not really need it. It's almost as though the movement were unplotted, unpremeditated, as though, once on the set, the cameraman simply couldn't contain himself, as though not even the camera itself could resist empathising with Kelly's euphoria in a gesture as instinctive and spontaneous as a burst of applause.

That, I know, is just a film buff's sentimental fantasy, but it does demonstrate how, in a great film, suspension-of-disbelief can be extended even to something as functional and indifferent as a camera.