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Auteur and Apocolypse now

 Coppola's creative signature always seems to create a powerful narrative, and its almost inevitable. We can see examples of this from, Apocalypse now, The Godfather trilogy and The conversation. 

One of the tricks that Francis Coppola uses to create the sense of 'inascapable fate' is a technique called 'waiting the dolly'

Francis stated in an interview that in the studio when he did film he would use this technique by using every sandbag in the studio and would lay them on the dolly as they did slow push-ins. This added an inertia to the camera movement and this also gave a great sense of gravity to the slow push-in shot. It give the shot a real sense of 'fate' when coming to an conclusion.A dolly movement is markedly different from handheld because it contains none of the camera operator’s small movements, their sense of humanity. This is neither good nor bad but is, rather, a stylistic choice on the part of the director. Some films use handheld movement to a great effect — Coppola isn’t one of them.


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