Presence
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Sundance 2024: Presence, A Real Pain
An experiment in shooting a movie entirely from a first-person POV, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has conceptual precedents but no meaningful ones in terms of the camera’s weight and the operator’s resulting physical relationship to it. 1947’s Lady in the Lake tried nonstop subjectivity with a bulky 35mm camera; 2009’s Enter the Void eliminated the embodied camera in its second half of weightless drifting. More recently there’s Hardcore Henry, which strapped GoPros to its protagonist’s head for a bouncy embodiment of a stuntman’s hardest workday. In Presence, Soderbergh’s longtime practice of acting as his own cinematographer and operator takes on an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2024 -
“14 Inches From a Very Personal Form of Murder”: Steven Soderbergh on Camera as Character and His Sundance Horror Film, Presence
A heady, elegantly-constructed ghost story, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has a bunch of half-buried threads, a couple of perfectly-timed scares, and a horrific close-up of an act of violence that mesmerizes the camera—just as horror films mesmerize their audience. The camera is the star here, and not merely because its sustained, floating movements, its sudden turns and retreats, its anxious hovering display the virtuosity of the operator who is also the film’s director, but because it is the titular character, the unseen presence whose half-life is disturbed and then engaged by a family of four that moves into a suburban house […]
by Amy Taubin on Jan 20, 2024
