Frozen cinema: The King of Comedy (1982)
Frozen cinema is a series of posts where I go through stills of movies that are visually interesting. While these images are constructed - I find that cinematography can be influences in photography.
The obligatory SPOILERS WARNING should be applied to all posts in the series.
The King of Comedy is Scorsese’s 1982 box office flop. While it was a commercial failure, it is often herald as one of his strongest films, noted for being one of his more darker and funnier pieces.
The movie deals with celebrity culture and how society drives the obsession of fans, spectators and stalkers. This results in many of the shots being medium to close wide angle shots, giving a sense of confinement, not letting any other parts of New York and the show business world - seeing only what the main character, Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), a delusional fan of late night television host Jerry Langford (played by comedy Jerry Lewis). The usage of these closer wide-angled shots creates a sense of uneasiness in what usually are shots of intimacy.
Often throughout the film, scenes shift between reality and alternate reality, through the mind of Pupkin, where he dreams up of idealized fantasy scenarios. One example of these fantasies is Langford coming to Pupkin to replace him on the Jerry Langford show as he’s at the downturn of his career.
The only time there really are far wide angle shots are in Rupert’s dream sequences - indicating the “boundlessness” of our own imagination and dreams but also the bottomless delusion of Pupkin’s own world.
