Member-only story
There are many impressive visual stylists in cinema, yet few have the compositional and staging grace that Steven Spielberg has been perfecting for over forty years of his career. It’s hard to call a Spielberg film ‘bland’ given that, whether they succeed or fail on the whole, the visual nature of his films is always embedded with fantastic images, complex blocking, and economic storytelling. Spielberg has been noted as one of the great practitioners of the classic Hollywood style: one that makes use of covering ground in a one-shot, often veering through three to several compositions, in order to cover the scene in a precise way that avoids overt showboating. Of course, that is not the only visual metric through which Spielberg attains visual elegance: he is also a sophisticated editor and his shot compositions are often uniquely framed, making noteable use of numerous types of framing devices and, in many cases, reflections.
Many directors grow into their style, becoming more assured artists as they develop through their career. Spielberg, interestingly, began as an intriguing visual artist: even his first proper ‘short film’ Amblin’ which resulted in him receiving the opportunity to direct…
