Dutch Angle - Examples of Usage in Movies

Examples of Usage in Movies

The 1919 German movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari first used the "Deutsche," later the Dutch, angle to emphasize visually themes of madness, illustrating the off-centred, off-balance nature and general social destruction taking place in the Weimar Republic set up by Germany after the First World War.

Dziga Vertov's 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera is known to contain usages of the Dutch angle as well, among other innovative techniques discovered by Vertov himself.

The angle was widely used to depict madness, unrest, exoticness, and disorientation in German Expressionism, hence its name (Deutsch, meaning German, was often conflated with the etymologically identical word wikt:Dutch; compare Pennsylvania Dutch). Montages of Dutch angles are structured in a way that the tilts are almost always horizontally opposite in each shot, for example, a right tilted shot will nearly always be followed with a left tilted shot, and so on.

The 1949 film The Third Man makes extensive use of Dutch angle shots, to emphasize the main character's alienation in a foreign environment. An anecdote of cinema lore alleges that once filming was completed, the crew presented director Carol Reed with a spirit level, to sardonically encourage him to use more traditional shooting angles.

Dutch angles were used extensively in the 1960s Batman TV series and 1966 film, where each villain had his or her own angle. Scenes filmed in any villain's hideout, when only the chief villain and his or her henchmen were present, were invariably shot at an angle departing extremely from the horizontal. This was to show that the villains were crooked.

Dutch angles are frequently used by film directors who have a background in the visual arts, such as Tim Burton (in Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood), and Terry Gilliam (in Brazil, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland) to represent madness, disorientation, and/or drug psychosis. In the The Evil Dead trilogy, Sam Raimi used Dutch angles to show that a character had become possessed.

The Dutch angle is an overt cinematographical technique that can easily be overused. The science-fiction film Battlefield Earth (2000), in particular, drew sharp criticism for its pervasive use of the Dutch angle. In the words of film critic Roger Ebert, "the director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

James Cameron "Dutched" the camera during the final stages of the sinking in his film Titanic, but here the intent was not to produce a sense of unease, but rather to exaggerate the slant of the deck, which—because of its length, and the need for sections of it to submerge—could only be tilted by an angle of about 6 degrees.

Die Hard (1988) makes use of the Dutch angle when Hans Gruber first confronts John McClane, leading to a sense of uncertainty and tension.

The Cable Guy (1996) uses the Dutch angle to foreshadow the disturbed personality of Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey).

Fay Grim (2006) was shot almost entirely in Dutch angles.

Doubt (2008) uses Dutch angles in many shots to show the tension of the scenes.

John Adams (2008 TV miniseries) makes heavy use of Dutch angles, often just to make the shot composition fill the frame.