Dr Parnassus shows Terry Gilliam’s Dutch courage

Nobody seems sure what the Dutch did to become associated with cinema's lamest "technique". But consider walking out of the cinema when you see the following: a character in a heightened emotional state (say, being pursued, sweaty-faced, by shadowy assailants through some warren-like sewers of some mittel-European city), and the camera is cocked diagonally – the so-called "Dutch angle" – to convey the prevailing wind of discomfort.

Apologies if this makes me sound like the kind of person who boos film-makers at Cannes for a living, but I loathe the Dutch angle. It's lazy film-making: an off-the-peg way of dressing scenes up as gothic or wacky, when those qualities should emanate from the script or the performances. It's the dodgiest affectation going, the cinematic equivalent of wearing a loud jumper at the office and referring to it as "loud". Tilting the lens is what people do to jazz up their holiday snaps, not several million pounds of somebody else's money.

One school of thought has it that the term is derived from the fact that, during the heyday of cross-North-sea barge trading, Dutch vessels had keels – and lay half on their sides when berthed – and English ones did not. In which case Terry Gilliam is first for a keel-hauling. Even for a man with an unusually high zany-cell count, he invariably feels the need to caper around his latest quixotic protagonist-king, tilting the lens at 42° like some half-cut Sancho Panza. I was actually relieved to see he chills a bit on the diagonals in his latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I don't know if the massive increase in CG shots meant a more sober approach, but it's a better, more solid movie for it.

Gilliam's incorrigibility is, of course, why he's a cult institution, but he's got a chronic affliction where the Dutch angle is concerned. His continued reliance on it only underlines the stylistic rut he's in, something he needs to sort out if he truly wants to rejuvenate the manifesto on the imagination that he repeats with every film. To take his previous three outings: I can hardly remember a shot in Fear and Loathing that wasn't listing like Olly Reed at 3am, but then all the characters were drinking the Kool-Aid; the stuttering Brothers Grimm fulfilled the requisite EU diagonals quota; and I think Gilliam made a serious, slanted misjudgment in Tideland, applying a flat-out comic sensibility to a story of childhood dysfunction that made the director seem insensate and even slightly creepy.

Gilliam's aesthetic has always fed off the vaudevillian and grandiloquent, but the Dutch angle was already looking kitsch in the 60s, when he was still squashing Spanish clergymen with giant feet for Monty Python. The other school of thought on the name's origin is that it is a corruption of Deutsch, because the German expressionists liked to set a tilt on their tales of madness and extremity. It was picked up by other film-makers – Carol Reed, for example, successfully used it to peer back into Europe's gothic crannies in The Third Man – but accumulated a patina of camp en route. There were only so many rabid Hammer horror films it could take, and by the time it was the preferred stage dressing for Adam West's pantomime nemeses in the Batman TV series, it was all over for the Dutch angle.

So why have film-makers carried on using it? Because it reminds them of their earliest days of watching films and contains a kind of raw, innocent cinematic energy? Perhaps that's another way of saying a director has lost his way and is reverting to infantile strategies. Peter Jackson caught the Dutch influenza, maybe from Sam Raimi, to admittedly hilarious effect in his late 80s/early 90s splatterhouse classics. But I don't think he ever found a stable visual tone for the Rings trilogy: Frodo didn't need his magic sword to tell when Orcs were close by – Jackson's off-kilter camera told him everything he needed to know. Quentin Tarantino, post-Kill Bill, also has leaning tendencies, which says it all. Directors should be equipped with spirit levels on leaving film school, and horizons kept shipshape, unless prior written permission is sought from the appropriate bodies. I don't want to get all John Cleese (someone should think about banning him, too) about the whole thing, but really: stop that – it's silly.

Source: Guardian Online