Holy Tilted Camera, Batman!!!

Dutch Tilt: a cinematic tactic often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed.

Dutch Tilt is actually Deutsch Tilt, or German Tilt, because it came from the groundbreaking Gothic German cinema of the 1920's. It was used to great effect in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and by the 1940's was being used in American films such as The Third Man.

A tilted camera angle can portray a very creepy and uneasy feeling when done well. In the modern world, Tim Burton is a master of Dutch Tilt.

It works in static shots best, and thus it naturally translates to photography. I used this technique to invoke chaos or confusion in photos long before I knew it had a name. It's one of those devices that just "seems right" when you are looking to evoke that particular off-kilter emotion.

But everything can be abused and Dutch Tilt has often been overused in movies and TV. In fact, another name for it is "Batman Angle" because of its extreme overuse in the old 1960's TV series, in which a tilted camera was used in almost every single scene of the entire 120 episode series.

And Roger Ebert blasted the haphazard use of tilt in the 2000 movie Battlefield Earth: "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

Incidentally, Christian's DP overused color filters as much as tilt in that film. Or so I have heard on numerous occasions, I never could stomach seeing it.

But I think in the right conditions and done for the right reasons Dutch Tilt can really push emotive buttons. It really works for accidents and scary scenes. And dance parties where it's a sort of "surrogate confusion mechanism" standing in for loud music and motion. Here are some of my favorite examples from this blog:

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