Dutch Angle Evolves Into Much More Annoying Boer Angle
Could revolutionize the way film bros talk about film, but probably won’t.
From a bush outside the set of The Lion’s Head in Cape Town, South Africa, I can now confirm that director Benny van Koolen has managed to turn a Dutch angle into an extremely obnoxious new technique, the Boer angle.
“Today we were supposed to shoot a gunfight between the Lion [the film’s protagonist, played by local star Nero Mabizela] and one of the hitmen out to get him,” camera operator Rose Slovo explained in a one-on-one interview. “Naturally, we started with the buildup to that fight, but then we got to the last shot before it breaks out, where the paranoia’s supposed to peak. We set up for a Dutch angle, did the take, Nero hit his marks, and I thought we were on to the real meat of the shoot. But after watching the playback, Benny thought he could take things up a notch, and that’s when the trouble started.”
With each subsequent retake, van Koolen demanded steeper tilts on the Dutch angle, and around the tenth take, he started alternating that with asking to lower the camera. By the twentieth take, he was totally fixated on combining an extreme Dutch tilt with a worm’s eye perspective. Five more takes later, he was already referring to the technique as the “Boer angle” and raving about how it would be the greatest cinematic innovation of his career.
“It really isn’t,” Slovo said when I asked her how accurate van Koolen’s estimation of the shot’s potential was. “Maybe in the right context, from the right director, this could be a brilliant bit of composition, but Benny’s not that guy—and even if he was, getting that shot wouldn’t be worth all this trouble.”
By take 60, the last one before a union-mandated break, the camera was tilted 273 degrees clockwise away from standard orientation, and van Koolen had assigned two production assistants to hold Slovo at such an angle that her head was inches off the ground. Despite Slovo’s phone falling out of her pocket and coming inches away from concussing her, the shot was finally to van Koolen’s liking. The same could not be said of anyone else on set, whose reactions were all some combination of confusion and annoyance.
“When I saw the playback,” Mabizela told his stunt double as the two walked by and the actor tossed a hunk of cheese he didn’t want into my bush, “I couldn’t believe we wasted three hours on this. He told me this shot was supposed to hinge on my facial expression, but now I’m halfway out of the frame!”
At press time, van Koolen could be heard arguing to the producers that, even if the Boer angle were a bad idea, it would at least be a new bad idea, which is more than the hacks trying to make AI movies can say. The bush I hid in for this scoop was a Cape Plumbago.
