The world exists in three dimensions, but we see it in two, albeit with the slight depth perception afforded by the slight offset of our two eyes. But the third dimension is what gives us the choice between the subtle variations of viewing angle that are my subject today.
Let’s begin with the classical perfection of what you might call a four-square view of a spanking, for which our initial illustration is a misty moment in the French movie La Fille de 14 Juillet (2013):
For those who are interested, that’s Charlotte (Marie-Lorna Vaconsin) getting some ‘fatherly’ treatment from Pator (Vincent Macaigne). And my telling you that implies one of the limitations of this otherwise generally pleasing angle: we get a very good view of most aspects of the spanking, but potentially at the cost of anonymizing one of the two parties involved.
When a girl is over the knee, the thing she’s most likely to be looking at is the floor.
Even when the focal point of the shot isn’t her bottom, the position tends to cut her out of effective human interaction, putting her into a situation where for the time being her primary sensory experience is what’s happening further down herself. Look at the disconnect between their two faces here:
(I’m afraid I don’t know what that’s from; it looks like a TV show, but may not be, and he resembles the American comic actor George Lopez, but also may not be. if anyone can identify it, please say!)
So the four-square angle can bring out the fact that, despite the intimacy of being over a man’s knee, there is something potentially isolating about being spanked. We can reinforce the point with examples from a 1970s Kung Fu movie, a 1960s comic-book superhero wrestler from Mexico and a 1950s US high school candid:
It is possible to get a bit more character into a four-square scene by showing more of her face, but that’s easier for an illustrator than a photographer,
because the pen and the paintbrush can manipulate the human body into poses that seem more natural than they may actually be.
Getting the girl’s face out of profile in a four-square shot involves positioning her neck in a way that wouldn’t be comfortably sustainable in reality,
which is why models and actresses sometimes need a bit of help in photographs:
So with that in mind, let’s change the viewing angle, with assistance from a birthday spanking of 2005.
Favoring the front end can open up the girl’s expressive reaction to a remarkable degree.
It only needs a very slight shift away from four square to make a big difference to our sense of the participants as distinct personalities in the scene,
which means, in theory, that she can make a more meaningful contribution to it as a scene, rather than remaining fundamentally passive.
Of course, there are always exceptions where the girl is still shut into her private world of posterior discomfort, sometimes hidden behind her disordered hair,
or else self-isolated by the simple act of closing her eyes.
That last one illustrates another distinctive feature of the ‘forward angle’, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your inclination. You can see it again in this birthday spanking candid, but you’ll have to look deep into the picture, well beyond her expressive face in the foreground:
What you don’t see with this angle is even more obvious in these two examples from newspaper strips of 1941 and 1967,
where the jutting hemlines make it pretty clear that each girl is being spanked on the seat of her panties, without in any way compromising the standards of a family publication in the middle of the last century.
Keep that in mind as once again we change the angle, this time with the help of multiple iterations of the same extended spanking from the Mexican comic book Memin Pinguin, as first drawn in 1969 and later redrawn for the cover of a reprint in 1983:
And round the back we go:
Some films and publications aren’t burdened by the limitations of the American press, and simply enjoy the view.
Picking up the other theme, this is obviously an angle that tends to favor the spanker far more than the spanked.
The girl will often be sidelined, reduced to just a bottom to be spanked,
albeit sometimes an attractively packaged bottom:
It takes a lot more neck-craning for her to get into the picture:
But there are some rear-favoring shooting angles that would take an Exorcist-style demonic head-swivel for an actress to make herself seen. Here are instances from a Czech costume drama of 1938 and a French spy thriller of 1964:
Then there’s the moment when the sassy sharpshooter Lucha (Lucha Moreno) is spanked in the Mexican musical Western No Soy Monedita de Oro (I’m Not a Gold Coin; 1959). Gallantry compels us to take a look at her face first,
because the cinematographer, Enrique Wallace, opts to get right down to what you might call the core essence of the spanking, with the frame zoomed in as close as it can feasibly go:
We’re not completely done with viewing angles, but there’s more to shooting a spanking than that, and at this point, we must address another issue that has been creeping up on us, and will come into plain sight next week.
Vanilla Spanking 