Capra repurposed (i.e., stole) some of Riefenstahl's most remarkable images (the camera descending slowly, as if from heaven, into a vast stadium filled with men).
The other moment is when Truffaut, again quite sensibly, argues that Hitchcock's trademark omniscient shots (the terrifying airborne shot of the town on fire in The Birds; the camera descending from Olympian heights to find the compromising key in Ingrid Bergman's hand in Notorious) could have been made only by someone raised, as Hitchcock was, a Catholic.
The movie opens with a series of aerial images of nighttime London, the city lights twinkling like jewels on black velvet, an elevated view that soon turns ominous as the camera descends to street level.
The Bionic Wrench is distinguished by its gripping mechanism, a circle of metal prongs that, inspired by the aperture in a single-lens reflex camera, descend evenly to lock onto almost any nut or bolt.
There's no excuse, though, for one reprehensible sequence in which the camera descends into the basement of a Detroit home, while a cello saws ominously on the soundtrack, and creeps up behind a large, pajama-clad woman at a computer, primarily to shock us with the visual contrast between her Second Life avatar and her actual body.
And as a general rule, whenever the camera descends into the lair of the rebel nerd who is trying to stymie the forces of darkness, the geeky upstart will be working on a computer that looks as if it was designed in 1978.
In a three-minute evocation of a wild party in pre-revolutionary Havana, the camera descends through several reveller-crammed balconies, weaves between hordes of bathing beauties, then goes underwater in a swimming pool: a delirious advert for the joys of pre-Castro decadence.
In the opening shot, the camera descends from the heavens, across a mountainous landscape, into a medieval-looking village, before settling on the genitals of a corpse out of which our doctor Faust is scooping the organs, searching for the human soul.
Reporters and television cameras descended and came away with stories about how "steel towns" were responding to Trump's move.
As the pinkmobile draws into Castlegate market, in Stockton-on-Tees, a flurry of TV and press cameras descend on it with glee.
As the extent of Gadsden's problem was discovered, television cameras descended, conspiracy theories brewed, and Gadsden County became an object of national ridicule that haunts it still.
