Director Signatures

Courtesy of the magic of Netflix, I finally got the opportunity to see The Quick and the Dead with Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Russel Crowe. I did not know going into my first viewing that the movie was directed by Sam Raimi, but that fact became immediately obvious once I saw his signatures all over the reel.

For instance, when Sharon Stone's character enters the town hosting the gunfighters competition she comes upon a rude barkeep who says something unsavory toward her. Stone retaliates by kicking the stool that the bartender stood atop from under his feet. Now, Raimi's influence was detectable in the way that he shot this interaction. You'll forgive me if I lack the proper cinematic vocabulary to describe it, but the camera seemed to segment the flow of the scene by taking extremely close and focused shots of the action. There was a zoom in to Stone's boot as it made contact with the stool, another zoom to the barkeep losing his balance, yet another zoom to his arm as he dropped a few glasses, and finally the sequence came back together as a whole and we simply saw the barkeep fall to the floor.

I've seen Raimi do this before in Evil Dead 2, the Evil Dead remake, Drag Me To Hell, and a few other ventures. Is there a name for this technique?

I also notice that Raimi likes to do similar zooms on a character's facial expressions.

All of that is a prelude to me asking: are there other director signatures that you can highlight for me? Things you spot that immediately identify a particular director's presence or hand at work?