We've been tossing around the idea of a best shots list for a while now.
But weren't sure we could narrow it down to just ten.
So instead we're doing five and then five more.
And then five more after that and so on and so forth.
We've got a whole series planned looking at our favorite shots based on their
angles, subject relationships, movement, purpose, and today; their size.
These are our five picks for the best shots of all time.
Part one.
(Music)
First up we're looking at the close up which is a shot you're probably
pretty familiar with But just in case you're not,
it's a close shot on someone's face that includes all of their features.
But no more than a little bit of their neck and the top of their head, if that.
And sure, you can shoot a close-up of all kind of stuff.
In that sense, a close-up is just a closer than normal look at anything.
And we'll get back to that kind of close-up in a later list, but for
this one, we're looking at shots of people and in the people sense, the close-up,
at it's most essential, focuses us in on human emotion, expressivity, and
it does it in an intimate way.
It provides us a heightened attention to the details of a characters face and
the nuance that comes with it.
Looking at a true closeup on screen is an experience that replicates the nearness
that's almost always reserved for intimate and romantic interactions.
It's reserved for lovers, sometimes quarrelers, and dental hygienists, and
that's about it.
But a wider closeup can feel like a leaned in Flirtation in a loud bar,
a really tight close-up belongs squarely in the realm of serious intimacy.
You'll only ever see someone from this angle pre-smooch or mid-coitus.
Because of its extraordinary familiarity, it can have a very powerful effect.
Especially if used sparingly.
Used at their most intimate, some of the best close-ups get us
right in there with "Guido Anselmi", "Sam Spade", and "Hannibal Lecter".
To an effect that ranges from dashing, to terrifying.
AT their emotional, they're Nana from 'Vivre sa Vie' and
Bonna Serra from 'The Godfather.' And at their most innovative,
we have clever reflections connecting the face to something outside the frame,
as in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' 'Mashima: A Life in Four Chapters,' and 'Alien." Or
breaking up, obscuring and remixing the face in 'Apocalypse Now,' 'Snowpiercer.'
and 'The Godfather.' Rendering the familiar unfamiliar.
But for our first pic there's absolutely nothing as affecting, as classic,
essential and iconic in its use of the closeup as Carl Theodore Dreyer's
revolutionary shot in 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' nearly 100 years ago.
(Music)
Here, we find ourselves with Joan of Arc, not on the battlefield, but
in the clerical court after her capture.
She's on trial for heresy, and
the cynical French clerics are using any means necessary to get her to recant.
But over and over, she doesn't, and
she doesn't in the most marvelous moving closeup we've ever seen.
Simple, sparse, but impossibly touching.
This one shot is the celluloid equivalent of chopped onions, and
as moving as it is today, it was an absolute revelation in its time.
Films originally played in single take scenes in a wide master shot,
more like the experience of theater than cinema as we know it today.
Eventually cuts developed in a close up was invented and
started being incorporated into film making, story telling, play book, but
it had never yet been used with the power of this one.
Dreyer's innovation was not to invent the close up but to pair it so
effectively with a nuance and real looking performance for such empathetic effect.
It proved that getting up close with someone who appears genuine
was far more effective than further away on someone projecting an emotion.
This one shot quite literally changed the face of filmmaking forever and
cemented the close up as cinema's trump card for feelings.
On the other end of the spectrum we have the long shot or wide shot or full shot.
This was the original frame,
the classic view inherited from the theater that we were talking about.
Because unlike the close-up, the long shot is not about faces but bodies,
not about nuance but about movement and form, about space and physicality.
Only the broad strokes of facial emotions are accessible.
But, where a closeup completely removes what the rest of the body is doing,
the longshot includes it, highlights it, relies upon it.
And, where the closeup almost always limits the visibility of the space,
the long shot makes it an important part of its composition.
And as in theatre, a good director creatively blocks a long shot,
arranging the figures in space to illuminate the subtext of the scene.
And good actors use their whole bodies to express things their faces no longer can,
but it's not just a wider way to say the same things.
It's a fundamentally different shot employed for different reasons.
It focuses us less on just one focal point, one person, and
more on that person in a context.
And it is less about revealing internal machinations but about external ones.
Long at its most essential is a shot of a physical relationship,
often a spacial relationship,
between a person and their environment or a person and another person.
And in direct contrast to the closeup, it's a wonderful shot at establishing
distance, of keeping characters out of the intimate space.
Our favorite long shots include those that relate figures to a space like these from
the 'Exorcist', the 'Searchers' or the 'Seven Samurai'.
And those that relate people to each other, like these from 'Manhattan',
'Harakiri' and 'The Thin Red Line'.
'Ida' has a couple long shots that make incredibly innovative use of the form but.
For our second pick, our favorite version has to be in the Vito Corleone flashbacks
of the break-in from 'The Godfather II'.
(Music)
(Sound) (Inaudible)
(Sound)
After young Vito Corleone Corleone,
who you might remember as Marlon Brando from the original Godfather,
loses his job.
He goes with his neighbor to rob a house, which is what lands us here.
And this standoff gives us one of the most dramatically effective long shots
we've ever seen.
This moment is tension in a bottle.
An entire conflict in a single frame.
And it's not just that it makes for absolutely poster-worthy imagery.
The long shot here is the perfect choice for this moment in the story.
Imagine separating this into cuts, separating "Clemenza" and the officer and
how much less intense that might be.
The power is in the fact that these two are on screen relating to each other.
Connected and the officer doesn't even know it.
The frame contains and heightens the dramatic irony that the police officer
doesn't know what he's walking into and
therefore our suspense is to what is going to happen next.
Clemenza's body coils with tension perfectly on display readying us for
the impending conflict and there's something else.
Who's to say we all need this space?
That we couldn't do this in a closer shot, tighter like this.
But something is immediately worse, and
it seems to us in the full shot, the frame leaves room for what's going to come next.
A standoff once he's through the door perhaps or
maybe just a red streak painted across the opposing wall here.
With the frame tighter, we wouldn't even be thinking about it.
But with this extra room, we've gotta wonder, are we gonna need it?
(Sound) Halfway between the close up and the long shot is the medium shot.
Neither close enough to show us the closest of intimacies, nor
far enough to really go wild with spatial relationships.
The middle child, but it has its place, too.
Like the middle child, the medium shot is a fantastic mediator, a compromise shot.
But not a compromise in the sense that it's the jack of all trades and master of.
No, it's a compromise in that it provides you with some access to both intimacy and
space.
This makes it the perfect shot for connecting the two, comparing, or
contrasting it.
For tying the emotionality to the physicality.
At its best, a medium shot can show us how a character feels about their surrounding,
either environmental or human.
It connects their face, and thus, their emotions to the things around them.
It's a bridging shot between the inner life of the close-up and
the outer life of the long-shot.
In the Mood For Love uses it to suggest a non-intimate distance.
Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger use it to combine a character's inner rage to
the faility of their bodies.
Royal Tenenbaums uses it to introduce characters through both
their spaces and their person.
Gene Dealmen innovates by excluding the head.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by shooting through a noose.
Shawshank through a tunnel.
However for our third pick we're rather partial to medium shot in Jake LaMotta
final fight with Ray Robinson from Raging Bull.
- Come on, come on.
- Come on!
Come on! Come on!
What are you staring for?
Come on!
- Robinson, apparently tired, punched with a fairly well, and rocked Jake LaMotta.
- Come on, Ray.
Come on.
Come on Ray.
(Noise)
- At a low point in his life in one of his
final fights La Motta practically begs for punishment and
just before he gets what he asks for the film slows.
It exhales.
It coils itself up quietly, and first we get this medium shot, and
then we get this one.
And here, everything shifts.
The crowd goes quiet, recedes into the darkness.
Robinson looms closer, the lighting intensifies.
We hold our breath, and then the pot boils over and it explodes.
This shot is absolutely terrifying, utterly effecting.
We feel a shift come over the film as it comes over the imagery and
know that something is coming.
And what's particularly awesome about it as a medium shot is that Scorsese engages
in that dynamic between person and environment that we've been talking about.
He is actively and conspicuously playing with the relationship between them and
he does that with a dolly zoom.
Which you might be familiar with from Jaws and Vertigo.
It involves changing the focal length of the lens by zooming,
while moving the camera to keep the subject the same scale.
The result of moving in while zooming out is that the background changes with
respect to the subject.
And by doing this in a medium, Scorcese creates a perfect relational shot.
We can see Robinson's position, the physicality necessary for fighting, and
most of all his expression.
But, we can also see the ring around them as it becomes cavernous and vast and
hollow and utterly barren.
The men are alone out there, swallowed up by the ring and
we can see how they feel about.
Or in this case, how they feel in spite of it,
all rage and hate and loathing and violence surrounded by an uncaring void.
The moment has almost teleported them to their own plane.
In a closeup, this shot would lose its context,
its intentional sense of distance from the world outside the ring.
And along, we would lose the emotion, the detail of their faces, the powerful and
potent twisted humanity which is why this is a great example of a medium shot
at its best.
Before we move on to our next slot we want to mention a couple shots we're
skipping over.
The inter intermediaries, the gradations between close and medium and
medium and medium and long.
These are the medium close up, and the medium long shot.
The medium close up is approximately a bust nips up if you will.
And the medium long cuts a person somewhere around mid thigh,
and we're going to make a controversial claim without any real
evidence to back it up here.
But we don't think these shots are really functioning in any essentially
different way than the close, wide or medium.
They just move the focus to different elements at different proportions.
The medium close is most notable for being a close up that's holding back,
keeping a little in the tanks in reserve for later so
that the real closeup can hit like a Gut-punching context.
Which is good, there's a use for that, just not a spot on this list.
And the medium long is pretty much a medium shot that, as legend has it,
was popularized in the mid-20th century around the time when westerns were at
the peak of their popularity.
In order to include the hip-holstered guns, especially for duels,
which is why it's often referred to as the American shot, or the cowboy shot.
So, if we had to pick a medium, long for a slot we pick one of these from The Good,
The Bad and The Ugly.
But we don't so we aren't.
So, you'll take your honorable mention and like it Leone.
Moving on, for our next actual category we're looking at the extreme close ups.
The shots that are so tight they can only fit a feature or two on screen at a time.
Where the close up focused us on nuisances as if we were intimately observing
a person.
And extreme close up takes it a step further.
As if we were observing them clinically.
It fractures the human face breaking it down into component parts we don't even
have experience really interacting with.
Only your dermatologist should ever get this close.
So it's not really something most people have a schema for.
Scientific emotional intelligence studies often ask
participants to judge emotions based on only a fraction
of a face because it's more difficult than judging from the whole hog.
So it's doing something very different than the closeup.
Instead, the extreme closeups tend to use a body part not as a natural means of
expression but as a symbol in the imagery.
Connected to us intellectually, not empathetically.
It's not about connecting with an organic performance.
It's about the frame, saying something with the information of the shot
as if it were a semantic element in a sentence.
A tear is sadness, an eye is watching, a mouth is talking.
The closeup is the canvas of the actor but
the extreme closeup is the filmmaker's domain.
There are some absolutely incredible examples of this, eyes in 'Bladerunner',
'Suspiria', and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'.
A mouth in 'The Man Who Wasn't There', a hand in the 'Gladiator',
Feet in 'The Tree of Life', and '12 Years a Slave'.
'The Matrix', 'Clockers', and
'Casino' all innovate by using reflections to combine the micro with the macro.
But for our favorite use of the extreme closeup, we're looking at 'Psycho',
which has some incredible eye photography.
However, for this slot, we're more interested in its iconic mouth.
Much like "Marian Crane",
the 'Psycho' shower sequence has been dissected to death.
But just in case you're unfamiliar with the context here, Marian has absconded
with $40,000 of stolen cash, and stopped at the Bates Motel to hold up for
the night, where she meets a young "Norman Bates", the hotel proprietor.
Hears tell of his, let's say, slightly controlling mother who then
does this.
(Music)
Aah!
- And in this incredibly famous sequence, we get this quick second long shot,
that is we think the perfect use for an extreme close up.
It is jarring, sudden, incredibly shocking, and in your face.
It doesn't feel intimate, it feels violent, like an invasion, like an attack.
It's too close for comfort, but it's very effective in a short amount of time.
In a frenetic span, the extreme close-up quickly and
efficiently says everything Hitchcock wants it to.
If we were to translate shots into words,
this one would say scream, not Marion Crane screams.
That's too much for something this close and this short.
Just scream.
But in context that's the exact right thing to say, and
it's not Janet Leigh the actress who's saying it.
Almost anyone who can scream could have been the mouth for this shot.
This is all Hitchcock talking to you, telling you that screaming is happening.
Violent, in-your-face screaming.
He's doing it close and fast, and the extreme close up is the way to do it.
(Music)
And finally, pulling all the way back to the other far end of the spectrum,
we're finishing off looking at the extreme long shot.
Far enough that bodies are individually indistinguishable.
Faces are inscrutable.
The people are tiny and
the scope is grand, which lends itself to the two things the extreme long does best,
grandeur in expanse and smallness in isolation.
At it's best, an extreme long express of a characters smallness
in the face of the vast world around them.
Like the long shot,
the extreme long is about a relationship between people and a space.
But like the extreme close up it uses the human form as shape and
a symbolic image not as an expressive medium.
This microscopic and telescopic scales are not human scales.
They communicate with symbols or arrangements or move not people.
it uses people as figuring,
symbolic of the person they represent but way too far off for us to really engage.
Some of the best for a sense of epic expanse are these from Last Year at
Marienbad, King Kong, and Days of Heaven.
While some of the best for a sense of isolation and
loneliness are these like Stalker, North by Northwest, and American Beauty.
But for our last slot, we don't think it's very controversial at all for
us to pick a David Lean shot, one from Lawrence of Arabia, after Lawrence is
turned back into the already impassable desert to retrieve a missing man.
Even though he is told that it will mean certain death.
(Music)
(Noise)
(Music)
Lawrence of Arabia is full of best ever extreme wides but
even in a sequence almost entirely constructed of them this is maybe the top.
The expensiveness is jaw dropping especially before
the era of the visual effects to see a human lost in such a vast sea of nothing.
That it renders his feet underly impossible.
Here is a speck of a man having conquered such a vast desert.
Here he has come back truly from the brink.
He might as well have gone to space, for all the emptiness that engulfs him.
And the effect is thus reversed.
Instead of making us feel his smallness as isolating,
we see it as overwhelmingly impressive.
So when "Sharif Ali" is moved by his success,
we understand why it's such a big deal.
Was that "Peter O'Toole" on the camera in that shot?
It's impossible to tell and irrelevant.
It is not his acting or his scene partners that tells the story.
We get more from the camels than any of their riders.
It's the broad strokes and the movements of the frame itself that communicates
a small man that's larger than life.
Which is why it's such a great extreme long.
When choosing a shot scale, it's all about what you opt to include in the frame, and
what you don't, that directs the viewer's attention.
And says, this is important, look for me here, not here.
Because our attention and ability to process information is truly, so
limited It's about controlling what we see, that tells us what to take away.
It's about size, about big something is compared to something else, and
what that says about their relationships to each other, and us as the viewer.
And it's about proximity, about closeness, taking advantage of our shared visual
langauge of relations, of nearness and far-ness with people we've interacted with
to create an impression of intimacy or the lack thereof.
In these five examples and their honorable mentions keep all of this in mind and
use these effects to tell the story.
And to invite the viewer to feel a certain way about it.
Which is why they're our picks for some of the best shots of all time.
Part one.
(Music)
So what do you think?
Have any other favorite close-ups, wide shots, mediums or extremes?
Have a different feeling about the ones we picked?
Next time we're looking at relational shots, two-shots,
over the shoulders, groups, crowds and alike.
You have any favorites of those we can steal so we don't have to do quite so
much goddamn research?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.