On this installment of our ongoing best shots list,
we're turning our attention from movement to lenses, focusing on how great
filmmakers exploit the optical properties of their cameras to cinematic effect.
These are four more of our picks for the best shots of all time.
(Music)
So if we're going to talk about the effect of lens choice on filmmaking,
we first have to touch on focal lengths, and
how they affect image as far as the craft is concerned.
And we don't want to bore you with too many details, but
what you need to know is that focal length is basically a number in millimeters that,
through a y roundabout way, essentially tells you a lens's effective angle of
view, or put more simply, level of magnification.
Higher numbers equals more magnification equals a longer lens.
Lower numbers equals less zoom equals a wider lens.
A normal focal length, one that tends to best approximate how we view the world,
is usually considered to be somewhere in the 24 to 50 millimeter range.
Any number higher than 50, and you're definitely longer than the human eye.
Any number lower than 24, and you're definitely wider.
But there's no rule that says cameras have to recreate how we see things.
Sure, sometimes that can be a powerful way to put us into a scene, but
it's not the only one.
And that's pretty much what we're focusing on today, camera technology enabling shots
that envision a distinctly different way of seeing the world.
And one of the first ways lenses can change how we see the world is by
magnifying, by using a longer than normal lens, or telephoto lens,
starting to become apparent around the 100 millimeter mark.
And then continuing towards the extreme at 200, 400, 500, even 2,000 millimeters,
at which point you're practically shooting through a telescope.
A lot of times that's what this shot feels like,
like a view through a telescope taken from way far away,
spying through some kind of optical device like binoculars, which is,
after all, the only real life experience most of us have seeing the world this way.
There's a voyeuristic element to it.
The opening shot of the conversation uses this effect to its great advantage.
And you get this sense because there is a distinct visual quality to
telephoto shots.
They don't just make far things look big where they might normally look small,
but they also flatten the image in the process,
as if the background were much closer than normal.
The Graduate uses this sense of flattening to make Benjamin's running appear futile.
He keeps moving but never seems to get closer.
But there's one more feature of the telephoto lens we want to talk about,
a kind of perceptual magnification.
And we think there's no better
example of it in action than our
first pick of this list from
Lawrence of Arabia as Lawrence and
his Bedoin guide drink from
a well that isn't theirs.
There's no doubt that this shot is obviously very distorted.
That's plain to see.
But it doesn't seem to be distorted in a way that suggests artificial optics.
We don't see this shot in figure TE Lawrence has started
looking through binoculars off-screen as in the conversation.
And it doesn't make us reflexively think of the camera or the lenses, either.
We feel very much in the character's point of view, but
it looks nothing like a real POV.
I mean, whether our eyes are 24 mm or 50, they could never get anywhere close to
matching this custom-made 482 mm lens's view, but that's what's so special here.
Rather than interpreting the point of view literally when we see this shot,
it instead gives us a sense of straining our focus on a small detail from
very far away.
We're a mile off, in the middle of the desert, squinting after a dot
we can hardly see and it's almost like our mind has zoomed in on it.
The camera lens isn't simulating our eyes in their particular field of view, but
our mind in its particular field of attention.
Try it. Look around the room you're in right now
and peer closely at a detail that's far away.
It's almost like it grows bigger in your mind.
It's a mental telephoto.
And sure, part of this effect comes from the cutting pad.
We're signaled by a cut off Lawrence's look in
a series of increasingly long-lensed POV shots.
But the result is undeniable,
a sense of heightened mental focus on a far off object in the distance.
Of course you can get some pretty effects at the other end of the focal lens
spectrum, too.
Below 24mm you're undeniably wide angle.
And once you're around 15, things start to take on a very distinctive look.
Below 10, and it gets all kinds of funky.
Everything starts to look like you're looking through a peephole.
And that's because the wide angle lens has exactly
the opposite effect of the telephoto.
Instead of flattening things,
distance from the camera is exaggerated dramatically.
Moving something towards the lens is like an assault, and
moving the camera through space feels like flying.
The wide angle also allows us to see far more of the world at once than we normally
would, which can give us some very uncanny views of a space, or
even less canny views of a person.
You feel like they're way up in your personal space, mostly because they are.
These wide angle close ups are taken from inches away, and yet
we can still see so much of them.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Terry Gilliam are probably the filmmakers who use this
grotesque up closeness to its best effect,
as in some of our favorite shots like these.
And Kubrick cuts it in for terrifying closeness in the Shining, and for
its other worldly all seeingness as the view of how in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
However, our favorite use of the wide-angle lens has got to be this one
from the end of Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels,
where we find one of the main characters eating alone.
(Foreign)
>> Fallen Angels is shot almost exclusively on an absolutely extreme six
and a half millimeter lens that fills it wall to wall with incredible examples of
wide angle cinematography >> And you get to see it all on display,
the exaggerated depth of a room, the garish caricature of the human face,
the immense feeling of speed in moving through space,
the coming-at-you like effect of objects approaching the lens.
But the most astonishing effect, and the reason we're so
often in love with the lens choice in this film, is its ability to
render a shot that is almost simultaneously a close-up and a wide shot.
Kissing distance from a character and yet in full view of all the world around them.
This has the effect of constantly keeping the character in the context of their
environment.
But in our shot this graphic connectedness has the exact opposite emotional effect.
In a film that so often finds its characters coming up lonely,
Wong Kar-wai uses this ultra-wide angle to separate his heroine from her world.
Wai fills half his frame with his subject and the rest of it with other diners, but
there's no sense of connection between them.
The exaggerated depth of the optics makes the world and
everyone in it feel a million miles away.
There is such a visceral sense of being alone in the crowd with this composition.
And it all comes directly from the lens used in this incredible shot.
Now there's nothing that says focal lengths needs to stay fixed.
We can't forget about zooms,
the all forgotten second cousin of the camera move.
And while today filmmakers tend not zoom because the effect has mostly fallen out
of style, and early filmmakers tended not to zoom because, well,
zoom lenses didn't exist yet.
There's a short middle period of cinema history that centered on
the 70s where zooms were almost kind of a thing.
Unlike most of our shots,
they come with a real life analog of the effect they capture,
panning as turning, tracking as walking, telephoto as binoculars or squinting.
There isn't actually a real life equivalent to the zoom other than,
well, the zoom.
You'll notice that the zoom hardly changes the image at all.
It adjusts its size but not in the same way as moving away from something does.
That would cause parallax.
It's just like cropping or scaling.
No one part moving any more or less than the rest of it.
And even though we talked about telephoto shots flattening the depth and
wide angle shots exaggerating it, all you have to do is watch a few zooms
here to see that changing a focal length doesn't move the background.
It's actually our distance from the subject that affects how close or
far from its background we perceive it to be.
The telephoto lens just lets us be really,
really far while the wide angle lens lets us shoot from really, really close.
You can see this in action in the dolly zoom or
trombone shot, a technique that counters a camera move with the zoom to compensate so
the subject appears like it's locked in place.
But while it stays in place, the rest of the image seems like it falls away or
closes in.
But it's the distance that's doing it, not zoom.
But as long as we're just zooming, some of our favorites include these snap zooms
from Hong Kong action cinema and its imitators, the optical zooms done in post
of The 400 Blow, and Psycho, and the punchy montage zooms of Edgar Wright.
However, to our eyes, the most artful examples keep it slow and simple,
as in this one from The Shining, this one from The Graduate, and especially this one
from our third pick, Barry Lyndon, just after Barry's stepson crashes a party,
publicly humiliates him, and enrages him into attacking.
(Music)
Barry Lyndon is another film that is absolutely filled with spectacular
examples of the form.
There are literally dozens of brilliant zooms throughout that could have just as
easily topped our list instead of this one.
And I'm really only vamping about them now so our editor has time to show you them.
Zooming in, most often Kubrick most often places us in the position of discovery,
quickly narrowing in on small details, and
dispensing with the environment around them.
Zooming out, we mostly find Kubrick losing a subject in the wide world around it, and
so it is in our shot.
We find Barry in pensive regret about his recent actions appropriately isolated from
his environment on a telephoto lens as if lost from the world of thought when,
he starts shrinking, growing smaller, harder to pick out, and less important.
We still remember the feelings the beginning of the shot gave us, but now
they are placed in a context that renders them a small detail in a massive world.
When we see this zoom out, we get a sense of Barry's smallness and
futility, almost helplessness in the face of the wider world
as he is transformed from the subject of a portrait into a detail in a landscape.
And that of course is perhaps the one real world analogue of the zoom.
Moving towards or away from a flat canvas, which, in a film that is largely modeled
on paintings, is probably exactly as intended.
And finally for our last shot of this installment,
we can't forget the other artistically important dial on the lens barrel, focus.
Now most of the time, focus is completely inconspicuous,
remaining constant on the subject of the shot the entire way through,
master tracking with it but completely unnoticeable in its mastery.
Other times the subject changes mid-shot,
necessitating what is called a rack focus from one distance to another.
Usually this, too, is pretty subtle, perfectly timed to anticipate when your
attention flits from one portion of the frame to the other,
motivated by a blocking change or a camera move, or someone starting to speak.
The art of the focus pull is a quite one.
But sometimes the focus puller is asked to perform a solo,
to speak up full voiced and lead the scene conspicuously
to cause a shift in attention rather than react to it.
Of course when you look at it this way,
the function of the focus rack seems pretty obvious.
It is a mean of affecting, well, focus,
or controlling where in depth and thus on the screen the audience draws its eye.
Some of our favorite shots of this sort include this most dramatic opening
rack from Fight Club and this entire scene that's told by
picking faces out of the crowd at different depths from the host.
But for our final pick on this installment of the list, we think no rack focus has
reached such artful heights as this one from The Graduate.
It finds Benjamin Braddock attempting to tell Elaine, the girl that he loves,
that he had an affair with her mother before that very same mother manages to
tell her herself. >> Elaine, I'm coming up.
>> Benjamin, I'm not dressed yet.
Benjamin, I said I wasn't dressed. >> You've gotta go over the back fence and
I'll meet you around the corner. >> What's the matter?
>> Hurry,
put your shoes on. >> (Laugh) Benjamin, Benjamin?
>> Elaine.
>> What are you doing?
>> Elaine, I have to tell you something.
>> What is
it? >> That
woman. >> What?
>> That woman, that older woman that I
told you about. >> You mean that one?
>> Yes, the married woman.
That wasn't just some woman.
What are you telling me?
Benjamin, will you just tell me what this is all about?
No. >> This shot is such a brilliant
two for one.
First, behaving exactly as we expect,
and then immediately thereafter, shocking us by doing just the opposite.
The first focus rack is swift and automatic, following Elaine's head turn
and doing for us exactly what Benjamin's eyes do in the shot just prior, and
flitting from Elaine to her mother.
The focus switches subjects just as we do, and it hardly registers.
But when Mrs. Robinson leaves and Elaine turns back around and
our attention switches back to her face, the focus remains on the empty space Mrs.
Robinson left before slowly, hesitantly, dreadingly rolling back onto Elaine
well after we've already decided she's what we want to be looking at.
It's like the film is purposefully frustrating us in what we want to see,
like it's avoiding it, afraid of what will come into focus.
The focus is us as Benjamin, refusing to make eye contact, dreadfully sure
she's put the pieces together, but still not ready to confirm that fact.
And it's not just dodging, but it's dropping the energy as it does.
It contrasts the prior high-intensity, high-speed, high-energy scene movement and
shot rack with a lethargic one.
Initially the focus whips away in a frenzied flurry like Benjamin trying to
rush to tell her something, but then it slinks back in, the wind completely out of
its sails as if it has given up on the fight, the battle over and lost.
Which is exactly what Benjamin does, and how he feels.
He responds avoidantly and depressively and hardly puts up an excuse or
an apology or a fight.
And Mike Nichols captured all of it with only a focus rack,
which is why we think it's one of the best shots of all time.
So what do you think?
Do you disagree with any of our picks?
Did we leave out any of your favorite shots?
Got any recommendations for shots in our next installment?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix Movie Lists.