Last time we looked at single shots by scale,
from close up to long shot to the extremes.
But this week we're doubling up.
We're looking at relational shots, shots of multiple people from pairs to crowds.
These are our picks for five of the best shots of all time, part two.
(Music)
First up, we're turning our lens to the over the shoulder.
And if you're not familiar with it, it's basically just what it sounds like.
You film one person from over the shoulder of another.
You've seen it a million times in conversations,
often as a shot reverse shot.
But in order to tease out some of the essence of the over the shoulder,
let's contrast it against another common conversational shot reverse strategy,
the clean single.
And if we look at a few clean singles and then a few over the shoulders, we can
hopefully start to feel the difference, but maybe not enough to articulate it yet.
So let's ratchet it up another notch.
Let's exaggerate our clean singles and our over the shoulders.
And here, the feeling starts to become a little more clear.
In the singles, we're all up in the subject's face,
while in the over the shoulders, we're almost peering from across the room.
In clean singles, we're in the middle of the action.
In the overs, we're outside spectators.
And this isn't just a visual trick.
This is a physical reality that occurred on set when the operator plopped down
the camera.
The clean single cameras are within the conversation while the over the shoulders
are outside looking in.
And look at what happens when we switch our focus to non-conversational over
the shoulders for a second.
It takes on distinctly spying vibe.
It's like a point of view with the point of viewer added in.
We're not just watching an interaction from afar,
but we're watching someone watching someone.
There's an immense sense of spectatorship in the shot, and
that's because the over the shoulder is a shot about looking at something,
about viewing it, about seeing, or ogling.
Some of our favorite over the shoulders of all time use this to great effect.
In 'La Notte,' 'Zodiac,' in 'Ali, Fear Eats the Soul'.
'The Graduate' puts a fresh twist on it by going under the leg.
And we love this one from 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' for
its brilliant use of reflection.
But there's no use of reflection quite so
incredible as this one from 'Paris, Texas'.
Where Travis finally reveals himself to his long
absent wife from behind a one way mirror at the peep show at which she works.
- Travis.
(Music)
- Wow, right?
Tell us this isn't an absolutely breathtaking over the shoulder.
And the brilliance of it is in the obstruction.
That in a shot about looking and and being looked at, there is something making it
hard for them to do exactly what it is they want so badly.
The emotional conflict, they're struggling to connect after such a long time in
bizarre circumstances, is represented in the physical conflict of the scene.
The actors in the space actually struggling to see each other,
which is represented to us through visual conflict and inability for
us to see what it is we're being positioned to look at.
It is fitting then that only after she turns out the lights do we get her
reverse over the shoulder.
This time a shot about her looking at him when she
is finally able to actually do so.
(Sound) For our next slot, we're looking at an unnamed, but not
infrequent shot of two characters facing the camera, one close and one far away.
We're going to call it the dual layer shot, and
kick ourselves when someone tells us it already has a way better name than that.
Put simply, the dual layer shot is just about what happens when you
take an over the shoulder and turn the shoulder around.
The looker becomes the subject of the shot,
shifting our primary focus to the mere figure in the frame.
And by turning just this one person around,
something absolutely incredible happens to the grammar of the shot.
It goes from being a shot of looking at to a shot of being looked at.
In the over the shoulder, we the audience and
our shoulder are both fixing our gaze on the subject of the shot.
In the dual layer, the gaze is being fixed towards our subject and us.
You can see this in some of our favorite dual layer shots like these from 'Cape
Fear,' 'Road to Perdition,' and 'The Usual Suspects'.
But for our favorite pick, we'd be absolutely crazy not to go with
Ingmar Bergman's 'Persona,' which has some kind of world record for
dual layer shots per minute.
In a moment of psychological torment of Elisabet like a nurse.
(Noise)
- (Foreign)
- You immediately get a feeling of
the assault of being looked at, with Alma looming, threatening in the background and
Elisabet turning away to escape, but in doing so, she turns closer to us.
The over the shoulder puts the subject at a decent distance away, but
this dual layer puts her right up against us at a very intimate distance.
So it becomes an incredibly exposed and vulnerable shot, and
we are privileged to a moment of hers that,
by her very impulse, comes specifically when she is trying to hide.
It's almost like Elisabet is trying to escape her emotional torture, and yet
she is pinned in by the lens, trapped by us and the dual layer composition.
And as Alma creeps closer, it traps her further.
Claustrophobically, we feel with her, only to finally escape in the next shot,
another beautiful dual layer that mercifully turns itself back into an over
the shoulder, turning the focus of the shot back onto Alma,
who finally breaks down under the scrutiny.
(Music)
Next up, we have the two shot,
perhaps the most straightforward of the relational shots.
The two shot takes a regular single and replaces the one character with two.
But one of our most fundamental beliefs when it comes to how shots
work is that you can only ever show the audience one thing at a time.
We can't read two words at once and
we can't look two different places without going cross-eyed.
So in order not to run afoul of our limited focus,
instead of focusing on either person A or person B, the two shot makes its
subject the relationship between person A and person B.
In this way, the two shot isn't photographing two individuals,
it's photographing a single unit.
The subject of the two shot is a relationship.
Isn't that kind of cool once you wrap your head around it?
>From near to far, from close up to long shot, from open to profile, to full back,
two shots have myriad ways to photograph a relationship.
Each suggesting something different about its closeness or estrangement,
its comfort or isolation, its conflict or its stasis.
Some of our favorites are these from 'Minority Report' and
'Yojimbo,' from 'Chinatown,' from 'Schindler's List,' and we had a hard time
not picking this one from 'Casablanca' because it's so goddamn good.
But we've talked it to death on at least three other lists.
So instead, we're looking at a slightly deeper cut, but no less brilliant,
from 'The Master' as Freddie imagines the girl he loves, Doris, and
why he left her behind.
- Close your eyes.
- What made you come and see me?
- We're gonna pause right here because we feel like this shot has said so
much already, and we wanna strike while the iron of its first impression is hot.
How quickly did you pick up on their dynamic?
Get a feeling for the state of their relationship?
Part of it is the excellent acting.
Phoenix manages to be simultaneously transparent and inscrutable.
Part of it is the costuming,
which also perfectly straddles the line between absurd and somber.
But there's a key compositional element at play here that does a lot of work too,
and that is balance.
The two shot is, by its very nature and design,
a shot that is entirely predicated on balance.
With two figures on the same plane, it is quickly and
readily assessed for symmetry or a lack thereof.
It is a shot that exaggerates an imbalance,
forcing it to stick out like a sore thumb to us, the viewer.
In the extreme, you can see this when filmmakers frame for a two shot, but
only include one character, for a feeling of emptiness and abandonment.
In 'The Master,' the imbalance is subtler than that, but perceptible nonetheless.
Freddy's ingenuous slouch puts him just slightly below Doris,
while the horizontal lines of the bench heighten the sense of the askew and
its position off center drags frame just slightly left.
For comparison, here's what the shot would look like if it were balanced.
Different, right?
So when we see this shot, without even realizing it,
we project this awkwardness onto their relationship.
Combine it with their odd distance, body positioning, acting, and
movement, to create an entire assessment of their relationship.
Letting us know exactly where they're at before they say a single word.
Stepping it up from two people to three, or four, or five, or ten,
we have the group shot.
And just like how the two shot isn't a shot of two different subjects but
their single relationship, the group shot is first and foremost a shot of a group
dynamic or state of the entirety of the crew, of a team, a family, a gathering.
In order to do this,
filmmakers must take advantage of a human psychological phenomenon called gestalt.
As humans, we have a tendency to conceptually group individual items
into mental sets and then deal with them in our minds as one thing.
Instead of looking at a bunch of bananas and cognitively representing them as
five individual fruits connected at the stem, we just see the one bunch.
It is a mental tool for efficiency, and when it comes to a group shot,
it is the filmmaker's greatest asset.
And this doesn't necessarily happen automatically.
The director's challenge is to block, stage, position, and move characters in
a way that contributes to an on sight impression of a group dynamic,
rather than just a chaotic jumble of visual noise.
Consider what we would deem an imprecise group shot, versus a more precise one.
And how much more immediately evocative it is after a quick scan.
Some of our favorite examples of group shots done right come from 'Days of
Heaven,' 'Fight Club,' 'Lost in Translation,' and '12 Angry Men'.
However, for our pick, we think it would be an absolute crime
to go with anything but a group shot from 'Barry Lyndon'.
In this case, when Barry is confronted by his stepson in a gentlemen's club,
in the wake of his biological son's death.
- Is Mr. Barry Lyndon here?
- Yes, my lord, he's inside.
- Thank you.
(Music)
- Here Kubrick employs gestalt masterfully, arranging his figures
in an achingly beautiful array that cries out to excess and debauchery and malaise.
Evoking the concept of a group of burned out men, and yet providing room for
Lord Bullingdon's entry into the frame and highlighting Barry at their fore,
such that he seemingly stands for all of them and all of them for him.
And he does it with such compositional brilliance that it is
humbly beyond our ability to fully analyze.
We can, however, look at the 17th and 18th century historical and
genre paintings he used as inspiration for clues.
Part of what takes our breath away here is the immense visual saturation.
An inheritance of a painting's need to convey a vast amount of information about
characters in conflicts and relationships in a single unmoving, unspeaking frame.
Master painters developed extraordinary abilities to convey entire
narratives in a single image.
So when Stanley composed this frame as if it were a painting,
as he does with almost all of Barry Lyndon, the effect is astonishing.
It draws the eye in like a Mandelbrot fractal, revealing more information
the deeper one looks while all the while reinforcing the whole.
The details strengthen the overall impression of the shot,
creating an image that is beautiful, memorable, evocative, yet simple and
straightforward at a glance.
(Music)
And finally for our last mult-person shot of the day, we're looking at crowd shots.
And if you think gestalt is important for viewers to process groups of five or ten,
can you imagine how crucial well-designed composition is when there are hundreds or
even thousands?
We humans couldn't do without it.
It would be like 'Where's Waldo?' on screen, and
we simply don't have two hours to seek out that stripey asshole in whatever candy
cane factory he's holed himself up in this time.
So in crowd shots, we're really thinking in terms of masses.
People are far away from being individuals.
They're just composite parts of greater entities, armies, factions, sex, cultures.
There's the one-crowd shot, communicating one piece of information about a single
mass that says everybody's doing it.
There's the one-crowd versus one-man shot that pits a man against the whole world.
The two-crowd shot that pits opposing forces against each other.
Some of our favorite crowd shots come from 'The Thin Red Line,' 'To Kill
a Mockingbird,' 'Hero,' 'The Crowd,' and definitely 'Ran'.
However, for our last pick, we're going way back to two shots from 'Metropolis'.
(Music)
These are the first two shots of any human beings in the whole film, and
they are absolutely incredible.
Coming right after a montage of the reciprocating pieces of machinery,
the arrangement, composition, and movement of humans in these shots are no accident.
They are purposefully designed to represent humans
as generic cogs in a machine.
But how perfect is it to use the crowd shot?
A shot scale we were just talking about for its tendency to strip
the identity out of its figures in favor of representing them as a mass to do this.
What's more, director Fritz Lang employees an absolutely brilliant motion strategy to
differentiate between those going into their shift, and
those coming out of it depleted.
The movement and compositional separation of the groups
keeps them distinct in our minds, while their consistent dress invites us to
consider what they must have endured to be transformed from one into the other.
He tries neither to do too much nor too little, and crafts an incredibly
meaningful and illuminating statement at a glance about people in their work lives
from two simple shots of a shift change, and it's utterly brilliant.
When moving into more and more complicated shots,
the tendency can be to obfuscate with all the elements, to create complexity and
chaos amidst the everything happening at once.
But there's a subtle art to engineering all of the complexity into one big thing,
front and center, that's plain and clear to see.
The attention is funneled from the component parts and
directed onto the greater whole that they add up to.
We only see the individual pieces on the way to arriving at their sum total.
It's only ever a shot of one thing at a time.
The trick is pointing everything in the same direction, and to our eye,
these five shots do it better than most.
Which is why they're our picks for the five best shots of all time, part two.
So what do you think?
Disagree with our picks?
Have any other shots you think might've belonged here?
Any ideas for best-of shots we should talk about on our next list?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.