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)
(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
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