Grace is frustrated by her lot in life and tries to
provoke Jack McKay (Ben Gazzara) into taking a
more open view of the world, which is ironic, since
he is blind. We are in McKay’s residence, where the
window is heavily draped to emphasize his condi-
tion. The scene opens with Grace sitting in a chair
as she taunts Jack, telling him that she’s walked out-
side and noticed the windows: “It must be a won-
derful view.” The lighting that illuminates her is a
classic example of three-point lighting (image [1] on
page 243): Grace is on the right side of the frame, in
semiprofile; the light is falling on her from no iden-
tifiable source, highlighting her left cheek and the
ridge of her nose; her heavily made-up eyes are in
the shadows of her bangs. From this lighting, we
clearly see that she is determined to get somewhere
with her provocation; in addition to encouraging
Jack to “see” more of the world, she may also be
making sexual overtures toward him.
Next, Grace boldly takes the liberty of pulling
open the drapes. Standing with her back toward us
and holding the drapes apart with her widespread
arms, she faces bright, almost surreal, sunlight and
trees (significantly, there is little other greenery in
the town) as the background music builds in a soft
crescendo that suggests both spiritual and sexual
release [2]. The reflection of her brightly lit face in
the window accentuates the passage from darkness
to light. She then turns, transfixed by the light: her
profile, in the far right of the frame, faces directly
left and toward the sunlight, which is evenly
thrown onto her face; her lips are open in an
ecstatic expression; the remaining two-thirds of
the screen is dark [3]. Finally, she turns toward
Jack, the bright sunlight behind her (an excellent
example of backlighting), her face now in shadows,
but her parted lips continue to underscore her
sense of astonishment at how easy it was to bring
light into darkness—a microcosm of her larger
hope of achieving acceptance in Dogville [4]. As the
scene ends, Jack remains trapped in his blindness.
It is Grace, not Jack, who is able to see the light.
Lenses
In its most basic form, a camera lensis a piece of
curved, polished glass or other transparent mate-
rial. As the “eye” of the camera, its primary func-
tion is to bring the light that emanates from the
subjects in front of the camera (actors, objects, or
settings) into a focused image on the film, tape,
or other sensor inside the camera. This was as true
of the lens in the fifteenth-century camera obscura
(in which the sensor was the wall on which the
image was seen) as it is of the lenses of today.
The basic properties shared by all lenses are
aperture, focal length, and depth of field. The aper-
tureof a lens is usually an adjustable iris(or
diaphragm) that limits the amount of light passing
through a lens. The greater the size of the aperture,
the more light it admits through the lens. The focal
lengthof the lens is the distance (measured in mil-
limeters) from the optical center of the lens to the
focal point on the film stock or other sensor when
the image is sharp and clear (in focus). Focal length
affects how we perceive perspective—the appear-
ance of depth—in a shot, and it also influences our
perception of the size, scale, and movement of the
subject being shot. The four major types of lenses
are designated by their respective focal lengths:- The short-focal-length lens(also known
as the wide-angle lens, starting as low as
12.5mm) produces wide-angle views. It
makes the subjects on the screen appear
244 CHAPTER 6 CINEMATOGRAPHY
DVDThis tutorial reviews the effects created
by lenses of different focal lengths.