you. Regardless of the outcome of this encounter,
you have become visually involved with this person
in a way that you wouldn’t have if the person had
remained at the other end of the room.
Similarly, the implied proximity of the camera to
the subjects being shot influences our emotional
involvement with those subjects. Think of how
attentive you are during a close-up of your favorite
movie actor or how shocked you feel when, as in
Gore Verbinski’s horror movie The Ring(2002; cin-
ematographer: Bojan Bazelli), an actor moves
quickly and threateningly from a position of obscu-
rity in the background to a position of vivid and ter-
rifying dominance of the frame. We all have favorite
scenes from horror films that have shocked us in
this way, violating and then virtually erasing the
distance between us and the screen. Of course,
nearness is not the only degree of proximity that
engages our emotions. Each of the possible
arrangements of subjects in proximity to each
other and to the camera has the potential to convey
something meaningful about the subjects on-screen,
and thankfully, most of those meanings come to us
naturally.
Shot types The names of the most commonly
used shots employed in a movie—extreme long shot,
long shot, medium long shot,medium shot, medium
close-up, close-up, and extreme close-up—refer to the
implied distance between the camera lens and the
subject being photographed. Since the best way to
remember and recognize the different types of
shots is to think in terms of the scale of the human250 CHAPTER 6 CINEMATOGRAPHY
Architectural mask in The Book of Eli In this image,
the Denzel Washington character is isolated in an
architectural mask formed by an opening under a destroyed
highway in Albert and Allen Hughes’s sci-fi thriller The Book
of Eli(2010), a movie that contains several other excellent
examples of this technique.
Masking in The Graduate Mike Nichols’s The Graduate
(1967; cinematographer: Robert Surtees) features one of the
most famous (and amusing) maskings of the frame in movie
history. As the scene ends, Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman),
framed in the provocative bend of Mrs. Robinson’s (Anne
Bancroft) knee, asks, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce
me... aren’t you?”Frames within the frameSome Japanese filmmakers
experiment with the Western conventions of framing, not
only by presenting more information within the frame, but
also by using frames within the frame. The composition of
the image preceding this one from Kyoshi Kurosawa’s
Charisma(1999) deliberately directs the viewer’s eye: the
window to the left is dark, the tree trunk draws our eyes to
the right, the fallen window screen eliminates a window we
don’t see. These elements subconsciously tell us to
concentrate our attention on the window in the upper right
corner. What happens next alerts us not to follow such
suggestions lightly because what we don’t know is that the
police have trapped a suspect, holding a hostage, in the room
behind the window on the upper left. They storm the
apartment, through the room on the upper right, and shoot
and kill both men in the adjacent room.