| Film Fanatic December 2002
Directing the Focus of an Audience: Part
Two
Focusing on a young teenage boy as an out-of-focus
nest of vampires slowly bears down on him, or on a police chief unaware that he’s a
little too close to the water, are examples of one type of focus called selective.
The act of selective focusing between two physical planes -- say after Mark Petrie finally
realizes he is amongst vampires -- is called rack focusing. In this case a focus
puller under the director’s command, simply pulls focus so the object or character
(Mark Petrie) that was in focus, goes out of focus, and what wasn’t in focus (the
vampires) becomes the focal point of the framed image.
In the case of Salem’s Lot this is done to make
the audience realize that Mark Petrie has become aware of the threat that moves behind
him. It also escalates the tension in the scene since the character’s awareness
triggers him to close the cellar door just in time.
Time, money, and more hands
Selective focus has dominated filmmaking since color film
has existed and motion pictures have moved from being filmed in a studio, under controlled
lighting conditions, to on location where productions need to make use of available
lighting. The main reason for this, other than advances in film technology, is because
deep-focus photography usually requires a lot of well-arranged and powerful lights to work
well. Arranging a lot of lights in a diner on the side of an interstate, or on a path in
the middle of a cornfield, is a very expensive proposition -- unless you luck out and get
an incredibly bright and sunny day lighting your cornfield. But waiting for such luck to
occur is also expensive.
Let’s go back to the hand analogy we used last month: Place one hand six inches from your face while the
other is twelve inches away. One hand should be out of focus while the other is in focus.
Now move one of your hands toward the other until both hands are in focus, but not on the
same physical plane. When both hands are in focus, but do not share the same physical
plane, the distance that separates them is referred to as depth of field, or depth of
focus.
The farther my hands are apart and in focus, the deeper the
depth of field, and therefore the better my eye is at keeping both physical planes in
focus. In my case, both hands were about two inches apart -- that two inches indicates a
rather shallow depth of field. But why would my vision have such a shallow depth of field?
Well mainly because there is one very dim light coming from the other end of my room.
Without involving lens length or quality it’s safe to say that my shallow depth of
field is the result of inadequate lighting. If I performed the same exercise outside on a
sunny day, I probably wouldn’t have enough length in my arms to kill the depth of
focus between my hands.
Back then…
Deep focus originally came to be when films
were more like filmed plays and black-and-white film was the only choice of stock. The
nature of a play is having several things happening at once on stage, and deep focus
allowed every physical plane on that stage to be in clear view. Black-and-white films also
looked better with deep focus, since composition had more to do with shapes in a colorless
image, and shapes looked flat if they didn’t have another shape behind them to
reinforce depth.
Look at a film like Citizen Kane and you’ll
immediately notice how geometrically dense Gregg Toland’s images are. Take the famous
scene in Xanadu where Kane stands in front of several mirrors as a means of depicting his
loneliness. You’ll note that every one of his reflected images may be on different
physical planes but are also in sharp focus. Without the ability to show each of his
reflections in sharp focus we lose the sense of depth, and therefore the feeling of
loneliness that is internalized in Kane.
Deep focus also allowed connections between characters to
be more apparent. The scene in Citizen Kane where the young Kane is playing outside
in the snow, and the camera pulls back into the house to reveal his parents in the
kitchen, represents a classic example of how depth of field and deep focus differ from
selective focus, by allowing the audience to be aware of multiple events happening on
multiple physical planes. As an audience we know that what’s happening in the
Kanes’ kitchen will surely affect the boy playing innocently outside.
But just because deep focus was more prevalent with black
and white doesn’t mean it fell dead with color. Vittorio Storaro used deep-focus
techniques to make the world of Dick Tracy seem more like a comic strip. Wide
exterior shots always had that sense of depth and vividness of color that a comic-strip
pane possessed.
So next time you watch a film be aware of where the focus
of the scene is taking you. From it, you may get a better idea of how relationships come
together without one word being spoken.
...Anthony Di Marco
anthony@hometheatersound.com |
