Best shots of all time

Part 1: based on scale

a) Close-up: it is a close shot on someone’s face that includes all of their features but
no more than their neck and top of their head. It focuses on human emotions,
expressivity and it does it in an intimate way.

For the creators, the best example of this is the affecting, classic, touching and
iconic shot in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). In this
scene 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 take back. But over and over she doesn’t.

This particular shot was revolutionary at that time because films originally used
single take scenes in a wide master shot, more like the experience of theater than
cinema as we know it nowadays. And Dreyer’s efficiency lied on the fact that he
used this shot to communicate such a strong and heartbreaking feeling. By doing
this he proved that getting a close-up of someone who looks genuine was far more
effective than a further shot on someone projecting an emotion.

b) Long shot: this was the original frame and classical shot inherited from the
theater. Unlike the close-up, the long shot is not about faces but bodies, not about
emotions but movement, space and physicality. Where a close-up completely
removes what the rest of the body is doing, the long shot includes it and highlights
it. And, where the close-up almost always limits what we can see, the long shot
turns the space into in important part of the composition. We no longer focus on
one specific object but in the context where they are.

The actors, for example, use their whole bodies to express things their faces no
longer can. The long shot is less about revealing internal mechanisms but about
external ones. It is a shot of a physical relationship, often a spatial relationship,
between a person and the environment or a person and another person. And in
direct contrast to the close-up, it is the perfect shot for keeping characters out of
their intimate space.

For the second pick, they chose one of Vito Corleone flashbacks where he breaks
into a house in The Godfather II (1974). After Robert De Niro, a young Vito
Corleone, loses his job he goes with Clemenza, his neighbor, to rob a house. The
scene is full of tension as we can feel how time passes slowly, wondering if the
police officer is going to get shot or not by Vito’s neighbor. The long shot here is
the perfect choice since intensity might be much more less if we would separate
the officer on one cut and Clemenza with the gun on the other. The frame contains
 and heightens the dramatic irony that the police officer doesn’t know what he is
walking into. The power is in the fact that these two are on screen relating to each
other at the same time.

c) Medium shot: halfway the long shot and the close-up is the medium shot. Neither
close enough to show us intimacy, nor far enough to show spatial relationships but
perfect to communicate the connection between both of them. The medium shot
can show how a character feels about their surroundings. It is a bridging shot
between the inner life of a close-up and the outer life of the long shot.

As an example, they picked a scene from Raging Bull (1980) where Jake LaMotta
has his last fight against Ray Robinson. He is begging to be punched and just
before it happens the film slows and we get a medium shot where the crowd goes
quiet and we dive into darkness. Finally, everything explodes as LaMotta gets what
he wanted. The tension between character and environment is perfectly captured
by Scorsese with a zoom lens as the camera is moving in one way but the subject
stays in the same scale all the time. In a close-up, this shot will lose its context, its
intentional sense of distance from the world outside the ring. And in a long shot we
will lose the emotion and detail of their faces.

d) Extreme close-up: this shot is so tight that they can only fit a feature or two on
screen at a time. It fractures the human face breaking it down into component parts
we don’t actually interact with in real life. The extreme close-up tends to use a body
part not as a natural means of expression but as a symbol in the imaginary. The
frame is saying something with the information of the shot as if it were a semantic
element in a sentence. While the close-up is the actor’s field, the extreme close-up
is the filmmaker’s domain.

As a use of this shot we can analyze the famous bath scene in Psycho (1960).
After Marion ran way with $40.000 she stops at the Bates Motel where she meets
Norman Bates, the owner. In this famous scene, Marion is about to take a bath
when who at that point we believe is Norman’s mother attacks her with a knife until
she kills her. The extreme close-up at Marion’s mouth doesn’t feel intimate as a
normal close-up; it feels violent and uncomfortable, like an invasion, but it’s very
effective in a short amount of time. As we said before, it isn’t the actress who is
telling us something; instead, it is Hitchcock who is saying “this is a scream”.

e) Extreme long shot: on the other far end of the spectrum there is the extreme long
shot. Far enough that bodies are individually indistinguishable and faces are
inscrutable. This shot is perfect to communicate two things: grandeur in expanse
and smallness in isolation. It expresses the character’s smallness inside the vast
world around them. Like the long shot, this is about the relationship between
people and space, but like the extreme close-up it uses the human form as a
symbolic image not as an expressive medium.
 The last chosen shot is from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Here we can
see very well represented a human lost in such a vast sea of nothing but as he
finds the other man we get the feeling of having conquered such a vast desert. The
effect of this scene is very particular: instead of making us feel his smallness and
isolation, we see it as overwhelming impressive.

Part 2: based on relational shots

a) Over the shoulder shot: in this shot you film one person from over the shoulder of
another. You get the feeling that you’re watching from across the room as an
outside spectator.

To illustrate with examples, the chosen scene is one from Paris, Texas (1984)
where Travis finally reveals himself to his long absent wife from behind a one way
mirror. The brilliance of it is that in a shot about looking and being looked at, there
is something making it hard for them to do exactly what is they want so badly. The
emotional conflict where both are struggling to connect after such a long time is
represented in the physical conflict of the scene. This physical conflict is actually
represented by the actors struggling to see each other.

b) Dual layer shot: this is about two characters facing the camera, one close and one
far away. When we pass from an over the shoulder shot to a dual layer shot it goes
from being a scene of looking at to a scene of being looked at. This shot puts the
subject in a very intimate distance so it becomes an incredibly exposed and
vulnerable shot.

For the creators, the best example of this is a scene from Ingmar Bregman’s
Persona (1966). In this shot you can feel the immediate assault of being looked at,
with Alma looming in the background and Elisabeth turning away in order to scape,
but in doing so she turns closer to us. It’s almost like Elisabeth is trying to escape
from her emotional torture, and yet she is caught by the camera, trapped by us and
the dual layer composition.

c) Two shot: this shot may be the most straightforward of the relational shots as it
takes the regular single and replaces the one character with two. Its subject isn’t
one object at a time but the relationship between person A and person B as a
single unit.

A good example of this is a scene from The Master (2012) where Joaquin Phoenix
character imagines the girl he loves, Doris, and why he left her behind. A key
compositional element that works genuinely here is the imbalance of the shot that
makes us feel the awkwardness of their relationship.
 d) Group shot: just like the two shot isn’t a shot of two different subjects but their
single relationship, the group shot is first a shot of a group dynamic. In order to
pursue this effect, filmmakers take advantage of a psychological phenomenon
called “gestalt” which proposes that 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. The director’s challenge is to communicate the impression of a
group dynamic between all the objects on stage.

The chosen example is one scene from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) when Barry
is confronted by his stepson in a gentlemen’s club in the wake of his biological
son’s death. This scene evokes the concept of a group of burned out men and yet
provides room for Lord Bullingdon’s entry into the frame, highlighting Barry Lyndon
on the foreground. One thing that is breathtaking is the visual saturation, an
inheritance of 17th and 18th century paintings’ needs to include a vast amount of
information about characters.

e) Crowd shot: here we are thinking in terms of masses. People are far away of
being individuals; they’re just part of something greater.

For the last pick, the creators go way back to two shots from Metropolis (1927).
Coming right after a montage of the reciprocating pieces of machinery, we can see
the march of workers entering their shift and also those who are finishing it. This
shot is designed to represent humans as generic cogs in a machine. The
movement and compositional separation of the groups keeps them distinct in our
minds but also it is a meaningful statement about people in their work lives.

Part 2: based on objects and places

a) Establishing shot: it is a shot of a place, a location, a space or geographical point.
Historically this shot comes before another scene in order to establish where it will
take place. But they don’t just tell us where we are; instead, clever establishing
shots can play off our mental archetypes about places to create an impression
about what kind of place are we going to enter next or what kind of people are we
going to meet.

The chosen shot is one from The Godfather (1972) where Clemenza searches for
a safe house with the traitor Paul Legato. It is an establishing shot in a series of
progressively more remote establishing shots that communicates in an indirect way
what is going to happen to the traitor in that faraway place where you can see the
statue of liberty on the background, by making us feel the imminent danger. The
place tells us everything we need to know about Clemenza’s intentions.
b) Insert shot: it is a shot for items, objects, details, things. It can ask us to look
closer at an object that turns out to be more than what meets the eye and invites us
to see things in a new way. Sometimes it reveals information about people through
the objects to which they connect.

The chosen scene is one from The Mirror (1975) where a child reads a poem at the
request of a mysterious woman when suddenly someone knocks the door. When
he comes back, the woman is no longer in the room but she left behind the mark
that the tea cup made on the table. This particular scene connects us with the fear
of a fading memory as we see how the mark is slowly vanishing. The woman has
gone out of frame, but the insert happens in plain view.

c) Cutaway shot: while the establishing shot and the insert show us something we
need to know about the plot, the cutaway doesn’t. It’s a look at something
unrelated to the plot, a break. The cutaway teleports us elsewhere, somewhere
outside the narrative that is not casually involved.

The last of all shots is from Floating Weeds (1959). For the creators, this scene of
a table with two bottles and bowls on it and with a window behind has an aesthetic
beauty that communicates some kind of loneliness through an empty space.