![]() To enable both the gun and the subject to stay in focus Hitchcock, created a giant mechanical hand and gun. In Alfred Hitchcocks' Spellbound (1945), the murderer, in a point-of-view shot, turns the gun away from his psychoanalyst (Ingrid Bergman) and on to himself. Brian De Palma, director of Carrie, is particularly fond of them.ĭeep focus cinematographers became particularly ingenious in the 40s and 50s. Split diopters are still in use to today. Deep focus also made extensive use of split diopters - basically a close-up lens cut in half that can be slid partially in front of the lens to enable close focus on an object or face one side of the frame while allowing the background to stay in focus. Citizen Kane is loaded with complex composites where background action was shot separately and matted in. A couple of years earlier none of this would have been possible.ĭeep focus also involved a few tricks. Faster filmstock and powerful carbon arc lamps enabled Toland to shoot between f8 and f16 using (mostly) wide-angle lenses. Some critics saw this as liberating the audience rather than being controlled and directed, the viewer was free to make his or her own connections.ĭeep focus (or deep depth of field, as we would call it today) was dependent on innovations in technology. Everything was clear and sharp for the eye to discover. No longer did the filmmaker have to decide what was in focus and what was not. Most famously pioneered by cinematographer Greg Toland in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, deep focus meant everything on the film set could be in focus at once. ![]() In the heyday of movies in the 1940s, a cinematographic breakthrough was proclaimed: deep focus. And sometimes, what was seen as a breakthrough with hindsight looks merely like a shift in convention. A breakthrough in one area can hold us back in another a technology that makes one style of filmmaking easier can impede another. Why did it fade in popularity? And do recent consumer and professional technical trends mean that it is now overdue a revival?įilmmakers push technology in certain directions, but technology pushes back at us, too. Replay: Once upon a time, Deep Focus ruled the cinema screen.
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