Bazinian Film
Bazin valued films that capture time and space realistically. He especially admired long takes. He believed that they allowed time to unfold in a natural fashion.
He valued films that have less manipulation as well as deep focus and wide-angle shots. Deep focus occurs when everything is in focus within the frame.
An application of a Bazanian extreme wide shot in the 2017 revisionist western film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which you can view on Netflix. You can find the main character in the lower-middle of the frame. From Film-Grab Links to an external site.
Additionally, he advocated for the filming of landscapes in extreme long shots and with the use of anamorphic lenses. He believed that this allows the audience the freedom to look where they want to in a frame. It also grants a feeling of immersion in the film. This sense of immersion, in conjunction with wide-angle shots encourages the audience to interpret the events in front of the camera in a more open and undetermined manner.
Bazinian films have ambivalence and many layers of interpretation. He believed that films need to have meaning expressed. He also believed that film is a language that has to communicate something, which ties back to our module last week on rhetoric in film.
Still from the 1939 film The Rules of the Game, which uses deep focus to create a definitive foreground, midground and background in the image. From Eurochannel Links to an external site.
Bazin especially admired French filmmaker Jean Renoir's cinema, going so far as citing the his 1939 film Rules of the Game directly in "Ontology of the Photographic Image." In the film, which features wealthy guests staying at a European chateau at the outset of World War II interacting with the poor servants of the mansion, uses the camera as an observer rather than a tool for cinema. This allows the cinematography to feature a clear upstairs/downstairs relationship between the wealthy guests and the servants of the film. The camera typically follows guests at head level and features blocking of characters deep down the chateau hallways to create deep focus. Realty in this film is portrayed as a continuous 360 degrees beyond the turn of the camera through an adept use of off-screen space.
Continue on to understand the mummy complex as well as contemporary approaches to realism.