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6.104 The faces are heightened not only by the close 6.105 The shallow-focus facial shot has remained a mainstay framing but also by the out-of-focus background (The of international film style (Yaaba, Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1989). Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1921).
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to preserve focus in long shots and plans américains, but what to do about framings that cut the figure off at the waist, bust, or neck? Given a lot of light and small apertures, it was technically possible to keep reasonable focus from somewhat close foregrounds to quite far back, as we have already seen (Figs. 6.32, 6.46). Still, as Bazin pointed out, editing encouraged directors to use shallow focus for close-ups. “If at a given moment in the action the director ... goes to a close-up of a bowl of fruit, it follows naturally that he also isolates it in space through the focusing of the lens. The soft focus of the background therefore confirms the effect of editing { montage].”85
Many filmmakers began to control attention within the closer framing. An iris might mask off distracting backgrounds (Fig. 6.98), but more often, as Bazin noted, the cameraman would emphasize the main figure by throwing the background out of focus (Fig. 6.104). Such selective focus was usually accomplished by employing wider diaphragm openings and by filming with longer lenses.86 (By the mid-1920s close-ups were commonly taken with a 75mm or 100mm lens.) The shallow-focus close-up became a staple of filmmaking, still common today (Fig. 6.105). Even with selective focus, however, the interplay of foreground and background so salient in the 1910s was not completely forgotten. For example, Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The New Babylon (1929), combining sharp foregrounds with blurred or misted background elements, creates a planimetric frontality—a laminated space to suggest that during the Paris Commune bourgeois spectacle spills out of the theaters into the streets (Fig. 6.106).87
At the same time that directors began to exploit selective focus, some American cinematographers created a “soft style” that made all planes of the image somewhat hazy. Gentle lighting, wide-open apertures, and heavy filters and scrims glamorized stars and lyricized landscapes. The results were often
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