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6.106 The New Babylon: Rain blurs the background figures whom the officer is about to execute.
self-conscious imitations of “artistic” photography at the turn of the century.%° The consequences of the soft style for depth staging can be seen in Frank Borzage’s poignant pastoral Lazybones (1925). The arrival of Elmer Ballister in his carriage opens up a newstrip of action between the foreground figures and the background figure, and the cutting isolates Lazybones while arranging the other characters in lustrous layers (Figs. 6.107—6.110).89 Such scenes remind us that depth staging is perfectly possible without “deep focus,” and they indicate that the shallow panchromatic images which Comolli took as characteristic of the sound era were in fact modifications of the “soft style” of mid-1920s silent film.
One beneficiary of Borzage’s explorations was Yasujiro Ozu, a director who has seldom attracted notice for his use of depth. Despite Burch’s claim that Ozu’s shots are supremely flat, Ozu’s low camera position often juxtaposes middle-ground action with props or items of landscape in the foreground (Fig. 6.111). He also sets important elements in the distance and then subtly grades planes by the degree to which they are out of focus. As in Lazybones, movement or centrality will then draw our eye away from the most sharply focused region (Fig. 6.112). Ozu’s cuts play on the same principle as they sidle us through a locale: a significant element out of focus within the first shot will be in focus in the next, but then a new out-of-focus element draws our attention.”
By contrast, some directors pushed for greater sharpness in their depth compositions. They began to explore the possibility that a lens of short focal length (35mm or less), stopped down to small apertures, could hold a reasonable focus on both a fairly close foreground and important background material. It is as if the viewer has been brought a great deal nearer those “tableaux” of the 1910s, with the foreground correspondingly enlarged. Now the director could keep action and reaction or character and object in the same shot,
ON STAGING IN DEPTH
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