Aesthetic Techniques Throughout its history cinema has defined and redefined its basic visual language. In the beginning it was a document of an event. The Lumière Brothers placed their movie camera down in front of something moving, a train pulling into a station or workers leaving the factory. There was no close up shot. The camera was always at approximately eye level. It did not move. There was no colour, and the monochrome film was always of a neutral contrast that draws no attention to itself as film. Although the marks and materiality of that film gives their movies a warmth of nostalgia and history that was not present in its creation as a novel and futuristic medium. George Méliès presented his work as theatre on a stage, although again with a locked off camera. He also introduced the world to cinema as a medium of fantasy and magic. As the medium and its technology matured more aesthetic options became available to filmmakers. Filmmakers employ a wide range of focal lengths to evoke drastically different narratives from a scene. With a normal lens, one that is close to the human eye in its perspective, the shot does not draw attention to itself. A wide lens will increase the depth of an image. Objects close to the camera become larger and objects further away become much smaller. In Cinematography: (Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors) Blain Brown (2011, p.55) says that this “All this can give the viewer a greater sense of presence —a greater feeling of being in the scene”. A telephoto lens does the opposite. It compresses the depth in the image. Depending on the subject matter and use alongside other aesthetic and narrative devices telephoto perspective can create a feeling of claustrophobia, heightened danger, and action or simply beauty. Claustrophobia is evoked due to the lack of space surrounding a subject, as the background is drawn in close behind them. Danger and action are heightened because the compressed space makes things appear closer. Brown (2011, p.56) explains that “With careful camera placement and a long lens, a speeding bus can seem to miss a child on a bicycle by inches, when in fact, there is a comfortably safe distance between them.” This trick has been in use for so long that even when it is not being used to make stunts safer it can still evoke the feeling of danger and intensity as almost a Pavlovian response to the telephoto perspective. Beauty is clearly a much more subjective idea, but it is widely accepted that telephoto lenses make people appear more pleasing by their use as portrait lenses in still photography.
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