The Emotional Shortcut - Great Cinematography
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Let me start by saying seeing these stills cannot fully represent the power of the actual motion picture itself, where Gregg Toland's work shines. One way his shot-work so compelling is how his deep focus is employed. Toland innovated this style of cinematography, starting years earlier, creating lenses that brought the background into focus as well as the foreground. Using deep depth of field photography, Toland brings in the peripheral actors in a scene, oftentimes creating a tension that is suggesting another conflicting emotion introduced. What had been mastered by directors and photographers in multi-angled shots that film editors would intercut, showing a creation of "see this character's emotion" then, "see this character's response" type of scene. Toland's deep focus moves the scene without moving the camera, but letting the actors do the movement and multiple reactions to their situation as the scene develops.
This is no small task, it is as much the way suggesting to the viewer that they need to take a larger view of what is happening on screen.
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