Chapter 4: Cinematography

Chapter Overview

The shot is the basic unit of film language. Whenever you write or talk about a film in an academic setting, you will be expected to describe individual shots accurately and thoroughly. Chapter Four’s primary purpose is to give you the vocabulary necessary to do so.

The cinematographic aspects of a shot that you will be expected to describe in almost any analysis are: its color qualities (remember that black and white are colors), the nature and source of its lighting, the implied proximity of the objects and people photographed in the shot, the angle and height of the shot, the nature of camera movement, if any, the point of view (POV) of the shot, and the speed and length of the shot. In order to have the necessary jargon at your disposal, you will need to memorize the terms used to describe these various aspects of the shot.

Chapter Four also describes a central compositional principle in cinematography: the so-called rule of thirds. The material on this subject and the related discussion of deep-space composition is intended to help you see the compositional space more clearly so that you can recognize balance or imbalance in the composition of any shot. Unlike most of the rest of the chapter, this discussion is less about memorization than it is about being visually aware and seeing details accurately.

The chapter finishes with a brief discussion of special effects, including Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), a technology that is completely reshaping the film-production process. The interesting question for future filmmakers and scholars will be how much this technology changes the viewing experience.