What's your favorite long shot?

I believe that many friends will occasionally hear or see the concept of "long shot" when watching film reviews, recommending movies, or chatting with some friends who have watched many movies around them.

In some cases, "long shot" is indeed the favorite capital for senior fans to show off. The consciousness of long shots may be the boundary between fans and ordinary viewers.

So, what exactly is a "long lens"?

In other words, what are we watching at the movies? Is it a picture, a story, or the way filmmakers tell stories with pictures and sounds?

In fact, most of the audience stay at the level of watching stories, but stories are never just stories, it also implies emotions and thinking.

A long shot of Magic Light

Excellent filmmakers, like excellent screenwriters, know how to guide your emotions and influence your thoughts with well-designed movie rhetoric.

"Long shot" is one of the rhetoric ways of movies.

Therefore, in order to see a film thoroughly, it is necessary for us to re-learn the syntax of the film like beginners and be familiar with the narrative and rhetorical tools used by filmmakers: long shots, montages, flashbacks, close-ups, slow motion, camera movement and so on.

We need to understand their meanings and their respective narrative and rhetorical functions.

Only in this way can we better understand what movies want to tell us, distinguish whether different movies are clever and frank in art and theme expression, and make a more mature judgment on the value of movies.

The "length" of a long shot actually refers to the time distance between the starting point and the closing point of a single shot.

The first two films in history, Factory Gate and Train Entering the Station, are two unedited long shots, although their director, Lumiere Brothers, did not necessarily know this concept at that time.

The train pulled into the station.

But for the current audience, the concept of long lens has been everywhere.

Even in recent years, it has become a selling point of a movie.

For example, the opening of la la land is an overnight prospect.

Long shot of uncle Kinsman's face beheaded by 100 people in the church (from the 38th second).

It is not enough for us to know what a vision is. We should also know how it developed to this day.

The long lens rises and falls in the film history, and the film starts from this, but under the influence of Griffith and others, it moves towards the montage structure of multi-lens.

But in the forties and fifties of last century, long shots began to become the subjective choice of filmmakers.

At this stage, the illumination of the camera lens has made a breakthrough, which makes filmmakers more and more willing to use deep-focus long lenses to present what happened in the foreground and background of the picture at the same time.

The long shot reflects the realistic aesthetics of filmmakers: Italian neo-realistic films such as The Bicycle Stealer and War hope to present a complete world, instead of dividing the world with too many clips and manipulating the audience's attention.

With the increasing diversification of film language, long shots did not dominate in the second half of last century.

However, in the new century, digital images have replaced film images, computer special effects have replaced optical special effects, and long lenses have made a comeback, because the lens length is no longer bound by physical restrictions such as film length and space barrier.

The resurgence of long shots is also related to the first-person aesthetics of video games and the emphasis on immersive experience in the VR era.

20 14' s Birdman and 20 15' s Victoria are both films with the effect of "looking through the mirror", both of which emphasize the immersive experience of the audience.

So, as a rhetorical device, what does the long lens really want to express?

In fact, it has no fixed meaning, and the meaning it can accommodate is diverse.

Long shots can show the whole picture of a scene in the film from the perspective of God, such as the US-Mexico border in The Robber of Beauty and the Greenleaf House pub in Kill Bill.

A long shot of killing Bill.

It can express the feelings of surprise or anxiety of characters from a perspective close to the first person. For example, in The Thief Has a Way, two protagonists enter a nightclub through a side door.

You can switch back and forth between the third person and the first person, and at the same time, it reflects the epic grandeur and the helplessness and sadness of the little people (the long shot of Dunkirk Beach in Atonement).

Five minutes of atonement footage

It can also show a fantasy world view in which reality and fantasy interweave and the past and future coexist, such as the 40-minute long shot in the roadside picnic and the "out-of-body experience" long shot of the dead hero in Escape to nothingness.

In Hou Hsiao-hsien and Hirokazu Koreeda's early films (City of Sadness and Magic Light), it showed an oriental "wait and see" attitude.

However, many times the long lens wants to express only a childlike emotion: "Look at me! I can even do this! " As we all know, if there are mistakes in many shooting links of a long shot, the whole shot will start over.

And the lens trajectories of many long shots surprise us like magic: so far, we can't guess how the lens in I am Cuba "flies" from one tall building to another; I can't guess how the lens in "Occupation: Reporter" passed through those two railings that were only a dozen centimeters wide.

These effects are easy to achieve in the era of computer special effects (such as the computer splicing long lens of the mysterious eye), so contemporary filmmakers have to dig their brains to make the lens longer. For example, the German pirated film Victoria is a long shot with a duration of nearly 140 minutes.

However, don't forget that orson welles, the director who shot one of the best long shots in the history of movies, once said: "There are often some shots in movies, and everyone can see at a glance that the director is deliberately shooting a' great shot', but the really great shot should actually be more subtle."

So as the master said, the longer the lens, the better. If it has nothing to say and just shows off its skills, then it is doing nothing.

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