Deep focus is a technique using a large depth of field. Depth of field is the front-to-back range of focus in an image, or how much of it appears sharp and clear.
In deep focus, the foreground, middle ground, and background are all in focus.
Deep focus is achieved by choosing a small aperture. Since the aperture of a camera determines how much light enters through the lens, achieving deep focus requires a bright scene or long exposure. A wide-angle lens also makes a larger portion of the image appear sharp.
It is possible to achieve the illusion of deep focus with optical tricks (split-focus diopter) or by compositing two or more images together.
The opposite of deep focus is shallow focus, in which the plane of the image that is in focus is very shallow. The foreground might be in focus while the middle-ground and background are out-of-focus. When avoiding deep focus is used specifically for aesthetic effect—especially when the subject is in sharp focus while the background is noticeably out-of-focus—the technique is known as bokeh.
Deep space is part of mise-en-scène, placing significant actors and props in different planes of the picture. Directors and cinematographers may use deep space without using deep focus, either an artistic choice or because they do not have resources to create a deep focus look, or both.
Directors may use deep focus in only some scenes or just some shots. Other auteurs choose to use it consistently throughout the movie, either as a stylistic choice or because they believe it represents reality better.
Filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Kenji Mizoguchi, Orson Welles, Masahiro Shinoda, Akio Jissoji, Terry Gilliam, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, James Wong Howe and Gregg Toland all used deep focus as part of their signature style.
French film critic André Bazin claimed that deep-focus visual style was central to realism. He elaborated in analyzing Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives: The action in the foreground is secondary, although interesting and peculiar enough to require our keen attention since it occupies a privileged place and surface on the screen. Paradoxically, the true action, the one that constitutes at this precise moment a turning point in the story, develops almost clandestinely in a tiny rectangle at the back of the room—in the left corner of the screen…. The viewer is induced actively to participate in the drama planned by the director.
Some filmmakers make deliberate use of the deep-focus capabilities of digital formats. Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006), a movie that was shot digitally early in the conversion from film to digital formats, made use of this capability.
Cinematographer Dion Beebe: “We also decided that there were attributes of HD technology we liked and wanted to exploit, like the increased depth of field. Because of the cameras’ chip size (2/3”), they have excessive depth of field that we decided not to fight, but rather utilize.
Split-Focus Diopter
In the 1970s, directors made frequent use of the split-focus diopter. It was possible to have one plane in focus in one part of the picture and a different plane in focus in the other half of the picture. This was and still is very useful for the anamorphic widescreen format, which has less depth of field.
A split diopter is half convex glass that attaches in front of the camera’s main lens to make half the lens nearsighted. The lens can focus on a plane in the background and the diopter on a foreground. A split diopter does not create real deep focus, only the illusion of this. What distinguishes it from traditional deep focus is that there is not continuous depth of field from foreground to background; the space between the two sharp objects is out of focus. Because split focus diopters only cover half the lens, shots in which they are used are characterized by a blurred line between the two planes in focus.
The diopter gave the opportunity for spectacular deep focus-compositions that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.
Brian De Palma explored the possibilities of the split-focus diopter extensively, as did other ’70s films such as Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Starting in the 1980s, American cinema has developed a trend that film scholar David Bordwell calls intensified continuity.[5] Bordwell claims that:
The average length of each shot in a film has become shorter.
Scenes are built up by closer framing
More extreme focal lengths are used
The scenes include increased number of camera moves, a trend
that has led to deep focus becoming less common in Hollywood movies.
Master shots where two or more characters hold a conversation have gone out of fashion, lessening the need for deep focus.
In contemporary Hollywood movie dialogue scene consist only of tight close-ups, with the master shot abandoned. If more than one plane in the image contains narrative information, filmmakers switch focus (“rack focusing”) instead of keeping both focal planes sharp.
Modern sets tend to have less lighting for more comfortable working conditions, and use of deep focus tends to require more light.
Coverage
The directors’ wish to capture the action or dialogue from different angles.
The practice of using multiple cameras for a scene.
Soderbergh: To stage a whole scene in one shot is no longer common.
“That kind of staging is a lost art, which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them. (…) That’s not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.”
An extreme case of filming in one-shot is the feature film, Russian Ark (2002), recorded in one take.
Films and TV programs with deep-focus photography:
Black and white
Foolish Wives (1922)
Nosferatu (1922)
Greed (1924)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Mad Love (1935)
Dodsworth (1936)
Osaka Elegy (1936)
Dead End (1937)
La Grande Illusion (1937)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
La Règle du Jeu (1939) Rebecca (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Stranger (1946)
The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Drunken Angel (1948)
Macbeth (1948)
Oliver Twist (1948)
All the King’s Men (1949)
Late Spring (1949)
Stray Dog (1949)
The Third Man (1949)
Rashomon (1950)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Detective Story (1951) Strangers on a Train (1951)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Ugetsu (1953)
The Crucified Lovers (1954)
Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Seven Samurai (1954)
Mr. Arkadin (1955)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Killing (1956)
12 Angry Men (1957)
3:10 to Yuma (1957)[7]
Paths of Glory (1957)
Throne of Blood (1957)
Tokyo Twilight (1957)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
L’Avventura (1960)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960) Psycho (1960)
The Hustler (1961)
The Innocents (1961)
La Notte (1961)
Yojimbo (1961)
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
Cape Fear (1962)
L’Eclisse (1962)
Knife in the Water (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Trial (1962)
Two for the Seesaw (1962)
The Haunting (1963)
High and Low (1963)
Hud (1963)
Seven Days in May (1964)
The Train (1964)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Hill (1965)
Red Beard (1965)
Repulsion (1965)
Cul-de-sac (1966)
Nayak (1966)
Persona (1966)
Seconds (1966)
Faces (1968)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Paper Moon (1973)
The Good German (2006)
The Lighthouse (2019 film) (2019)
Color The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Vertigo (1958)
Ben Hur (1959)
Floating Weeds (1959) North by Northwest (1959)
How the West Was Won (1962)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) The Birds (1963)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
The Appaloosa (1966)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Macbeth (1971)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
The Offence (1972)
Chinatown (1974)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Jaws (1975)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
All the President’s Men (1976)
The Tenant (1976)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
The Shining (1980)
Blow Out (1981)
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Rumble Fish (1983)
Brazil (1985)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Casino (1995)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
Six Feet Under (2001–2005)
The Pianist (2002)
Peter Pan (2003)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
The New World (2005)
The Black Dahlia (2006)
The History Boys (2006)
You, the Living (2007)
Zodiac (2007)
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Carnage (2011)
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)
It Follows (2014)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
Suspiria (2018)
Us (2019)
References
Bordwell, David; Kristin Thompson (2003). Film Art: Introduction (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003
Merklinger, Harold. “Understanding Boke”. luminous-landscape.com. Archived from the original on 9 April 2013. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
Bazin, André (1997). “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing”. In Cardullo, Bert (ed.). Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties. New York: Routledge. pp. 14–15. ISBN 978-0-415-90018-8.
Holben, Jay: “Partners in Crime”, American Cinematographer, August 2006.
Bordell, David (2002). “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” in Film Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3.
Kehr, David (2006-11-12). “You Can Make ‘Em Like They Used To”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2012-03-20.
Mertens, Jacob (28 November 2013). “3:10 to Yuma (1957)”. Film International: Thinking Film Since 1973. Retrieved 17 April 2017.
Film Theory: Mise en Scene–Deep Focus
Research in progress, March 2, 2024
Deep focus is a technique using a large depth of field. Depth of field is the front-to-back range of focus in an image, or how much of it appears sharp and clear.
In deep focus, the foreground, middle ground, and background are all in focus.
Deep focus is achieved by choosing a small aperture. Since the aperture of a camera determines how much light enters through the lens, achieving deep focus requires a bright scene or long exposure. A wide-angle lens also makes a larger portion of the image appear sharp.
It is possible to achieve the illusion of deep focus with optical tricks (split-focus diopter) or by compositing two or more images together.
The opposite of deep focus is shallow focus, in which the plane of the image that is in focus is very shallow. The foreground might be in focus while the middle-ground and background are out-of-focus. When avoiding deep focus is used specifically for aesthetic effect—especially when the subject is in sharp focus while the background is noticeably out-of-focus—the technique is known as bokeh.
Deep space is part of mise-en-scène, placing significant actors and props in different planes of the picture. Directors and cinematographers may use deep space without using deep focus, either an artistic choice or because they do not have resources to create a deep focus look, or both.
Directors may use deep focus in only some scenes or just some shots. Other auteurs choose to use it consistently throughout the movie, either as a stylistic choice or because they believe it represents reality better.
Filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Kenji Mizoguchi, Orson Welles, Masahiro Shinoda, Akio Jissoji, Terry Gilliam, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, James Wong Howe and Gregg Toland all used deep focus as part of their signature style.
French film critic André Bazin claimed that deep-focus visual style was central to realism. He elaborated in analyzing Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives: The action in the foreground is secondary, although interesting and peculiar enough to require our keen attention since it occupies a privileged place and surface on the screen. Paradoxically, the true action, the one that constitutes at this precise moment a turning point in the story, develops almost clandestinely in a tiny rectangle at the back of the room—in the left corner of the screen…. The viewer is induced actively to participate in the drama planned by the director.
Some filmmakers make deliberate use of the deep-focus capabilities of digital formats. Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006), a movie that was shot digitally early in the conversion from film to digital formats, made use of this capability.
Cinematographer Dion Beebe: “We also decided that there were attributes of HD technology we liked and wanted to exploit, like the increased depth of field. Because of the cameras’ chip size (2/3”), they have excessive depth of field that we decided not to fight, but rather utilize.
Split-Focus Diopter
In the 1970s, directors made frequent use of the split-focus diopter. It was possible to have one plane in focus in one part of the picture and a different plane in focus in the other half of the picture. This was and still is very useful for the anamorphic widescreen format, which has less depth of field.
A split diopter is half convex glass that attaches in front of the camera’s main lens to make half the lens nearsighted. The lens can focus on a plane in the background and the diopter on a foreground. A split diopter does not create real deep focus, only the illusion of this. What distinguishes it from traditional deep focus is that there is not continuous depth of field from foreground to background; the space between the two sharp objects is out of focus. Because split focus diopters only cover half the lens, shots in which they are used are characterized by a blurred line between the two planes in focus.
The diopter gave the opportunity for spectacular deep focus-compositions that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.
Brian De Palma explored the possibilities of the split-focus diopter extensively, as did other ’70s films such as Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Starting in the 1980s, American cinema has developed a trend that film scholar David Bordwell calls intensified continuity.[5] Bordwell claims that:
The average length of each shot in a film has become shorter.
Scenes are built up by closer framing
More extreme focal lengths are used
The scenes include increased number of camera moves, a trend
that has led to deep focus becoming less common in Hollywood movies.
Master shots where two or more characters hold a conversation have gone out of fashion, lessening the need for deep focus.
In contemporary Hollywood movie dialogue scene consist only of tight close-ups, with the master shot abandoned. If more than one plane in the image contains narrative information, filmmakers switch focus (“rack focusing”) instead of keeping both focal planes sharp.
Modern sets tend to have less lighting for more comfortable working conditions, and use of deep focus tends to require more light.
Coverage
The directors’ wish to capture the action or dialogue from different angles.
The practice of using multiple cameras for a scene.
Soderbergh: To stage a whole scene in one shot is no longer common.
“That kind of staging is a lost art, which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them. (…) That’s not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.”
An extreme case of filming in one-shot is the feature film, Russian Ark (2002), recorded in one take.
Films and TV programs with deep-focus photography:
Black and white
Foolish Wives (1922)
Nosferatu (1922)
Greed (1924)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Mad Love (1935)
Dodsworth (1936)
Osaka Elegy (1936)
Dead End (1937)
La Grande Illusion (1937)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
La Règle du Jeu (1939)
Rebecca (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Stranger (1946)
The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Drunken Angel (1948)
Macbeth (1948)
Oliver Twist (1948)
All the King’s Men (1949)
Late Spring (1949)
Stray Dog (1949)
The Third Man (1949)
Rashomon (1950)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Detective Story (1951)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Ugetsu (1953)
The Crucified Lovers (1954)
Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Seven Samurai (1954)
Mr. Arkadin (1955)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Killing (1956)
12 Angry Men (1957)
3:10 to Yuma (1957)[7]
Paths of Glory (1957)
Throne of Blood (1957)
Tokyo Twilight (1957)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Touch of Evil (1958)
L’Avventura (1960)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Psycho (1960)
The Hustler (1961)
The Innocents (1961)
La Notte (1961)
Yojimbo (1961)
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
Cape Fear (1962)
L’Eclisse (1962)
Knife in the Water (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Trial (1962)
Two for the Seesaw (1962)
The Haunting (1963)
High and Low (1963)
Hud (1963)
Seven Days in May (1964)
The Train (1964)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Hill (1965)
Red Beard (1965)
Repulsion (1965)
Cul-de-sac (1966)
Nayak (1966)
Persona (1966)
Seconds (1966)
Faces (1968)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Paper Moon (1973)
The Good German (2006)
The Lighthouse (2019 film) (2019)
Color
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Vertigo (1958)
Ben Hur (1959)
Floating Weeds (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)
How the West Was Won (1962)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The Birds (1963)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
The Appaloosa (1966)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Macbeth (1971)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
The Offence (1972)
Chinatown (1974)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Jaws (1975)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
All the President’s Men (1976)
The Tenant (1976)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
The Shining (1980)
Blow Out (1981)
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Rumble Fish (1983)
Brazil (1985)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Casino (1995)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
Six Feet Under (2001–2005)
The Pianist (2002)
Peter Pan (2003)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
The New World (2005)
The Black Dahlia (2006)
The History Boys (2006)
You, the Living (2007)
Zodiac (2007)
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Carnage (2011)
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)
It Follows (2014)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
Suspiria (2018)
Us (2019)
References
Bordwell, David; Kristin Thompson (2003). Film Art: Introduction (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003
Merklinger, Harold. “Understanding Boke”. luminous-landscape.com. Archived from the original on 9 April 2013. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
Bazin, André (1997). “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing”. In Cardullo, Bert (ed.). Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties. New York: Routledge. pp. 14–15. ISBN 978-0-415-90018-8.
Holben, Jay: “Partners in Crime”, American Cinematographer, August 2006.
Bordell, David (2002). “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” in Film Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3.
Kehr, David (2006-11-12). “You Can Make ‘Em Like They Used To”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2012-03-20.
Mertens, Jacob (28 November 2013). “3:10 to Yuma (1957)”. Film International: Thinking Film Since 1973. Retrieved 17 April 2017.