As I was reading Mikhail Romm‘s book on directing in cinema, I came across a chapter on shots and framing, in which Romm illustrates different types of shots through the well-known paintings. I found the idea marvellous and thought I’d translate the passage, using the same illustrative method.
1. Long (or the most generic) shot. This means that in this shot we have either a very large room in its entirety, or such an expanse of landscape that it can be seen far and wide. A human figure in such shot will be barely noticeable. Say, for example, if it is a crowd of people storming the Winter Palace, then individual figures in such long shot will fuse into a moving mass.
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| Karl Brulloff – The Delphi Valley (1835) |
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| Ilya Repin – Krestny Khod in Kursk Gubernia (1880-1883) |
2. Generic shot. This is either a large room, but not as huge as before, or, if we are filming outside, a part of the street or a part of landscape, yet not as expansive. As you can see, there is no critical difference between the long shot and the generic one. When we say “the long shot” or “the most generic shot”, we merely want to highlight the scale of the view. As for a man, it will still be a small figure. The prominence will belong to either the architecture of the room, or to Nature, or a street.
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| Ivan Aivazovsky – On the Island of Rhodes (1861) |
3. Middle shot. This is a part of the room, a part of the street, a Nature spot. If we are filming at the theatre, these will be two or three boxes, or a few rows of the stalls, or a part of stage. People are better seen in the middle shot. Architecture or Nature no longer dominate a person, and the person’s image is clearer. Say, if “The Religious Procession” by Ilya Repin is the long shot, then “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan”, also by him, is the middle shot.
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| Ilya Repin – Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885) |
4. The next shot, according to the scale of viewing, we may call the group shot. People dominate this shot, while the room or an outside space are less prominent. Repin’s painting “The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV” may be regarded as a group shot.
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| Ilya Repin – The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV |
The next few shots do not require much explanation. In all these shots the person acquires more and more prominence, while the surroundings become less important. The latter is practically non-present in the close shots.
5. Knee-long shot.
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| Henri Fantin-Latour – Charlotte Dubourg (1882) |
6. Waist-long shot.
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| Sir Joshua Reynolds – Mrs Abington (1771) |
7. Portrait shot (the head and a part of chest).
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| Pierre Paul Prudhon – Annunciation (detail) (1881) |
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| Vincent van Gogh – A Peasant Woman (1885) |
And, finally, the closest shot, scale-wise, is:
9. A detail. It can be an inanimate object (spectacles or a block of cigarettes shot to fill the entire screen), or animate, i.e. belonging to a human body (a fist, a person’s eyes).
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| Claude Monet – Still Life: A Piece of Beef (1864) |
