The Shot

This is my forth film fan blog posting.  For this post I am going to talk about the shot with a focus on framing within Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.  Although this film is relatively new, (made in 2010), I believe that it fits in with some of the classics of the heist movie genre. 

Now, explaining this film to someone who has never seen the film before can be a little tricky.  The main character Cobb is a very skilled dream thief who is able to enter people’s minds and extract their deepest darkest secrets through forming a dream world and accessing the victim’s deepest thoughts.  He was eventually caught, and is considered a fugitive.  Now his only way back to his children is to pull off the opposite of a perfect heist.  He doesn’t need to steal and idea, he needs to plant one in someone else’s mind (inception).  Cobb goes out and assembles a team of individuals who each have their own unique talents and has everything funded by a man who wants the idea planted in someone else’s mind.  While overcoming many different problems and trip-ups, Cobb eventually goes deeper and deeper into the human brains dream states and has to figure out for himself what is real and what is really just a dream. 

According to Robinson, In the Long Shot (LS) the whole subject is in frame. The usual convention of the Long Shot (LS) is the character's head and feet are nearly touching the top and bottom of frame. As we are now closer to the subject, it is easier to identify aspects of the character and their performances, but also retain the audiences' awareness of the overall environment they are in, which makes the Long Shot (LS) a good framing for action scenes and observing social groupings.  In the movie inception because most of the film is shot from the idea of being in a dream or a dream within a dream within a dream, the use of the long shot really plays a vital role because of the intricate detail that each character needs to perform in the scene, while also making the audience still be aware of what is happening with other characters in the scene. 

Like I stated before, this film can would be very difficult to make because of the many dream within a dream scenarios, but according to dcist.com, Nolan he has qualities of the art house auteur, challenging his viewers intellectually. But he's also a people's filmmaker, issuing those challenges to masses of viewers who flock to his films in contradiction to popular wisdom that populist audiences don't like dark or difficult work.  He is able to incorporate many different kinds of shots to make the audience aware of what is happening within the story.  Even if it’s a close up shot, which he uses often, to let the audience know what is going on without directly stating it.       

Works Cited

"Digital Mise-en-Scene : Shot Composition - Long Shot." Welcome to the E-Portfolio of Annabeth Robinson 2006. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2011. <http://www.annamorphic.co.uk/machinima/ls.htm>.

"Out of Frame: Inception: DCist." DCist: Washington DC News, Food, Arts & Events. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2011. <http://dcist.com/2010/07/inception.php>.