Shot

(Plano / Plan)

This is the main unit for the audio-visual transmission of information which is generated from the conversion of the literary script into a technical screenplay. It is obtained in the filming using one or more takes (shooting plan) and takes on its final form in the editing (editing plan). The information transmitted by the shot comes to a large degree from the framing adopted at the time. Thus, the shot is normally described in the technical screenplay to specify its type, ranging from the close up, where what tends to dominate is emotion, to the long shot, in which what dominates is spatial information, inheriting these names from the language of painting.

The main categories are the close up shot, medium shot, American shot, group shot and long shot

There are many types in terms of the framing, but the main categories are the close up shot, medium shot, American shot, group shot and long shot. Clockwork Orange, 1971 by Stanley Kubrick begins with a close up of the protagonist, Alex, staring fixedly at the camera which is slowly opening up to a long shot of the crowded milk bar. The types in terms of time range from the subliminal, very short shot, such as the minimum duration of a publicity still, to the sequence shot with a duration that can extend to an entire audio-visual story.

The history of films begins with the long shots in the films of William Dickson, a whole body long shot of three blacksmiths in Blacksmith scene (1893), and this was also used in the documentary reports of the Lumière brothers, such as Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory (La sortie des ouvriers des Usines Lumière à Lyon Monplaisir, 1895). By the early twentieth century, cinema was already using all the ranges of shots. With Abel Gance –The Wheel (La roue, 1922)- and Soviet film-makers such as Dziga Vertov – Man With A Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929)- the duration of the shot reaches its shortest level.

Man with a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera / L'homme à la caméra | Dziga Vértov, 1929, URSS

In the wake of "urban symphonies" such as Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis (Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927) by Walter Ruttmann, in this film Dziga Vertov shows us, with hints of metalinguistic documentary, the daily life of the bustling city of St. Petersburg. Through his camera, which acts as his eye, Vertov captures the essence of the scene, showing the social relationships between the citizens using a strictly Marxist analysis. As its single plot, the director tries to capture the routine of a Soviet cameraman who has to film the city from dawn to dusk. With the help of his brother, the cameraman Mikhaïl Kaufman, Vertov, true to his theories, does not for a moment allow people to assume that any of those pieces are invented. So in the rapid montage that shows the fascination of Vertov for Constructivism and Futurism, he constantly introduces images of the cameraman who is using his camera to film the reality around him and even of the editor who in the editing room is responsible for making sense of all that material.

Portrait of Dziga Vertov
I am a film eye, I am a mechanical eye, a machine which shows you the world only as I can see it

Dziga Vertov

(1896-1954)

Cine-Eye (Kino-Glaz) began at the end of 1919 in a Russia recently decimated by the civil war, a tumultuous period of hunger and misery which some artists took advantage of to promote a genuine artistic revolution, parallel to the one that was taking place socially and politically. Dziga Vertov, a pseudonym which in Ukrainian means “spinning top” (his original name was Denís Abrámovich Kaufman), joined forces with his wife, Elizabeth Svilova, and his brother, the cameraman Mikhaïl Kaufman, to present his own particular version of that cinematographic revolution. Harshly attacking fiction cinema, which they called lying cinema, the three created, under the nom de guerre of the "Council of Three", a series of fascinating avant-garde manifestos and documentaries whose later influence was such that even Jean-Luc Godard ended up paying tribute to them in 1969, creating the Dziga Vertov Group.

A contemporary of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Vertov began his career in the field of the documentary. He started work in 1918 as secretary of the Moscow Cinema Committee, and after the start of his famous series of newsreels Film Truth (Kino-Pravd) in 1922, in 1923 he eventually published the manifesto Kinoks-Révolution (Kinoki, Perevorot), an influential document in which he defended Film-Eye (Kino-Glaz) as artistic testimony of the reality and expressed his complete rejection of fiction films. Interested above all in editing, the filmmaker began to experiment with this from his first feature film, Film-Eye (Kino-Glaz, 1924).

His later projects, increasingly ambitious and radical, would include titles such as A Sixth Part of the World (Shestaya Chast Mira, 1926), Stride, Soviet! (Shagay, Soviet!, 1926), and what would without doubt be his masterpiece, the visionary Man With A Movie Camera (Cielovik s Kinoapparaton, 1929). Disenchanted with the iron Stalinist dictatorship and increasingly demotivated with the artistic world, Vertov would still direct two sound films, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas, (Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa, 1931) and Three Songs About Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934), being relegated after that time to producing totally conventional and anodyne newscasts for the party. Vertov died in 1954, practically forgotten by his contemporaries.