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I find closeups of actors’ faces to be the most consistently disappointing images of recent movies shot in wide-screen. Since few faces are that much wider than they are tall, a wide-screen closeup often results in lots of empty space—as closeups tend to be filmed in shallow focus, the remaining portion of the shot usually contains little in the way of depth-of-field. A full-screen closeup in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio is just as awkward, granting an incomplete view of the face under consideration. Wong Kar-wai’s new wide-screen feature The Grandmaster contains numerous closeups; and one of the most disappointing things about it is that they’re hardly more interesting than those shot by any Hollywood hack. The movie is plagued with these all-too-familiar swarths of aesthetic unconcern, which fill nearly two-thirds of the frames in which they appear.
Read Ben’s previous posts on wide-screen cinematography (part one and part two).
