ABSTRACT
Sizes of frame such as the close shot, the medium shot, the long shot and so on create a certain distance between the viewer and the people, places and things represented in the picture. The relations expressed by these distances derive from our everyday experience, from the distances we keep from different kinds of people, places and things in everyday life. Edward Hall (for example, 1966: 110-20) has described this in relation to our interactions with people, but the same applies to interactions with places and things. According to Hall, we carry with us an invisible set of boundaries beyond which we allow only certain people to come. The zone of ‘personal distance’, the distance at which you can touch the other person, is for those who are close to us – if others enter it this will be experienced as an act of aggression. ‘Social distance’ is for more businesslike and formal interactions. At this distance we keep people ‘at arm’s length’. ‘Public distance’ is for larger and more formal group interactions. It is the distance we keep from people ‘who are and are to remain strangers’. To all these distances correspond different fields of vision. At personal distance only head and shoulders are in sharp vision, and as it happens this corresponds to the close shot, as usually defined in the world of film and television. At social distance we see a little less than the whole figure, which roughly corresponds to the medium shot, and at public distance we see the whole figure with space around him or her, which corresponds to the long
intimacy inary relations, and long shots portray people as though they fall outside the viewer’s social orbit, either because they are strangers or because they are much lower or higher in social status. In reality this may not be the case. The people we see in long shot may be people like us. But that is not the point. The point is that viewers are addressed as though these people are not part of their world.
