ABSTRACT
If our intention is to illustrate, by way of example, the function of the technique/ideology duality in the field of the cinema, and to mark the contradictions and forms of resistance to which all discourse on the autonomy of technique is now constrained, then why should we examine depth of field, when it is merely one technical effect among many others? It is certainly an effect upon which, since its use by Welles in Citizen Kane, all number of theorists and critics have conferred the status of a stylistic procedure, and which their responses have invested with a certain number of interpretations. But this alone does not motivate our choice, for we could be told, in response, that what takes place with respect to depth of field, from the moment that a filmmaker (or a film) implicates it in a signifying process, also takes place with respect to the close-up, or camera movement, which are “neutral forms” charged by a text, made meaningful by an utterance, and inhabited by an ideology. Even more so, given that it is worth noting, precisely, that the theoretical discourses triggered by the pretext of depth of field have not burdened themselves with a concern for respecting any kind of fundamental neutrality of forms (which, in any case, they also postulate), or hastening to abstract this representational technique from the corpus in which it had been inscribed in order to give it a generalized normative validity, which would amount to granting it an intrinsic signification 1 - and maybe not the right one, as we shall see.
