One might also add the aspect of restraint. It is precisely through restraint that BEST YEARS achieves the biggest and most effective tear-jerk effects, and precisely because they do not seem to be contrived (through editing), but seem to impose themselves naturally. Having said this, deep-focus/deep staging requires far MORE directorial control than would be the case with analytical editing.
H
> Exactly, in preserving the spatio-temporal dimensions of quotidien
> experience it is both more subtle and more realistic.
>
> See also the marriage ceremony at the end of The Best Years of Our Lives.
>
> Richard
>
> On Tue, January 25, 2011 13:54, Frank, Michael wrote:
>> everything said so far seems to me right on target, but it leaves out one
>> characteristic of staging in deep space that i think may have been
>> overlooked, or maybe just so taken for granted that it's not been
>> articulated . . . note, for example, that henry taylor, discussing one
>> scene in *Best Years of Our Lives* says that it's "poignant moment which
>> could not have achieved quite the same effect if the scene had been
>> divided up into separate shots." . . . but he doesn't explain WHY
>> presenting this material via editing would be less poignant . . . and
>> this is a question that i think andre bazin addresses . . . the argument
>> is that when the scene is staged in deep space [using deep focus
>> cinematography] it replicates real human perception in which the viewer
>> has to search out the salient details of a mise-en-scene, and avoids the
>> excessive rhetorical push - the elbow in the ribs , as it were - of the
>> director saying, "hey, notice this" - - - and that when that directorial
>> intrusion on our discovery of meaning is avoided, the result is - let's
>> say - better
>>
>>
>>
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