Nolan Fans

Vader182 wrote:Deep focus doesn't really emphasize or show reality since nobody's vision can actually see anything that way, and has rarely ever been emulated.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Toland's use of deep focus in Citizen Kane has been emulated repeatedly throughout the history of cinema. Scorcese, Leone, Kubrick, Polanski, Fincher and even Spielberg have made movies that make use of the technique.

And your argument that it "does not influence or show reality" is very flawed, especially due to your poor choice of words. No, deep focus is not a correct representation of human vision. But it does add a sense of realism, which was Toland's intention. He frequently talked about how he was "looking for realism" and how the audience had to feel like "they were looking at reality, instead of merely a movie."

Deep focus, as it appears in Citizen Kane, has not been emulated as a style of filmmaking. Of course, deep focus has been used, it's become an ingrained element within the visual vocabulary of cinema. That's not what I mean. The way it was implemented in Citizen Kane has never been popularized as a mode of communicating cinema- just a tool in specific uses, or not used to remotely close to how it was done in Kane.

Furthermore, I'm well aware of the intentions of the film. Adapting a visual style meant to more closely resemble reality as we see and interact with it (also done by long takes/temporal reality) doesn't work if it's more distant from how we see reality than the way ordinarily shot films look.

I hate flaunting things like this, but I wrote a six page essay studying these concepts that received very high praise from the professor- a significant figure in Chicago's film culture who's job is studying and analyzing film history both as a programmer at a Chicago's most iconic film center (he elects what films to show, and they primarily show old classics of which he must consistently review and rewatch and so on- all he does with all of his time is study film), and as a professor of film history. Because this is a controversial topic, establishing this credibility is significant.

-Vader

Uhhh...Memento, anyone? That and Sin City are perhaps the best neo-noirs of the past 15-20 years, IMHO. (Depends heavily if you consider Pulp Fiction to be neo-noir.)

C'mon, people!! Respect the Nolan.

Ace Ventura

Drive (2011) was pulp noir...great film.