O que é PLANO? | Dicionário de Cinema #01

[Dictionary of Cinema] [Plane (equivalent to “Shot”): Flat limited surface] [The Arrival of a Train, Lumière Brothers, 1895] A train pulls into a station. The passengers open up the doors and get off. The platform overflows with people, each following their own path.

This iconic image represents the everyday events of train stations, by the end of the 19th century. Besides the on-screen activity, we can observe cinematic principles that continue to be the basis of all visual storytelling. One of which is the Shot.

Let’s move a century forward to check out the 2019 short film "Journey". As usual, the film consists of a progression of shots. There’s a shot.

Then another one. And so on. A shot is an uninterrupted fragment of imagery in motion flowing through time.

In other words, it’s what we see between cuts. Usually, a film has many shots. And a shot is considered to be the shortest unit of a movie.

But it’s not that simple. A shot consists of a flat image. The cinematic shot contains a height, a length and the illusion of depth, based on perspective.

Depth can also be implied by the existence of a foreground and a background. Jacques Aumont determines three contexts in which the shot is used as a unit. Firstly, there are the different types of shots.

You can tell them apart based on the distance between camera and character. In brief, there’s the "Long Shot", which captures the subject within a wide view of their surroundings. The "Medium Shot", that frames the subject from the waist up.

And the "Close-up", which tightly frames the subject’s face. “Journey” has no Close-Up shots, so this example shot is from the short-film "The Myth of Delirium", which we’ll discuss later in this video. The second context is the stillness and the movement.

A shot may be still, with the camera on a tripod and a fixed framing or it might have movement. An example of camera movement is Panning, in which the motion happens horizontally from a fixed position. The last context is about the unit of duration.

As a fragment, the shot may be short, without many seconds. [*These cuts are artificially faster, the movie’s original shots are longer. ] Or it might stretch for a longer period.

All of these options are taken into account when conceiving a shot. These choices define what’s known as framing. According to filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein: "The logic of organic form vs.

the logic of rational form yields, in collision, the dialectic of the art-form. ” In conclusion: There’s the subject, and the manner in which it's being captured. Now, for instance, these are cemetery workers.

The camera is fixed, at a certain distance that allows us to conceive where they are, as well as their movements. Properly framed, the shot may or may not have movement, and has a specific duration. Thus, our definition takes form: the shot is the filmic unit that contains the image between cuts, including the framework and the movement of what’s on-screen, always with a set duration.

Only a radical cinema project would dissociate itself from the basic principle of a shot. The short [The Myth of Delirium, Evandro Scorsin, 2020] is an example. From the start, it challenges the viewer, with a sequence of abstract pictures that are closer to “film frames”, that is, frozen images, than to our definition of a mobile shot.

Another case, in the same movie, is this sequence. Where is the shot? In each of the individual pictures or in the frame as a whole?

Movies such as “O Mito do Delírio” defy basic notions of filmmaking. Suddenly, our concept is vulnerable and debatable. Generally, the farther a movie is from classic cinema, the harder it is to precisely pinpoint the “shot”.

However, as the Lumière brothers illustrate, our explanation is still fitting. There’s a noticeable framing with height, length, perspective and mobile bodies in a specific duration. Therefore, our definition of a shot arises and stands as an essential concept for film analysis.

Simply observe with intent.