Using Distance and Obscured Vision for Evocative Storytelling

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTGuDtxDAWA

There is a scene in Nostalghia (1983), that shows the dream that a character is having of an angel. The shot doesn't begin in capturing the front of his face where the viewers eyes could potentially fixate on; instead, there's a tracking shot in the back of the character where we don''t see his face at all; just his head and back being positioned 1/3 of the frame - it allows the viewer to see the objects that he's seeeing in front of him without a distraction in character response. The shot ends with the camera panning towards the 'angel' out in the distance moving his/her wings. 

What is unusual is how the distance is used here to enhance the mystery.  if you see something far away in real life, you have a chance of mistaking it for something else. And---like dreams, you go between different planes of thinking, perhaps even also to switch our perspectives with others spontaneously. Tarkovsky's speed with the camera is slow and methodical here and the black-and-white allows for an easier access into this dreamlike state.

Bergman, also a deep admirer of Tarkovsky's work, aims for similar objectives in his small handful of films, using obscured vision as a way to evoke something otherworldly. In the scene from The Magician (1958), a scientist who doubts Dr. Vogler's "magic" is haunted by several pop-out scares when Vogler shockingly "comes back to life". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh5rweDQyks

When the scientist's glasses come off we put ourselves in his shoes and assumes that his vision is blurry and can't quite see Vogler sharply. The viewers are compelled to fill in the gaps of what is not clear because its not so obvious whether or not this is Vogler or his ghost 

Black-And White

It's a strange irony that for a medium that easily captures a realism, one of cinema's greatest pioneers George Meleis was in fact an illusionist that created fantasy short films. He taught us this, that filmmaking can be a process of illusions, that your subject appears as one thing but can actually be seen as another.

Its sometimes  important when filmmakers sneak something under the rug with black-and-white, too. Lynch shocked the world with his surrealist masterpiece Eraserhead (1977) or when Spielberg gave us the emotionally devastating Schindler's List (1994).  There are ways that the black and white helps with showing a subversion of sorts and/or playing with visual clarity in order to reveal new concepts.