Well, I saw a movie last night that commanded me to bring this technique to the forefront of my discussions.
The movie was Lee Cronin's The Mummy, which is, I think it's fair to say, lousy with split diopter shots.
What the heck is a split diopter, you might ask?
It's a shot in which both the extreme foreground and the extreme background are in focus at the same time. It isn't possible to achieve this effect with just a normal movie camera. Here's what Wikipedia says about how the effect is accomplished:
A split diopter is half convex glass that attaches in front of the camera's main lens to make half the lens nearsighted. The lens can focus on a plane in the background and the diopter on a foreground. A split diopter does not create real deep focus, only the illusion of this. What distinguishes it from traditional deep focus is that there is not continuous depth of field from foreground to background; the space between the two sharp objects is out of focus. Because split focus diopters only cover half the lens, shots in which they are used are characterized by a blurred line between the two planes in focus.
Okay, but what does it look like?
It's something you immediately notice and don't soon forget, because it looks so ... strange. The textbook example is probably the newsroom shots used by Alan J. Pakula in All the President's Men, including the following:
If you look closely at this shot, you'll notice that both Robert Redford and the gathering of journalists waaaay in the background are in focus. Which, in the context of this film, has thematic implications, though I won't go into those right now (possibly because it's been at least 15 years since I've seen this movie and I don't remember what those implications are).
However, in many ways this is not the typical split diopter shot in the sense that it is naturalistic and does not draw attention to itself. This is a better example of the sort of uncanny appearance of a split diopter shot, from Brian De Palma's Carrie:
You notice this right away, and you wonder for a moment if something has happened to your sensory perception, like someone slipped a drug into your popcorn. Nope, that's just a split diopter.
These shots are not very common because I believe they are quite difficult to execute. I'm not going to go into why that is because this is not a technical movie blog, and without refreshing my memory on what makes them so difficult, I couldn't actually tell you why anyway. And so it is that I tend to notice them whenever I see them, and feel like I have been treated to something truly special.
The Mummy, then, was quite the treat.
In fact, we get so much split diopter in The Mummy that it almost becomes a signature part of the movie's style and overall look.
I don't know Lee Cronin from a hole in the ground, but he obviously thinks he's pretty special because he's put his name above the title of this movie. Looking him up, I'm reminded that he wrote and directed the last movie in the Evil Dead series prior to this year's new entry, that being Evil Dead Rise in 2023.
And I'm not surprised to find there's at least one split diopter shot in Evil Dead Rise. The image below combines one from that previous movie with one from the new movie that's composed similarly:
But there's definitely more than one split diopter in The Mummy. They just keep coming, and coming, and coming. Like this one:
And this one:
And this one:
(Sorry for the poor quality of that last one. I grabbed it off my computer during a replay of the movie, when the options available online ran out.)
Regarding the second one, it may not seem like a split diopter because the character in the foreground is not totally in focus. But I think that's because she's moving, not because she's actually out of focus. In any case, this was offered up as an example of split diopter shots in The Mummy, so I'm not questioning it.
I didn't go in depth on the online reactions to all these split diopter shots, but I did see someone mention that by using so many of them, Cronin weakens the impact of any individual one, and they lose cumulative impact as well. (If there's an actual distinction to be made between those two things.)
That may be true to some degree. But I'll say that each time I saw a new one -- and there had to be at least a dozen in the film -- I felt freshly exhilarated, just because it is something rare in filmmaking. And after nearly 7,300 films, I need all the rare I can get.
And I wouldn't necessarily say a split diopter shot even looks better than a normal shot that might use a rack focus to shift the focus between a foreground and a background object, or might leave one of them fuzzy for the duration of the shot. You might even argue that by looking "weird" it creates an unnecessary distraction, something that takes you out of the moment as you are forced to consider the filmmaking rather than the story being told by the filmmaking. It's a bit unnerving, kind of like watching a movie in high frame rate for the first time.
But there's something old school, film school try hard -- in the best possible way -- of what Cronin is doing here, and I will always reward that, even if it is overused by ten to 25 percent, even if it is more indulgent than it needs to be.
And hey, it finally gave me the occasion to write about one of my favorite nerdy film techniques.
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