The '70s Camera Technique You’ve Been Seeing All Summer
+ season of the split diopter
If you’ve watched a movie in the last fifty years, you’ve almost certainly seen a split diopter shot. For those who don’t recognize the name, a split diopter is a partial lens that allows for two objects, one in the foreground and one in the background, to be in focus. See this moment from Mission Impossible (and pray that the .gifs can load correctly in your inbox, otherwise you’ll want to view in browser for the full effect).
It’s a practical technique I associate mostly with Brian De Palma, as well as filmmakers influenced by his long oeuvre of films about voyeurism, paranoia, and suspense.
So why is the split diopter shot showing up in all of this summer’s biggest movies?
It wasn’t shocking to see it in Trap, shot by Luca Guadagnino collaborator and the cinematographer behind Suspiria (2018) and Challengers, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Suspiria features a prominent split diopter — unsurprising for the film’s deliberate evocation of ‘70s giallo — and Challengers features a (to my eyes, faked) triple diopter — again, fitting given the story’s rotating pas de trois. Trap is a movie about dualities, whether it’s a concert that’s actually a sting operation, or a doting father who’s actually a serial killer, or a summer blockbuster that’s actually a hard launch for some guy’s daughter’s music career.
But where I wasn’t expecting to see it was in Good One, India Donaldson’s stunning debut about teenager Sam who goes on a hiking trip with her dad and his old chum. What was probably supposed to be a pre-college bonding trip for Sam and her dad has turned into a weekend for washed-up boys, with Sam as the perennial feminine receptacle for their complaints, banter, and bravado. Good One has haunted me since I saw it last month, and it’s this use of the split diopter that got me thinking about the technique. While nothing violent happens to Sam, the discomfort of the trip is palpable — and it’s aided by a remarkable use of a split diopter when Sam finds a quiet place in the woods to use the bathroom. I chatted with the film’s brilliant cinematographer, Wilson Cameron, about the choice.
“There's a recurring thread in the film with Sam changing her tampon. She increasingly has less and less privacy, despite being in the middle of the woods. The split diopter highlights that feeling of claustrophobia for the audience, because it allows you to hold both Sam and the guys in focus, versus a traditional medium shot, where the guys would be defocused in the background.”
The split diopter isn’t always used in the showy De Palma way — two people close-up, their faces contorted with emotion, the waft of betrayal smudging the empty space between them. It can be used just as effectively with objects, like the arrow in Deliverance (1972). When the technique is used with two people it can often feel jarring. It’s a shot that inherently plays with our perception of space. Like when two people in a play face the audience, but seem not to see each other, it forces us to understand the emotional, not literal, choreography of a scene. It’s for this reason that it can often be used to comic effect, whether or not it’s purposeful.
The split diopter showed up again this summer in Strange Darling, shot by character actor-cum-DP Giovanni Ribisi, and in Between the Temples, when the cantor played by Jason Schwartzman turns to a Catholic priest as an unlikely source of support.1 It’s not that the split diopter is a particularly rare shot — I found twitter accounts, subreddits, and a bundle of letterboxd lists devoted to cataloging hundreds of the technique’s best showings. But it does feel curious that the De Palma style diopter — that clean juxtaposition of two parties uncertain of the other’s intentions — is showing up now, in a time of unprecedented surveillance and screen usage.
What fascinated me about the diopter shot in Good One is that it’s a style I don’t generally associate with the great outdoors. It’s a technique that reminds us of construct and the artifice of medium, and thus doesn’t feel natural for outdoor photography. While it is prominently used in the outdoor recording scene of Blow Out (1981), the diopter reminds us of the incredible opening montage of split screen work. The split diopter signals the layers of technology the movie is concerned with, and forewarns of the urban paranoia to follow. Which brings me to my final plot point about the split diopter: is its seeming frequency this summer just a coincidence? I know it’s always been there. So why haven’t I noticed it until now?
Like a lead character in a De Palma movie, I’m questioning if this is a conspiracy of my own making. Is the summer of split diopter my attempt to make sense of a highly surveilled post-COVID urban landscape? I cannot count how many hours a day I spend on screens, scrolling on my phone under a dual monitor work setup, disassociating in front of train ads — nor how many cameras I pop up on when I buy groceries or walk down a street of Ring-equipped duplexes. As I wrote this on the train, the man next to me took out a second phone, pausing his Spotify playlist on one phone to listen to a voice memo on another. Does the split diopter even hit anymore when we’re this accustomed to seeing two digital images alongside each other?
Whether or not it existed for anyone else, the summer of the split diopter has been real for me. My affection for this cinematic flourish is proof that my mind has not yet been fully corrupted by the cynicism that inevitably accompanies a tedious slate of summer blockbusters, and that buried amongst copy-pasted theatrical releases there are still people engaging with film as a narrative of moving visuals. When I stop noticing the split diopter, when I stop being able to focus on an image on the screen — that’s when I’ll worry.
other news:
I am very pleased to be participating in the Film at Lincoln Center Critics Academy and to be attending the New York Film Festival this week, and will hopefully be producing some interesting writing about it. You can expect me again in your inbox this October — I have something special planned for a birthday edition.
Thank you to Maddie Burg for telling me about this one, as I have yet to see this movie.
Love the idea of this being connected to the rise of surveillance, screens, and everything more generally being recorded; made me wonder if this current surge in popularity is also tied to advances in digital film and what an audience expects.
Fifty years ago, a technique like this would have stood out very blatantly because audiences were more familiar with film as a physical medium, and would recognise the uncanny nature of both objects being in focus. Now, so much of what we see is digitally rendered (or at the very least tweaked), so we've lost some of our instinctive recognition of how physical cameras behave.
The unsettled feeling of a split diopter shot in the contemporary film landscape becomes more subconsciously creepy, more of an uncanny valley wrong-ness that nudges us to grapple with what is and isn't real on the screen -- which would still be very aligned with the theme you point to, of being uncertain of each other's intentions. This feels like a response to surveillance and screens, definitely, but also possibly a response to the rise of AI-generated slop, which is both unreal AND lacking in human intention.