Jacob T. Swinney’s newest video, “David Fincher: From A Distance,” examines the celebrated auteur’s use of wide shots throughout his filmography. Clips from Alien 3, Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl and everything in between establish an artist with a command over the eyes and pulses of his viewers. While the close-ups suck people into the characters’ situations and plots, the wide shots establish the worlds the characters inhabit, usually showing them at the center of the frame, instead of its edges. The world in which these flawed and frayed people must exist revolves around them, and is even bigger than the audience suspects.
As Swinney himself puts it:
My last David Fincher video examined the filmmaker’s use of the extreme close-up. It seemed only right that my follow-up video would do the opposite. Fincher’s use of the long/extreme long shot is something of beauty, lending a majestic sense of scale to his often cramped and grimy little worlds. Whether he employs the shot to communicate isolation, express magnitude, or even just to give us a much needed breath, Fincher’s approach to distancing us from his subjects is masterful.
David Fincher: From a Distance from Jacob T. Swinney on Vimeo.
