How conversations are shot across the history of popular movies

What is it about?

Over the course of a century, filmmakers of popular cinema have composed conversation in three ways. The oldest, but rare in silent movies, is to place single characters in alternating shots either at midframe or on the same side of the screen. Next, beginning about 1930 they began to show two characters with the camera looking over the shoulder of one, and then reversing to show the other character over the shoulder of the first. And finally, from the 1930s through the 1950s, they began to place characters in alternating shots on opposite sides of the screen. Over the century, each of these yoked shot-pairings increased in frequency and, together, they eventually encompassed more than a third of all shots in popular movies. But their increases were not uniform and their relative prominence has continually changed almost to the present day. A relevant factor is that mean shot durations of whole movies decreased from the 1960s into the 2000s. Strikingly, once the average shot duration declined to about 4 seconds by the 1990s, the durations of shots that had successive characters on the same side of the screen became shorter (by about 1/5 of a second) than those with characters on opposing sides of the screen, likely to ensure that viewers had enough time to move their eyes across the screen and perceive the facial expression of the character.

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Why is it important?

Mapping the changes in conversations across the history of popular cinema shows more ways in which that cinema has evolved to fit psychological principles of alternation and spatial positioning.