Technical and Thematic Tags

Use these word cloud visualizations to browse the cinematographic techniques and recurring themes observed across Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. Each screenshot in the collection has been tagged with applicable technical and thematic terms from a controlled vocabulary, detailed in the glossary below. Word size in the visualizations is determined by frequency and all words link to a corresponding collection search.

Glossary

Angle and Perspective

• overhead: very high, shot from directly above
• high: shot from above, looking down
• low: shot from below, looking up
• eye-level: shot head-on
• dutch: camera is tilted or canted, frame is not parallel to the horizon
• point of view: shot as if it were from a character’s perspective, putting the spectators in their shoes to see the world through their eyes

Distance

• extreme close-up: shot from very, very close, from chin to forehead for a face without hair or shoulders or showing only a fragment of a face, for example an eye, an object
• close-up: shot from very close, as when a face or small object takes up the entire screen
• medium shot: shot from a middle distance, usually waist up
• plan américain: shot from the knees up, usually appears in westerns
• full shot: encompasses the whole body, taking up the screen
• long shot: shot from far away, as in a landscape and if there are humans/objects, they are smaller than the size of the screen
• extreme long shot: usually akin to panoramic, and if there are humans/objects, they are tiny on the screen
• establishing shot: a long shot of a location that informs the spectator where the next scene is about to take place

Location

• interior: the camera and/or the setting of the shot is indoors
• exterior: the camera and/or the setting of the shot is outside

Movement

• fixed: camera does not move
• mobile: camera moves
• pan: camera swivels on its horizontal axis without changing its position on the ground
• tilt: camera tilts on its vertical axis without changing its position on the ground
• tracking: camera moves in any horizontal direction regardless of whether actual track was used during production to create the shot
• zoom: shot achieves the same effect as a tracking shot towards or away from an object, but using a special lens instead of moving the camera; NB: for differences between tracking, also called dolly & zoom, please see this video.
• crane: camera as a whole moves vertically up or down, or may move around in 360-degree space regardless of whether an actual crane was used in production. This tag also applies to shots captured with a drone.
• handheld: camera that usually gives the impression of perspective, as if someone were holding the camera—sometimes it’s a bit shaky or unstable

Lighting

• high key: frame is bright, illuminated with no to little shadows
• low key: contrast between light and shadow, also called chiaroscuro
• backlighting: lit from behind, can look like a halo or a silhouette, depending on how strong the light is

Composition

• single shot, two shot, three shot: indicates how many people are in the frame
• dirty single: one person figures prominently in the shot, but there may be other people in the background or out of focus
• group shot: for the purposes of this project, used for shots of more than three people

Duration

• long take: a continuous shot that is much longer than the average shot length in a film, often to convey a sense of the action taking place in real time

Themes

• crime
• doubles
• family
• gender
• histories
• intertextualities
• intimacies
• location
• marginality
• media
• PTA
• religion
• systems
• violence

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