The Persistence of Depth: Exile, Inheritance, and the Unseen Legacy of Deep Focus

By Osman Arslan film-history December 31, 2025

A pair of glowing red eyes materializes from the absolute black of a jungle night. They are not animal, not quite human. They belong to a ghost monkey, a prodigal son returned not to a home but to a memory of one, his form transmuted by time and transgression. He sits at the dinner table with his sister-in-law and his dying uncle, Boonmee, who is unsurprised by the apparition. In the same frame, impossibly, is the translucent phantom of Boonmee’s long-dead wife, drifting in from the porch. This is the quiet, miraculous supper scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), a composition of staggering ontological depth. Past and present, human and non-human, corporeal and spectral, all coexist within a single, stable shot, each occupying its own plane of reality yet visible all at once.

For decades, the critical narrative has charted a decisive turn away from this kind of spatial complexity. We are told that the deep focus cinematography perfected by Gregg Toland and celebrated by André Bazin, that grand, democratic style that held foreground, middle ground, and background in simultaneous, crisp relief, was a relic of a bygone Hollywood classicism. In its place, it is said, arose the intimate, subjective gaze of the post-war European art film, a tradition favoring the shallow depth of field, the defocused background, and the isolated portrait. This aesthetic of intimacy, of psychological interiority, is seen to flourish in the work of contemporary titans like Claire Denis or Agnès Varda, whose canvases prioritize the close-up and the haptic over the tableau. I believe this narrative, however tidy, is incomplete. It overlooks a powerful, subterranean current in global cinema.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that dismisses deep focus as an outmoded theatrical device, I argue that its fundamental principles have not vanished but have been radically reinvented. This technique, born of silent-era necessity and solidified in 1930s Hollywood dramas of social upheaval, secretly structures some of today’s most visionary cinema. It persists not as a nostalgic tic but as a potent visual language for exploring the modern conditions of exile, inheritance, and ecological anxiety. From the multi-planar racial tensions of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to the disorienting, non-human perspectives of Sensory Ethnography and the spectral landscapes of Weerasethakul, the legacy of deep focus has been repurposed. It transforms the technique from a tool for staging social realism into a method for visualizing the haunting of the present by the past, revealing a suppressed spatial continuum in film history that connects the dustbowl diaspora to the diasporas of the soul.

###

The syntax of deep focus was not born with sound, but in the eloquent silence that preceded it. In the late silent era, directors like King Vidor constructed vast social tapestries within the frame precisely because they could not rely on dialogue to shift our attention. In The Crowd (1928), the camera beholds a sea of anonymous office desks stretching into an impossibly distant vanishing point, with our protagonist, John Sims, lost within the geometry of oppressive labor. The shot’s power lies in its simultaneity; it is both a portrait of one man’s ambition and a panoramic indictment of a system that renders him insignificant. This compositional strategy, where the individual story is nested within a larger, visible social context, laid the formal and thematic groundwork for the deep focus revolution of the 1930s and 40s.

Of course, the canonical example is Orson Welles and Gregg Toland’s work on Citizen Kane (1941). More than a technical flourish, their use of the split-diopter and wide-angle lenses was a philosophical statement. For André Bazin, its virtue was ontological. By refusing to guide the viewer’s eye with the coercive cuts of montage or the isolating blur of a shallow field, deep focus restored a measure of ambiguity and perceptual freedom to the cinematic image, bringing it closer to the way we experience reality itself. The iconic shot of young Charles playing in the snow, framed by the window as his mother signs his life away to a banker in the foreground, is a masterclass in this principle. It is a scene of exile, the severing of a bond, where the foreground action (the signing of a contract) seals the fate of the background figure (the boy). The spatial depth becomes a manifestation of temporal and emotional distance. The entire tragedy of a life’s inheritance, or lack thereof, is contained in that single, cavernous composition.

For nearly half a century, this moment was treated as an apex, a peak from which cinema gracefully descended into other, more intimate forms. Then came the blistering summer of 1989 on a single block in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee resurrected the political grammar of deep focus with a vengeance. Far from an outlier, Lee’s film can be seen as the missing link between the social problem plays of 1930s Hollywood and the diasporic cinema of the 21st century. His mise-en-scène is not Bazinian in its pursuit of realism, but it is profoundly indebted to the concept of the multi-planar frame as a site of social conflict.

Consider the recurring scenes of the three corner men (Robin Harris, Paul Benjamin, and Frankie Faison) observing the neighborhood’s daily dramas. Lee and his cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, consistently place them in the foreground, their commentary a kind of Greek chorus, while the life of the block, children playing, Mookie delivering pizzas, Buggin’ Out canvassing for his boycott, unfolds in the middle ground and background. The depth of field ensures that no single action is isolated. Every event is witnessed, absorbed, and judged by the community. The frame itself becomes a container for the neighborhood’s simmering tensions, forcing us to read the relationship between its distinct social planes. When Radio Raheem and Buggin’ Out storm into Sal’s Famous Pizzeria for their final confrontation, Lee orchestrates a collision of these planes. Sal and his sons occupy the foreground behind the counter, a bastion of white ownership, while a crowd of Black residents masses in the doorway and on the street behind the challengers. The space is not merely deep; it is charged, stratified, and primed for explosion. This is Citizen Kane’s compositional strategy remixed for the Reagan era, a story of inheritance, the inheritance of a neighborhood, of racial animus, of a place to call home, staged as a battle for spatial dominance.

###

If Lee deploys deep focus to articulate the political stratifications of the urban diaspora, Apichatpong Weerasethakul pushes the technique into the metaphysical realm. The recent, meteoric rise of his work in critical estimations, as documented by the shifting landscape of global polls like Sight & Sound’s decennial survey, signals more than a welcome diversification of the canon. It reflects a growing attunement to a cinematic language that uses space and time in ways that classical narrative has conditioned us to ignore. Weerasethakul’s cinema is often categorized as "slow," a label that conjures images of long takes and contemplative stillness. Yet this classification obscures the radical complexity of his compositions.

His films are not about psychological interiority rendered through a shallow focus; they are about a collective, spiritual interiority made manifest in the exterior world. The jungles of Thailand in Tropical Malady (2004) and Uncle Boonmee are not merely settings; they are archives of memory, haunted by silenced histories and transmigrating souls. Weerasethakul’s deep focus is one of stacked temporalities. In Tropical Malady, a soldier, Keng, hunts a shapeshifting shaman in the form of a tiger. As he ventures deeper into the jungle, the film’s reality fractures. In one astonishing sequence, Keng rests by a stream as the subtitles deliver a monologue from the tiger, his invisible pursuer. The camera holds a deep shot of the foliage, every leaf and branch rendered in detail, but the true depth is sonic and narrative. The human plane (Keng) and the spirit plane (the tiger) are layered onto a single sensory field. We see Keng, but we hear the tiger; the depth is between what is seen and what is felt, a ghostly inheritance of folklore and desire.

This culminates in the dinner scene in Uncle Boonmee. The shot is deceptively simple: a medium-wide tableau showing family members around a table. But the genius lies in what the frame contains. In the foreground, we have the living. In the middle ground, the ghost of Boonmee’s wife, her form flickering with a soft, ethereal light. To her right, the Monkey Ghost, covered in black fur with glowing red eyes, a visceral, almost monstrous presence. The background reveals the dark porch and the night beyond. This is not the clean, geometric depth of Toland, but a messy, porous, and profoundly moving depth of being. Weerasethakul uses the long take and the stable, deep frame not to give us the freedom to choose what to look at, in the Bazinian sense, but to insist that all these planes of existence are equally real and inextricably linked. Boonmee’s impending death is not an ending but a transition, and the frame shows us the world he is about to fully enter. Exile here is not from a nation, but from a singular, linear understanding of life itself. The cinematic space becomes a sanctuary for diasporic souls, a place where past lives and alternate forms can return home.

###

This reinvention of deep focus finds its most radical expression in the work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, particularly Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012). If Weerasethakul gives us spiritual depth, Leviathan plunges us into an ecological one. Shot on a commercial fishing trawler in the North Atlantic with an army of tiny, waterproof GoPro cameras, the film dismantles the very idea of a stable authorial perspective. The cameras are strapped to fishermen, dangled from masts, and tossed overboard into teeming nets of fish. The result is a cinema of non-human perspectives.

Here, the concept of a deep visual field is pushed to its materialist limit. In one sequence, the camera is submerged amidst a cascade of fish guts being washed off the deck. In the hyper-focal chaos, every element is sharp: the glistening scales in the immediate foreground, the gulls dive-bombing in the middle distance, and the churning, slate-gray waves on the horizon. There is no hierarchy. The gulls’ perspective is as valid as the fisherman’s, the fish’s as valid as the ship’s. This is an aesthetic that challenges the anthropocentric bias inherent even in classical deep focus, which, for all its democratic potential, still organized the world for a human spectator. Leviathan presents a world in which we are merely one element among many, caught in a brutal, churning system of extraction.

In an echo of Agnès Varda’s empathetic project in The Gleaners and I, which finds poetry and politics in what society discards, Leviathan forces a confrontation with the refuse of industrial capitalism. But where Varda’s camera is a tool of gentle inquiry, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s is one of violent immersion. The film stages a kind of reverse exile: it is not about a people exiled from their land, but about our own perceptual exile from the non-human world we dominate. The inheritance at stake is the planet itself. By dissolving the distinction between foreground and background, subject and object, Leviathan’s totalizing depth of field recasts the social drama of Vidor’s The Crowd and Lee’s Do the Right Thing as an all-encompassing ecological struggle. The layers of conflict are no longer just social, but elemental. It is a terrifying and awe-inspiring vision, one made possible by repurposing the fundamental desire of deep focus: to see the whole world at once.

###

To look at the cinema of today through the lens of a technique supposedly perfected eighty years ago is to engage in a kind of critical archaeology. It reveals the ghost infrastructure that supports some of our most innovative contemporary filmmakers. The narrative of canon-shifting, which sees the decline of mid-century American classics like Raging Bull and the ascent of global arthouse voices, often focuses on thematic evolution, a move towards more diverse stories, post-colonial perspectives, and environmental concerns. While this is true and necessary, it risks a formal blindness, missing the profound ways in which old tools are sharpened for new purposes. We have been so trained to associate the arthouse with the poetics of shallow focus that we have failed to see the poetics of deep focus being rewritten right before our eyes.

The link between a 1930s Hollywood grappling with the Great Depression, a 1980s Brooklyn on the edge of a race riot, a Thai jungle populated by spirits, and a fishing boat lost in an oceanic vortex is the shared grammar of a deep and layered frame. It is a grammar used to articulate the anxieties of displacement and the complex inheritances, of social strife, of spiritual memory, of ecological debt, that define our modernity. Spike Lee politicizes depth, Apichatpong Weerasethakul spiritualizes it, and the Sensory Ethnography Lab elementalizes it. Each takes the classical impulse to show the individual within a larger context and expands the very definition of that context.

This hidden genealogy suggests a new way of watching. It invites us to look past the surface of a film’s subject matter and attend to its spatial politics. How is the world organized within the frame? Which planes are given prominence, and which are suppressed? What is allowed to co-exist in a single shot? To ask these questions is to move beyond simply identifying a technique and toward understanding its philosophical implications. Cinema, at its most potent, does not just show us things; it proposes relationships between them. The enduring, evolving legacy of deep focus is a testament to this power. It leaves us with an image not of a closed argument, but of an ever-deepening field of view, like the final shots of Tropical Malady, where the glowing eyes of a tiger-shaman stare back at us from the abyss of the frame, a gaze from another plane, asking us to acknowledge the depth we so often fail to see.

---