"American shot" or "cowboy shot" is a translation of a phrase from French
film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films and the film medium. In general, film criticism can be divided into two categories: Journalism, journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, magazines and other popular mass-m ...
, '','' and refers to a medium-long ("knee")
film shot of a group of characters, who are arranged so that all are visible to the camera. The usual arrangement is for the actors to stand in an irregular line from one side of the screen to the other, with the actors at the end coming forward a little and standing more in profile than the others. The purpose of the composition is to allow complex
dialogue
Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. As a philosophical or didactic device, it is c ...
scenes to be played out without changes in camera position. In some literature, this is simply referred to as a 3/4 shot.
One of the other main reasons why French critics called it "American shot" was its frequent use in the
western genre
The Western is a genre set in the American frontier and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada. It is commonly referred ...
. This was because a shot that started at knee level would reveal the weapon of a cowboy, usually holstered at their waist. It is actually the closest the camera can get to an actor while keeping both their face and their holstered gun in frame.
The French critics thought it was characteristic of
American films
This is a list of films produced by the American film industry from the earliest films of the 1890s to the present. Films are listed by year of release on separate pages, either in alphabetical order (1900–2013) or in chronological order (2 ...
of the 1930s or 1940s; however, it was mostly characteristic of cheaper American movies, such as
Charlie Chan
Charlie Chan is a fictional Honolulu police detective created by author Earl Derr Biggers for a series of mystery novels. Biggers loosely based Chan on Hawaiian detective Chang Apana. The benevolent and heroic Chan was conceived as an alter ...
mysteries where people collected in front of a fireplace or at the foot of the stairs in order to explain what happened a few minutes ago.
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks (May 30, 1896December 26, 1977) was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name."
A v ...
legitimized this style in his films, allowing characters to act, even when not talking, when most of the audience would not be paying attention. It became his trademark style.
References
Cinematography
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