Five Shots: BETTY BLUE and Frames Within Frames
Betty Blue has so many spectacular shots, we couldn’t narrow it down. We’ve picked Five [types of] Shots using colour, these five are all frames within frames, and our next entry is about melodramatic blocking and angles!
Frames Within Shot Reverse Shot
Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is trying to get into the hospital to see Betty, the nurse is tasked with making sure everything is in order.
They’re not antagonistic, and the divider between them is transparent, but his desires and her job are at odds.
The window cutout in this shot / reverse shot keeps each of them semi-isolated as they go back and forth; whoever is most important at any given moment has their face ‘framed’ by the cutout.
It’s a cool use of what was likely a built-in feature of the location.
Frames Within Shot Reverse Shot pt 2
Zorg watches an argument between his husband-and-wife neighbours. As the couple bicker, their ideological separation is represented visually, the windowframe literally drawing lines between them, or putting each in a box, pending how you look at it.
In Zorg’s reverse shot the frame throws shadows over his face; we’ve no idea who he sides with, or what he thinks of the whole thing.
Framing With Smaller Items
Piano lids, windows, car windshields, grease paint; the items are there, you just arrange the people around them juuuuuust right.
Creating Frames in Exteriors
If you can’t arrange your actors around existing elements, you can always just get big, expensive items or vehicles like a tow truck and create a frame out of them!
Creating Frames in Interiors
Betty Blue uses windows doorframes quite a bit, including in pans and edits where they emphasise a distance between Betty and Zorg, and medium shots where they give characters each their own little frame-within-a-frame.
At first glance this shot looks like just another door-frame-ing, but look how the mirror placement also frames and lets us see Betty . . . and presumably get a glimpse of what Zorg is peering at, too.
