The Zoom

Drama at the Touch of a Lever

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by Nick Hall

Type

Essays

Subject

Technique > Cinematography

Keywords

cinematography, shots

Publishing date

2018

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Collection

Techniques of the Moving Image

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 226 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8135-8720-2

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Book Presentation:
From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. In The Zoom, Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television. From late 1920s silent features to the psychedelic experiments of the 1960s and beyond, the book describes how inventors battled to provide film and television studios with practical zoom lenses, and how cinematographers clashed over the right ways to use the new zooms. Hall demonstrates how the zoom brought life and energy to cinema decades before the zoom boom of the 1970s and reveals how the zoom continues to play a vital and often overlooked role in the production of contemporary film and television.

About the Author:
NICK HALL is a research officer in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London in the United Kingdom.

Press Reviews:
"Outstanding and engaging, Zoom makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of cinematography, allowing scholars to see zoom technology afresh."
— Patrick Keating

"New Scholarly Books: Weekly Book List, June 8," by Nina C. Ayoub
— Chronicle of Higher Education

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press