Abstract
This chapter analyzes one of the most salient devices of the Hulu series’ poetics: the use of shallow focus and more generally blurry images. If the series’ aesthetics takes many of its cues from Atwood’s novel, I would like to assess how dynamic the use of shallow focus is. Is it utilized according to a consistent formula? Does it interact with other devices? Do specific scenes and episodes play on and even disrupt the formula? How does this poetics contribute to the production of sensation and meaning? And does it have political implications? Finally, what does the series’ use of shallow focus teach us about the poetics of a series and, more generally, about the status of the blur in an audiovisual medium? I hope to answer these questions following a typological analysis of the functions of shallow focus that will be organized from the most common to the less frequent, and that will be divided into three parts devoted to the (de)construction of cinematic space, of memory, and of self.
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Notes
- 1.
“I lean forward, pulling the white curtain across my face, like a veil. It’s semi-sheer, I can see through it” (Atwood 67).
- 2.
“In the curved hallway mirror I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke” (Atwood 219).
- 3.
“Once in a while I think I can see myself, though blurrily, as he may see me” (Atwood 221).
- 4.
“I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen halo, a zero” (Atwood 210).
- 5.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=cY4aCnfrqss Viewed on January 7, 2019.
- 6.
“[I]n the 1990s it was recognised as an explicit technique, dubbed ‘bokeh’ after the Japanese word for blur, in which clarity and fuzziness are counterpoised in the same image (creating a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bokeh, depending on whether or not the results are visually pleasing)” (Jay 92).
- 7.
Marks says: “The viewer’s vision takes a tactile relation to the surface of the image, moving over the figures that merge in the image plane as though even faraway things are only an inch from one’s body” (181).
- 8.
Maureen Turim cites an example in Humoresque (Warner, Jean Negulesco, 1946) (121).
- 9.
So far, the series has not resorted to the possibility of reducing the aperture to shift from shallow to deep focus within a shot and produce a layered composition.
- 10.
Eileen Rositzka notes the influence of Edgar Degas’s painting “Interior” also known as “The Rape” (1868–1869) on the design of the Waterfords’s house’s interior (200–1).
- 11.
“The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power” (Butler 15).
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Roche, D. (2021). Shallow Focus Composition and the Poetics of Blur in The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017–). In: Wells-Lassagne, S., McMahon, F. (eds) Adapting Margaret Atwood. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73686-6_9
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