In the futuristic world of Severance, the excellent labyrinthine series broadcast on Apple+ which is currently finishing its second season, a technology forces the employees of a company to split their minds in two, creating two personalities: when they are in the company, they are Inters, when they leave, they are Exters, and these two personalities have no memory of each other. It is in the elevator which takes them to the basement of the company that this switch occurs, and it is represented on the screen by a memorable visual find: a close-up on the faces of the characters which gradually distorts by a simple change of perspective. This cinematic technique is the Dolly Zoom, or reverse tracking shot, a technique more than 60 years old, but which continues to have its little effect.
A double movement invented for Vertigo
Concretely, during this type of shot, the camera operates a double simultaneous movement: the camera makes a tracking shot (forward or backward, on a trailer called a dolly) whose effect is thwarted by a zoom which makes an inverted movement: zoom if the camera moves backward, zoom out if the camera moves forward. Thus, if the element in the foreground remains framed in the same way, the background is affected by a brutal distortion of perspective, sometimes an elongation, sometimes a crushing. Often carried out in a rapid and dramatic manner, the Dolly Zoom therefore offers the possibility of creating movement in a relatively fixed shot, communicating to the spectators an impression of psychological shift, of unease, of revelation or… of vertigo.
It was precisely to represent vertigo that the effect was first developed on the set of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo in 1958. To achieve this, the English director asked one of the cameramen during filming, Irmin Roberts, to work with him on a shot that would allow the viewer to feel the intense fear of heights experienced by James Stewart's character in the film. The effect appears several times in the film, particularly in the bell tower sequence, where Stewart tries to chase Kim Novak up a grand staircase, throwing dramatic glances as he climbs the steps. It is also known as the Vertigo Effect that the Dolly Zoom is also known.
An iconic effect that runs through the history of cinema
While Hitchcock himself would reuse this effect in several of his films (the fall down the stairs in Psycho or the cramped interior of Marnie), other directors have also adopted this technique for their own sometimes memorable effects. Steven Spielberg in particular, who first experimented with this technique in Sugarland Express in 1974 before signing one of his most iconic shots two years later in Jaws, when Roy Scheider becomes livid on the beach when he sees the blood from a shark attack rising to the surface of the water. The effect would also return in ET, in a shot of the quiet suburb where the film takes place which offers a double Dolly Zoom, first to stretch the depth of the landscape (the camera moves forward, the zoom decreases), then to tighten the image when the menacing search teams arrive in the shot (reverse movement, the camera moves back and the zoom increases).
Martin Scorsese has also used it several times, such as in Raging Bull to represent the sensation of losing balance during a boxing match, in Hugo, when the hero dreams that he is going to be hit by a train, or in Goodfellas, during a long discussion in a restaurant between De Niro and Ray Liotta to very gradually signify the character's growing paranoia.
We can also cite François Truffaut, a true admirer of Hitchcock (in Jules et Jim or Fahrenheit 451), Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction during Uma Thurman's overdose, Vincent Kassovitz in La haine (in an incredible exterior shot that locks the two main characters in their environment when they arrive at the gates of Paris) or even in The Lord of the Rings, where Peter Jackson twists a shot of a simple forest road to signify the imminent approach of an enemy.
Because of the unease it can make the viewer feel, the Dolly Zoom has also found its place in horror cinema, such as in Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist in 1982, which stretches a corridor to the extreme like in a nightmare, or more recently with M. Night Shyamalan in Split and Glass. On the other hand, the effect can have a comic spring, we will remember The Mask, when Jim Carrey meets Cameron Diaz for the first time, or also Mad About Irene, when Jim Carrey (again!) switches from one personality to another.
Animation is not left out, the genre allowing animators to give free rein to their imagination. We can thus evoke The Lion King in 1994 when Simba sees a herd of wildebeests rushing by, the zoom on his face being intensified by the retreat of the mountain in the background. On the 3D animation side, Ratatouille uses the effect several times, first when the mouse Remy watches his favorite chef on television, allowing to show the character's attachment, then to create the switch to the memories of the food critic when he tastes one of the dishes of the restaurant. These are just a drop in the ocean of uses that have been made of compensated tracking for over half a century now.
For Severance, Dolly-Zoom as a tilt
While this technique originally had to be carried out manually by the teams on set, innovations quickly made it easier to implement. In Europe, director of photography Jean-Serge Husum filed the patent for Trans-Trav in 1964, a mechanical system that synchronizes the zoom with the movement of the tracking carriage. Subsequently, advances in motion control tools for cameras offered much more advanced control of movements, facilitating the creation of Dolly Zooms. Jessica Lee Gagné, the director of photography on Severance (and director of the astonishing episode 7 of season 2) explains, in an interview with Go Creative Show, that she used a tool called Kuper Control to achieve the famous dissociation shot in the elevator: "It's a hybrid system, both human- and computer-operated, and it uses lasers. When you manually move the camera, the distance traveled is calculated, mapped, and directly acts on the zoom. We had tried using robotic arms to do these shots, but they were a little dangerous to use since the camera comes very close to the actors' faces."
Severance's Dolly Zooms are also relatively unique (compared to those of another series like Squid Game 2 for example, below) since they are mostly played on plain, white backgrounds, where only the angles of the elevator make a visible change, the majority of the effect focusing on the actors' faces which gradually stretch or squash, with wide-angle zooms that intensify the effect. "The idea was to show in the same shot the switch between the outside world, filmed in the series with long focal length shots, and that of the company's basements, made of bizarre wide-angles that evoke surveillance cameras," summarizes Jessica Lee Gagne. The result? A signature shot that never ceases to fascinate episode after episode and a way of reminding us, once again, that a camera movement with true intention can sometimes tell much more than simple words and make the impossible visible.
