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A scene from William Wyler's film, The Best Years of Our Lives, exemplifies deep focus. Note the in-focus figure in the phone booth in the background — best seen in the enlarged view of the image.

Deep focus is a photographic and cinematographic technique incorporating a large depth-of-field. Depth-of-field is the front-to-back range of focus in an image — that is, how much of it appears sharp and clear. Consequently, in deep focus the foreground, middle-ground and background are all in focus. This can be achieved through knowledgeable application of the hyperfocal distance of the camera lens being used.

The opposite of deep focus is shallow focus, in which only one plane of the image is in focus.

A scene from Jean Renoir's film, The Rules of the Game, exemplifies shallow focus. Note the out-of-focus figure in the background — best seen in the enlarged view of the image.

In the cinema, Orson Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland were the two individuals most responsible for popularizing deep focus. Their film, Citizen Kane (1941), is a textbook of possible uses of the technique.

However, cinematic deep focus did not originate with Welles or end with him. Film-makers such as Erich von Stroheim and Jean Renoir experimented with the technique in the 1920s and 1930s. And director William Wyler also favored deep focus from the mid-1930s through to the 1950s — as can be seen in his post-World War II drama, The Best Years of Our Lives, from 1946, the last of several collaborations between Wyler and Toland. French film critic André Bazin championed deep focus as a major advance in the realism of the cinema and singled out The Best Years of Our Lives for analysis in his influential collection of essays, What is Cinema?

The following films contain notable examples of deep-focus photography:

• Foolish Wives (1922)
• Greed (1924)
• Working Girls (1931)
• Mad Love (1935)
• Dead End (1937)
• Grand Illusion (1937)
• The Rules of the Game (1939)
• The Long Voyage Home (1940)
• Rebecca (1940)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• The Little Foxes (1941)
• The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
• Ugetsu (1953)
• Sansho the Baliff (1954)
• Mr. Arkadin (1955)
• Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
• L'Avventura (1960)
• The Trial (1962)
• Chimes at Midnight (1966)
• Faces (1968)
• The Last Picture Show (1971)
• Rumble Fish (1983)
• Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
• The New World (2005)