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Many thanks for this, Daeds. You sum up very well my feeling about prose vs film: “Film and prose fiction seem to be two media divided by a sort-of common language.” It’s the seem and sort-of which interest me.

“So I think what I was reacting to with Midsommar was that the director, Ari Aster, was finding ways to put us closely within characters’ heads while staying ‘wide’.” This aligns with my thoughts about seeing a correlation between the psychic distance slide and the camera zoom or staggered zoom (thanks for explaining that – I didn’t know about the SZ).

The following may be illogical and mistaken. I don’t want many movies these days.

I think a correlation doesn’t always exist. To me that’s good news; they’re different art forms and the point is that that they’re, well, different. I just fear it when other commentators on writing use camera shots as examples as if it’s the best, even the only way, to think about psychic distance. A novice writer could have their imagination limited, especially at the far ends of the PD scale of omniscient narration and stream of consciousness. Could any long shot be able to capture something as wide as the opening of Dickens’ Bleak House: “Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.” Maybe it could — I don’t know much about film techniques. At the scale’s other end it seems to be the skills of the actor in conjunction with the camera operative and director which show thought. Close-ups help, but I’m not sure they’re necessary. A character can look confused, panicked, euphoric or whatever and show a series of reactions in a shot that includes, say, another character on either side of them.

The cowboy shot is interesting for being able to show what the cowboy sees, assuming the shot is from behind him, at the same time as a scene-encompassing  view for the audience. I’m sure there are examples from non Westerns but I can’t think of any at present. In that case I do see a correlation with level 3 on the psychic distance scale, “Henry hated snowstorms” in John Gardner’s example, putting the reading in both the narrator’s and the character’s point of view, or either of their POVs depending on how we want to see the scene. Or we’re sliding from one to the other.

I like you drawing attention to how the camera POV can be fixed while the characters move in and out of shot. To me it can be very atmospheric, showing the way a house, for example, is a character itself while the human characters move through it and use it in different ways. As you say, it is, “telling its own story or part of a wider story, but which we might not even notice as we concentrate on the characters in the foreground.”

I’m glad you reminded me about James Salter. I hope I’ve remembered this right but I think it’s in Light Years where the narrator comments on the Hudson River that the river is self-cleaning. It’s not of course, but at the time — the 1970s? — rivers were often complacently seen this way, a reason not to do anything about them. If I read it properly, it summed up the character’s thought at that moment, his approach to life in general and the approach of a whole society. There was a panoramic view of attitudes all in one phrase. Of course all this be achieved in film but I think it would need dialogue or foregrounding or something, in addition to views of the river, to present the information so neatly.

Or maybe Light Years has been filmed brilliantly. But thanks for raising the questions about cameras vs words.