Medium shot

The frame from roughly the waist up, the range of ordinary talk. Close enough to read a face, wide enough to keep the room.

The medium shot is film's conversational register: waist up, face readable, hands visible, the room still present around the shoulders. It is the range at which people actually talk to each other, which is why dialogue lives here and why the shot feels like none at all.

Its invisibility is its function: mediums are the prose between the wide's establishment and the close-up's emphasis, and film breathes through this register the way text breathes through plain sentences. A cut that never rests in mediums exhausts; the unremarkable shot is what makes the remarkable ones remarkable.