Wide shot

The frame showing the whole space and the figures within it. Where you are, before who you are with.

The wide shot states the theatre of events: full figures, whole spaces, the geometry of who is where and what surrounds them. It is cinema's establishing sentence, but also its instrument of loneliness and scale, a small figure in a large frame is an argument no dialogue matches.

Where you are, before who you are with is a rule of information order, and wides carry a second discipline: they expose everything. No cheat of framing hides the set's edge or the extra's drift; the whole world must actually work. That is why wides are expensive, and why confident films can afford to hold them.