Shots in Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude, the 1971 black comedy directed by Hal Ashby, often uses wide, long shots to emphasize the feeling of the characters being alone in their own world. Good examples of this are during the sequence after Maude has helped Harold convince his uncle that he is unfit for military service. The two are driving across the countryside with no signs of human life for miles, and the wide shots with them barely visible at the bottom of the frame symbolize how they could be all alone in the world for all they care.

Close ups are fairly rare in the film, which uses mostly wider establishing shots or medium shots to show action. Following the sequence of distant hillside shots, when Harold and Maude are sitting together by the bay, there is a brief zooming close up of Maude’s arm when Harold notices a serial number tattooed on her inner forearm - clearly the type given by the Nazis to prisoners at Auschwitz. The close up is used here to show a key detail that places the film in time and remind the audience what it meant to to be Maude’s age in the 1960s and '70s. The detail revealed by the close up is made more poignant by the fact that it is almost immediately replaced with a wider shot in which Maude points out the seagulls visible from where they are sitting, exemplifying the contrast between what she has been through and how she is able to appreciate life now

The final sequence in the film shows Harold driving from the hospital to the side of a cliff and uses a series of shots ranging from close ups of his face, to very far shots where he can barely be seen on the edge of the cliff, to the final medium shot of him walking away from the camera. This progression (from very specific to very broad to somewhere in between) symbolizes how Harold is moving through his grief; first he is very focused on what has just happened and how he is feeling in that moment, then it zooms way out to show his car going over the cliff then show that he is still alive but very lonely and isolated, then the medium shot where he walks slowly from the camera with his banjo shows that he has found a balance and is moving on with his life.