dragonyphoenix

When I read about the Ndlovu Youth Choir translating "Bohemian Rhapsody" into Zulu, of course I had to go check it out right away. I was absolutely blown away. Listening to the song is amazing, but then watching the video is just a whole other level. It's like a song that doesn't even belong in our universe somehow crossed over from its home to show us an alternate world we could have.

Direct link to Youtube (in case the embedding goes bad) is here

"Much of the Fifties existed in order to edit out of history the freedoms of wartime: a renewed McCarthyite puritanism drove homosexuality further underground with the inevitable psychic consequences. By the mid-to-late Sixties, there were all sorts of exposé! books, but not then: just a few coded, discreet novels (like James Barr's Quatrefoil), which would usually end in suicide or death."

Jon Savage (quoted in Loaded, by Dylan Jones)

I imagine that a web search could turn up the answer for this (or at least it could have, before AI ruined web search), but I feel like one on you could probably explain it to me better, and you might even enjoy imparting your knowledge to someone, so I'm asking the question here.

This morning I was reading the interview with Chow Yun-fat in the Giant Robot 30-year celebration book, and I was hoping one of you could explain what he's saying here about the difference in space and cameras between Hollywood and Hong Kong films:

In the Hollywood studios, you have more room, more space, I mean for the dimension for the camera, for the screen. But in Hong Kong, our buildings, our rooms are narrow, so we must use a lot of action or movement because the depth is not enough to expand the whole images in the picture. So we must use a lot of movement. Also, we must use a lot of wide-angle lenses to enlarge the environment, the space. So every time you see actors in the movie we look wider, fatter because the lens can make the people like that [puffs up his cheeks for emphasis]. Usually here [in Hollywood] we are using 50mm lenses for the close-up or 85mm lens. But in Hong Kong we use 35mm or 28mm, because the depth is not enough.

I'm not understanding the relationship between size of the lens and depth of the picture (and TBH I'm not entirely clear on what he means by depth of the picture). I thought the different sizes of lenses were for different distances between the camera and the subject, but apparently there's more to it than that? (Or else I'm entirely wrong about that?)