Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock (1929)

This still shot from Blackmail by Alfred Hitchcock is a favorite of mine because of the Jester painting in the background. The Jester from this film is a metaphor for many different things. One of which being that he is like the man who painted it (the dead guy). Near the end of the film there is a shot of the Jester and in a way it reflects the dead man laughing at Alice because she never got to have a voice. In a way he sort of got away with his crime. Throughout the entire film the audience wants to shake Alice to make her speak up and tell her side of the story.

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais (1959)

This weeks film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, showed many different examples of this weeks theme, editing and montages. The picture above shows how the editor used a close up shot to reveal intimacy between the unnamed characters. Furthermore, in the beginning of the film there was a montage of many different shots of people, places, etc. to give the audience an idea about the events that occurred in Hiroshima. I also noticed from the examples in class and from the movie that a lot of the time when montages occur, there is music playing, probably to create a more fluid transition between the different images. In this film during the montage there was music playing in the background on top of a woman's voice narrating.

His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks (1939)

This weeks film was His Girl Friday by Howard Hawks and the focus of the film was editing. With this being the first time I have ever studied film, i never realized how many cuts there were in an entire film. And that is a good thing! The main point in editing is to create a fluid series of shots that are aesthetically pleasing to the viewer. For this film I noticed a lot of scenes that had a fade-out into another scene. This is an old film and I am wondering if they still use those as often today as they did in 1939 because I can't recall seeing many faded out scenes in today's movies like I did in this film. I also was very aware of the use of the 180 degree rule. One last technique that clearly stood out to me was when the reporters found out that Williams was hiding in the table, there were an extreme amount of cuts, most likely to show chaos.

The Piano, Jane Campion (1993)

The week we saw the film, The Piano, our focus in the class was cinematography. After learning about different filming techniques it was easy to spot them, especially with this film. There were many many extreme close up shots of the main characters hands. This is ironic because of the series of events that occur ending with the woman's finger getting chopped off. If I was to see this film again it would be obvious to me that something bad involving her hands was going to happen in the end. The end of this movie is an ending that I just can't stop pondering about. Someone brought up the idea that her getting pulled into the ocean with her piano could have been a dream and I never thought of that before. They mentioned the idea that she died in that scene and then the last scene where she is learning to speak wasn't real. The piano was very symbolic of the woman's voice, since it was how she expressed herself.

Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee (1989)

There was a very apparent Mise-en-scene in this film. The point that stood out the most to me was the coloring. There were very saturated, bright reds, yellows and greens, probably a connection to the emphasis on African Americans in the film. Spike Lee did a wonderful job in showing heat by creating a yellow/orange haze in the scenes throughout the film. I could literally feel the heat they were experiencing throughout the day. This also later came to be a foreshadowing of the fire that was to occur in the end with Sal's Pizzeria. He also did a wonderful job by showing the tension between the Italians and African Americans by having Mookie, the main character in a Robinson jersey, and the white male walking down the street in a Larry Bird Jersey. Robinson was the first black baseball player while Larry Bird is a very white, Irish basketball player.

In class we talked about how directors and cinematographers have created visual metaphors for the audience to subconsciously feel more connected to a film. For example, in The Graduate the mother in the film is wearing a leopard coat to resemble her ferocious, sexual character as she tried to seduce the boy.