Film: ‘O, Lucky man’
Director: Lindsay Anderson
The scene starts with close ups of character one – an old man, and character two – the main character. There conversation is serious and they are talking about smiling. Character 1 keeps saying to the main charter, smile, when he doesn’t know why he should. Both of them have serious expressions, they are in a white room, no blank space behind them, the camera is focusing on the faces. The edited shots are planned in the way that the characters speak then we are shown the other character to see their reaction and response. This is using cause-and-effect to engage the audience, and show a narrative structure of the conversation.
The director, Lindsay Anderson, has a tendency to make the audience feel surprised, and does this by having close ups then cutting to a medium shot, allowing the action to take place. This was when character 1 hits the main character over the head. This is similar to the first scene I analysed, with the main character jumping out of the window. This destroys the audience’s expectations completely. After character 1 hits him over the head, the storyline changes. The shot cuts to black and reappears with close ups of the characters, and they are acting differently, as if the hit never happened. The camera then focuses on the main characters face and zooms in, so the audience is just looking at his face, mainly his lips and eyes, trying to figure out what is happening, the same when he is lying in the hospital bed. Anderson uses this as a motif, and a way to change what is happening within a scene. A J cut is then used from a close up of the face to hearing music from the next shot.
The next shot changes the storyline completely. It is a party scene. There us entertainment playing in the background, and everyone is smiling and hugging. The main character is always positioned centre of frame, and different characters enter and leave from the sides of the frame, making the shot more symmetrical. The coverage used in this next shot allows the audience to follow the couple dancing, and it is a way of showing the set/location and the extra characters involved. This scene has gone from still sharp cuts with no movement, to a scene that is full of movement, not one person is standing still. This allows the audience to create new expectations, ones that will hopefully not be destroyed. The coverage of the close ups of characters dancing shows their facial expressions , making us feel more connected to their situation. The entertainment is used as a way to cut up the continuous dancing scene, making what could have been a long shot, into small shots, with fast movements; which is also evident in the hospital scene, where it goes from being slow to fast-paced. As the song being sung says ‘around the world, in circles’, the camera is spinning, so everything and everyone seems to be orbiting around it. The camera then tilts up to the roof, suggesting something is about to happen, and it does. Balloons start falling to the ground adding to the party movement.
After analysing a scene from within this film and then the finale, they are different in the way the mood changes. The first scene left me feeling anxious, surprised, scared and trapped, where the director adds to these emotions by making him jump out of a window. However the final scene is different from this, as the director has created something fun, energetic, but still a bit crazy, through the coverage of the scene. There are motifs that kept reoccurring such as close up’s, sharp cuts, destroying audience expectations,and focusing of the face of the main character. This all shows Anderson’s methodology and personal style of cinema.