Category Archives: Cinema Studies

Cinema Studies

Genre and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Broadly speaking, genres are part of a system for collating and categorising films of a similar type. Films belonging to a particular genre are linked by their use of one or more conventional elements associated with that genre, also called tropes. These tropes can take a number of different forms:

  • Subject matter or theme, e.g. westerns are often concerned with good vs evil
  • Plot patterns, e.g. romantic comedies often contain a “meet cute”, police thrillers often end with a standoff or shootout
  • Manner of presentation, e.g. detective films are often structured around the process of investigation
  • Emotional effect, e.g. comedies attempt to elicit humour, horror films attempt to shock or frighten the audience
  • Iconography, e.g. Roman costumes are central to sword-and-sandal epics

The utility of genres rely on wider cultural acknowledgement and understanding of these shared elements – an understanding which is developed by audiences seeing many films sharing particular tropes.

Marketing and promotion have a significant effect on genre expectations, because how a film is marketed (including the poster, synopsis and title) usually signposts what genre the film belongs to. This, in turn, governs our experience of the film because we view it with genre associations already in mind.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) predominantly takes the form of a vampire horror film, and was generally marketed as such. This genre is evident in the film’s subject matter (the central character is a vampire who preys on several victims), emotional effect (gruesome attacks are a hallmark or horror films), and in some of the film’s style and iconography (e.g. extensive use of dark shadows and high-key lighting, the vampire’s sharp canine teeth, etc.).

However, it also mixes in various tropes from other genres, notably the spaghetti western (e.g. widescreen composition with significant characters/objects at the extreme left or right of frame, tight close-ups of faces, sharp and dramatic shifts in focal plane, etc.) and some additional elements generally associated with Iranian cinema (e.g. traditional Iranian forms of dress, the central significance of cars and driving, etc.). Through its combination, conformance and contradiction of these tropes, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is both an excellent example of particular genre tropes as well as an example of a film that significantly rejects and remixes those tropes in a unique way.

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Cinema Studies

Documentary and Grizzly Man

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) presents itself as a documentary portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a nature filmmaker and self-styled friend of grizzly bears in Alaska’s Kodiak Island national park. Using Treadwell’s own material, which he recorded over many years camping in the wilderness, the film sets out to discover what made Treadwell tick and the circumstances leading to his death.

It is a synthetic documentary that blends many different types of documentary form: there is a framing narrative that occurs in “current” time (following Herzog as he talks to Treadwell’s friends and coworkers, watches Treadwell’s footage, etc.); talking heads interviews with people speaking generally about Treadwell’s life; and archival footage and images captured by Treadwell himself during his summers in Alaska. The story is not told in chronological order, nor is it governed by cause and effect, and it contains no fictional reenactments or recreations (with actors, staged lighting, etc.), but it does contain several sequences where real people explain to the filmmaker certain events in current time, such as an aeroplane pilot walking through the wilderness and pointing out the location where he discovered Treadwell’s body.

By manipulating Treadwell’s footage — deciding what to present, and how it is presented, as well as narrating the footage with his own words — Herzog articulates his own thesis about the nature of humanity using Treadwell’s life and work as supporting evidence. Though it presents itself as a portrait of Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man is actually a more nuanced and complicated essay film, with some similarities to the rhetorical form of documentary that sets out to convince the audience of a particular viewpoint.

This is a particularly subtle demonstration of the idea that documentaries are never true depictions of reality, no matter how convincingly they present themselves as such. Herzog manipulates the objective reality of Timothy Treadwell’s life and death, and uses it to craft and present his own worldview.

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Cinema Studies

Style and The Age of Innocence

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

“Style”, when applied to filmmaking, is the unique pattern and use of stylistic choices common to a particular director or group of directors. Style can be identified in several dimensions:

  • Single director, that is, the stylistic signature of a director’s work across their career (e.g. Edgar Wright’s style involves techniques of visual comedy and frame matching, fast-cutting mundane actions, a mobile camera using plenty of zooms, etc.)
  • Genre or a collection of directors, such as film noir, or the unadorned style associated with the Dogme 95 movement
  • A country’s national cinema, for example German expressionism’s heavy reliance on angular compositions and high-contrast lighting to create a distinctive visual character

Although the costume melodrama is not a genre that Scorsese worked in often, several elements of the director’s personal style shine through in The Age of Innocence (1993).

Prominent narration from the point of view of the film’s protagonists or major characters is a device that Scorsese often uses to provide exposition and clarify his character’s mental state. The Age of Innocence utilises narration heavily, but it is spoken from the point of view of an omniscient outsider, who provides the audience with a wider range of knowledge than the characters on screen.

The Age of Innocence also contains a beautiful long take, which follows Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) walking through several crowded, ornate drawing rooms upon entering a party. Long takes, with the camera moving between and shifting focus on several small details in the scene while following behind a main character’s movements, are another Scorsese trademark.

Less obvious stylistic elements are also common to much of Scorsese’s work, such as the use of darkness and colour to express a character’s moods, and timing editing with musical cues to create a fluid, romantic pacing. These and many other elements combine in a unique, identifiable way to make up the signature style of Martin Scorsese.

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Cinema Studies

Sound and Vivre sa vie

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Conventionally, sound is used to support or reinforce the visual and narrative elements of a film. In Vivre sa vie (1962), director Jean-Luc Godard plays with the conventions of sound just as he and other French New Wave practitioners often experimented with accepted cinematography and editing techniques.

The perceptual properties of sound (volume, pitch and timbre) as well as the dimensions of sound mixing and sound editing (rhythm, space, perspective and time) are all manipulated in calculated ways so that the sound track actively engages the audience, rather than remaining perceptually invisible as sound tracks often do.

As just one example, under the opening titles we see Nana (Anna Karina) shot in close-up with an orchestral theme that abruptly stops after a few seconds, with the rest of the shot continuing in silence. Silence, or a close approximation to it, occurs in odd or unconventional places throughout the film. By drawing such prominent attention to elements like dynamic volume and nondiegetic music and sound, Godard foregrounds the sound track’s unreality and further provokes his audience to question the rules and limits of cinematic form.

In a film thematically concerned with performativity and the parameters of cinema, featuring a number of nondiegetic elements that draw attention to the fact that Vivre sa vie is a piece of art, manipulation of sound in this way has a significant impact on the experience of the film.

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Cinema Studies

A close formal reading of Zodiac

In his 2007 film Zodiac, David Fincher precisely controls the visual aspects of film language to drive story action, develop characterisation and convey meaning. A formal analysis of a single shot, which occurs at timecode 02:19:04 on the Director’s Cut Blu-ray version of the film, reveals the contribution of lighting, colour, focus and staging to the overall experience of the shot and the meaning it conveys. In the scene, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) visits Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer) after receiving an anonymous tip that a former workmate of Vaughn’s may be the Zodiac killer, with handwriting evidence linking the workmate to the Zodiac’s letters. During a conversation in Vaughn’s kitchen, which immediately precedes the shot being analysed in this essay, Graysmith learns that the handwriting sample actually came from Vaughn and not the workmate, implying that Vaughn himself may be the killer.

In the shot that follows, by meticulously controlling the visual properties of the frame in the context of the scene and the film as a whole, Fincher suddenly and immediately evokes the mood and atmosphere of a thriller. After over one hour without seeing a murder on screen, the audience is manipulated by a combination of cinematography and mise-en-scène to believe that the Zodiac killer may spring back into activity by striking against the film’s main character.

Taken in isolation, the most immediately identifiable characteristic of the shot is its extremely dark, low contrast lighting and slightly yellow hue. The colour yellow has a centrally important meaning in the visual style of Zodiac, and this meaning changes in the context of various scenes and time periods throughout the film. In early scenes in the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, yellow (along with similar colours orange and brown) are warm visual signifiers of the 1960s and 1970s, the retro colour palette helping the film establish its setting and year. By the time the film arrives at the scene set in Vaughn’s house, which occurs in 1979, yellow has been stripped of its nostalgic properties and is now more strongly connotative of bruising and decay, as the toll of investigating the Zodiac killer begins to destroy the lives of those investigating him. By grading this scene with a dark yellow tint, Fincher further illustrates the damaging frustration and obsession that has gripped Graysmith while also drawing visual parallels to the murder scene that opens the film, which is similarly depicted in shadowy yellow tones.

In terms of staging, the shot is deliberately composed to convey a change in the power relationship between the two characters. Before Graysmith realises that Vaughn might be dangerous, they are shot in a relatively standard manner and roughly on equal terms — medium shots follow the dialogue from one character to the other as they discuss the handwriting evidence in Vaughn’s kitchen. But in contrast to the earlier shot, after his realisation Graysmith is placed in the foreground to the far right of screen and shot in close-up, taking up roughly fifty per cent of the frame. Behind him, to the left of the frame, Vaughn stands deep in the background over Graysmith’s shoulder. The shot is photographed with a shallow depth of field to keep Graysmith perfectly sharp while Vaughn is almost completely out of focus, his dark brown and grey costume blending in with the dark background. Graysmith is clearly the most visible subject of the shot, but Vaughn looms over it in such a way that he controls the action and demands the audience’s attention. This shot would likely have been photographed with a long focal length through a telephoto lens, which in addition to a shallow focal plane also has the effect of visually compressing the depth of the composition and making it appear to the audience as if Vaughn is mere centimetres behind Graysmith, when he’s actually metres away.

The combined result of all these visual choices is that Vaughn looks as though he is towering over Graysmith’s shoulder, watching over him like a hunter stalking its prey. This heightens the sense of imminent danger and also plays into the genre associations the audience is being manipulated to make. The shot lingers on Graysmith’s face and eyes in close-up as they dart from side to side, emphasising his fear and paranoia as he starts to put together what he’s just learned, realising that he’s stumbled into danger and trying to figure a way out. His hair and make-up is styled in such a way that a mixture of sweat and rain glistens on his forehead and facial features, visually separating him from the darker surrounding of the frame and emphasising that he is foreign to this environment, an interlocutor who is no longer in control of what happens to him.

Approximately three seconds into the shot, Vaughn indicates that he wants them both to go downstairs and turns on the basement light, which throws a flood of diegetic yellow light into the background of the scene. Previously the shot had been lit primarily from above, which gave each character’s face sunken features and a death-like quality. The basement light hits Vaughn entirely on the left-hand side of his face as it streams out of the basement from the extreme left of screen, without producing any significant change in the lighting on Graysmith’s face. The right-hand side of Vaughn’s face plunges even further into shadow, distorting his features and making him appear even more obscured and menacing in the background. This reinforces the character’s mystery, as neither Graysmith nor the audience can yet tell what his true intentions are. The light from the basement also creates a vertical line of shadow that bisects the frame between the two characters, enclosing each in a small, tight square of space. This foreshadows Graysmith’s confinement in the remainder of the scene, as he finds himself locked into a potentially dangerous situation without any obvious way out.

These visual signifiers rely on the audience’s familiarity with the thriller genre and some of its associated tropes to be effective — particularly the idea that basements are dangerous places with no escape, that villains are generally lit with dramatic shadows, and that breaking into a sweat is associated with fear. At nine seconds long the shot is the longest in the whole scene, and the spacious shot duration allows the dark mood and negative associations to settle over the frame slowly, giving the audience a sinking feeling to go along with Graysmith’s. Had Fincher cut away at any point during the shot it could have undercut the moment of emotion and empathy that slowly builds as Graysmith realises his predicament. By looking directly at Graysmith’s eyes, shot from a level angle, head-on direction and in close-up, the audience is directed to experience the scene from his perspective, and left there for several seconds of agony.

In a film that is generally concerned with power, control and unfulfilled obsessions, with a main character that systematically pieces together a case from disparate and conflicting sources, it’s the first time Graysmith feels like he’s not completely in control. Due to precise manipulation of cinematography and mise-en-scène, it’s also the first time in over an hour that the audience feels the same way.

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Cinema Studies

Narrative and Mystery Road

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Narrative form is a framework in which a series of events is arranged in time and space, governed by the effects of causality. Narrative films may or may not be presented in chronological story order, the plot duration may or may not match the story duration (usually not), and the space may be real or imagined, but just by operating in such a way that causes and effects occur in some kind of temporal order, in some kind of defined space, means that a film has a narrative.

The plot of Mystery Road is a tiny keyhole through which a sprawling story is viewed. The story stretches back years in the past, across many locations involving hundreds of characters, but the plot is restricted to Jay’s experience investigating a single crime in a relatively small number of locations. So while the story duration is several years, the plot duration is mere days, and the screen duration is just over two hours.

The story information is meted out as Jay discovers it (the narration is subjective), involving the audience in the processes and procedures of detective work as he uncovers the real causes and motivations that lie behind the crime. The story space is quite vast, involving cities, towns and other locations across Australia, but the plot space is restricted only to the locations Jay visits in investigating the crime. Interestingly, the screen space could actually be considered larger than the plot space, because there are a number of gorgeous extreme long shots of vast outback locations that stretch far further than the spaces in which characters interact.

Causality in Mystery Road, as is often the case in thrillers and crime films, is meticulously controlled. Causes turn into effects, which spark more causes, and the plot continues along a narrow thread of story information. The climax of the film resolves the major chains of cause and effect, but there are also significant events that happen off screen, or are presumed to have occurred before or after the plot sequence (most notably the inciting murder).

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Cinema Studies

Editing and Enemy of the State

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

If mise-en-scène concerns what’s in the shot, and cinematography is how the shot is captured, editing dictates the relationship between shots. By editing, a director joins two shots together to steer the audience’s perception and experience in a particular way. There are a number of ways a director or editor can join shots together: a simple cut (instantaneous change from one shot to another); a fade in to or out of black; a dissolve (briefly superimposing the end of one shot to the beginning of another); or a wipe (one shot replaces another by means of a boundary line moving across the screen). By deploying these techniques, a director controls the relationship between the two shots in terms of time, space, rhythm and graphic qualities.

In Enemy of the State, Tony Scott uses editing in a number of precisely controlled and kinetic ways to evoke mood, drive the narrative and create contrasts between characters and settings. As just one example, the rhythm of cutting is often ramped up to heighten the sense of tension and paranoia felt by characters during chase or fight sequences, and the same techniques are used to depict the high-tech surveillance equipment used by the CIA (the capability of the CIA to quickly locate Robert Dean is integral to the plot of the film).

Cross-cutting is often used to show the simultaneous action of characters being surveilled (usually Robert Dean) alongside the people doing the surveilling. This cross-cutting invites comparison of the two sets of characters, and emphasises the power relationship between the two — the CIA knows much more about Dean than he knows about them.

One particular example of this is a scene in which Dean and his wife are driving through a tunnel, unaware that at that moment CIA agents are ransacking and vandalising his house to cover the installation of recording equipment. The shots of Dean and his wife are mostly medium shots of the two conversing in their car, well-lit by overhead street lighting, with few cuts to different angles/perspectives other than the occasional close up to one of the characters while they talk. When it cross-cuts to the CIA agents ransacking Dean’s house, the editing changes drastically to emphasise graphic contrasts (the setting in Dean’s home is much darker and shot with higher contrast, low-key lighting), rhythmic contrasts (shot length becomes much shorter as the agents violently trash the environment), temporal contrasts (the scene condenses time by jumping forward through actions), and spatial contrasts (depth is shortened by extensive use of close ups and camera movement).

These techniques (governed by an approach to editing known as continuity editing) are working constantly through the film to affect form and create meaning.

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Cinema Studies

Cinematography and Zodiac

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Last week we learned that mise-en-scène refers to “what’s in the frame”. Cinematography, by contrast, is how the scene is captured by the camera. It is the act of photographing what’s in the frame.

There are several elements that cinematographers must consider when shooting, from light characteristics (contrast and exposure), speed of the camera, perspective (focal length and depth of field), framing (angle, distance, masking and camera position), movement (panning, tilting and tracking), and duration. Special effects are also a subset of cinematography, because effects control what ends up in the photographic frame.

David Fincher and cinematographer Harris Savides exercise precise control over the cinematography in Zodiac, showing as much meticulous attention to detail as the serial killer that is the object of Robert Graysmith’s obsession.

At surface level, Zodiac’s most obvious visual attribute is its strong yellow-green hue, achieved through costume and set design but also prominently through exposure and colour grading. This nostalgic colour pallet helps sell the film’s period setting (1960s and 1970s), but it also gives the entire film the feeling of decaying flesh, which links in with the film’s themes of death and unfulfilled obsession.

Power dynamics are also communicated through staging and mise-en-scène, as well as the cinematography techniques of focus and depth of field. In the scene where Arthur Leigh Allen is interviewed by the three detectives, the relative position of each character places him in a power relationship with the other characters in the scene. By focusing (or not focusing) on objects that have lead the detectives to suspect Allen of being the Zodiac, Fincher steers his audience to look for all the circumstantial evidence that points to the same conclusion.

Zodiac also uses framing in interesting ways. For example, in the scene set at Bob Vaughn’s house immediately after Graysmith discovers that one of the most important pieces of handwriting evidence actually belongs to Vaughn, the next shot shows Graysmith centred in frame using a medium shot that accentuates the hallway walls on either side of him, isolating him at the centre of the frame almost literally inside a tunnel as his realisation comes into focus. It’s the only shot in the film that so obviously isolates a character in this way, and it helps to set up the danger of the next thrilling scene where Graysmith follows Vaughn down into the basement, unsure of whether he might be the Zodiac or not.

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Cinema Studies

Mise-en-scène and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

The term mise-en-scène describes a wide range of visual elements and techniques that make up what’s in the frame at any given point in a film. To give his film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou a heightened, storybook quality, director Wes Anderson manipulates mise-en-scène to build an artificial world entirely its own.

Setting: Many scenes are set in an underwater dreamland, populated by weird and wonderful sea creatures brought to life with stop-motion animation and clay models. Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte, is shot in cut-away style reminiscent of the 3D diagrams in children’s cut-away books. To an audience this deliberate style (and the movement of characters between locations in the cut-away ship) highlights the constructed artificiality of the film, for comedic effect and also to heighten the feeling of artificiality and the sense that the universe of the film is not governed by ordinary rules of physical movement. Even the composition of Anderson’s shots, which are often perfectly symmetrical and evenly balanced, constantly reinforce to the audience that each shot and scene has been hand-constructed to achieve the director’s purpose and meaning.

Costume and make-up: Similarly, the red hats and blue uniforms of Zissou’s crew serve multiple purposes: as striking visual elements, as opportunities for physical comedy, and also help reinforce the idea that Zissou and his crew are a group removed from regular society operating in their own universe. The red hats highlight Zissou’s quirky, antiquated notions of his crew as a family (a common theme in Anderson’s films), and also hints to the audience that Zissou has a dictator-like hold on his crew’s every move — explaining character motivations and driving the plot forward.

Lighting: As most of the film is set either underwater or in the lower decks of the Belafonte, lighting is another area that Anderson crafts to manipulate the intellectual or emotional response of the audience — particularly the quality, direction and source of light. Each room in the ship uses an entirely different lighting set-up, to change the feeling of each location, and the above-ground scenes are lit with a wide range of intensities and quality of light. Lighting also functions as a recurrent joke in the film referring to Team Zissou’s incompetence, as all the lights in the Belafonte turn off completely at different points in the film.

Acting and performance: The speech and mannerisms of the actors also reinforce the artificiality and comedy of the film. Bill Murray’s quirky, unpredictable characterisation of Steve Zissou adds comedic anticipation to any scene, because he doesn’t act in a rational way that audiences would expect. Cate Blanchett’s character speaks and acts as if she just stepped out of a Lauren Bacall screwball comedy, but this incongruity is not felt as strongly since all of the other characters act and speak in a stilted, cartoonish way too.

The combination of all these elements (plus many more artfully crafted visual techniques) give The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou a feeling and personality unlike almost any other film.

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Cinema Studies

Experimental film

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Though at first it seems like an arbitrary collision of unrelated images, Ballet mechanique juxtaposes and manipulates visuals to convey a certain feeling and provoke an emotional response from the viewer. Though it has no story or narrative in the traditional sense, it still conforms to standard film language by utilising certain elements of film form (particularly similarity/repetition, difference/variation and unity/disunity) while completely ignoring others (function and development). This is an example of the abstract form of experimental film, in which the filmmaker uses theme and variation to build a cohesive work that is interesting or compelling because it provokes our senses in unusual ways.

The Illustrated Auschwitz is a stunning and effective example of the associational form, in which images and sounds are placed together in such a way as to create an association in the viewer’s mind. At first the film’s imagery seems oddly disconnected to the narration, but the viewer is quickly trained to make clear associations between the subject matter of the voiceover and the images being presented on screen – though these meanings are more abstracted than in a traditional narrative film, their presentation in this way helps the viewer to feel the film viscerally rather than understand it intellectually.

We Have Decided Not to Die uses highly constructed, stylistic shots to convey different feelings and emotions in each of its “phases”. Though it also has no narrative in the traditional sense, a viewer could interpret it as an exploration on a theme – so it can be “followed” in the same way as a narrative film. It also uses elements of film form (specifically similarity/repetition) to create associations between each phase, and by their placement and juxtaposition next to one another shapes the viewer’s understanding of the film.

La Jetee is an experimental film concerned with the possibilities and limitations of the cinematic form itself, using a stylistic constraint (the film is built almost entirely from still images) in service of conveying its story. Even though it has a very clear story and plot, its unique mode of presentation sets it apart from the rest of narrative cinema.

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