Tag Archives: textual analysis

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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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Everything is a text

For certain types of media, textual analysis seems quite natural and obvious. Attempting to find meaning in visual art, cinema, music, television, etc. (where there is an author and they are trying to elicit some kind of meaningful response from an audience) is a relatively normal thing to do and is generally an inherent part of understanding that piece of media.

But I’ve begun to realise that almost any form of communication can be read as a text. Building on our exercise in Week 1 in which we surveyed the visible media at the State Library, practically every part of our environment can be analysed in this way, including things as small and seemingly insignificant as directional and traffic signage.

Why is a stop sign red, and why is it octagonal? What meanings are connoted by these aesthetic properties? Why do the directional signs at Emporium use a sans serif typeface and monochrome colour scheme? Answering these questions can explain how society functions on a deeper level. Even an entire city as a whole could be analysed in this methodical way — what are the semiotic signs and codes that can be identified within it, and what part do they play in forming meaning?

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Do you see what I see?

I picked up on an interesting point from this week’s reading Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis, that depending on the culture to which the interpreter of a text belongs, a text can mean very, very different things. It reminded me of a fascinating BBC Horizon programme I watched online about five years ago, in which researchers performed experiments and found that people from the Himba tribe in Namibia could not identify the blue square in the right half of this diagram:

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The researchers discovered that Himba, who culturally and linguistically treat blue and green as the same colour (with just one umbrella word that describes both), but have hundreds of words to describe individual shades of green, actually see the blue square as being visually indistinguishable from the green. And the opposite was also true – Himba were able to positively identify two different shades of green in the left half of the diagram that, to westerners, were seen as a single hue (spoiler: it’s the same position as the blue square).

Unfortunately the documentary I saw is no longer available online, but the next best thing is the xkcd colo(u)r survey, in which web comic artist and former NASA engineer Randall Monroe surveyed over 200,000 people and asked them to name colours. The differences in results from men and women is really interesting – although it must be remembered that the data set for this particular study is incredibly small and skewed (not just to people of the western world, but specifically to people who read xkcd) – and backs up the idea that what I see may not match what you see.

The results of both these studies prove that even something as seemingly universal as the interpretation of colour can vary widely between cultures. The differences would get wider and wider as you move further up into high-level cultural differences – making it a wonder we’re able to function as a global society with common thoughts and interpretations at all.

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory

In discussing textual analysis this week, and in particular the idea that interpretation is dependent upon (and dictated by) context, I started thinking about artistic intent and how big or small an influence it has on the interpretation of a work.

One of the major shifts in the discourse of cinema occurred in line with the development of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, when feminist film theory became an active area of study based on the idea that the cinema of the early 20th century reflected the place of women in wider society, and that cinema is a tool used by a patriarchal society to reinforce the idea of a natural difference between sexes (and the inferences that can be drawn from this idea, that women should possess certain qualities, act in certain ways, etc.). This topic is explored in Molly Haskell’s 1973 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, and the paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (published in 1975), and has continued to develop in the decades since.

The filmmakers discussed by Haskell, Mulvey and others were presumably not consciously striving to make a comment on the place of women in society, or perpetuate damaging stereotypes, but post hoc interpretation took those films and analysed them as artefacts in the context of wider society at the time they were made. Artistic intent was irrelevant; the signs and signifiers of the texts themselves were the things deemed important and worthy of study.

Feminist film theory shows that texts can be analysed and found to hold certain qualities or attributes that the creator may not have intended, even long after the work was created. People are still analysing Italian renaissance art and interpreting what it reflects of 15th and 16th century society, and scholars in the 24th century will probably be doing the same for art being created right now.

It’s a slightly scary idea that your work could be analysed by others decades or centuries after its creation and found to hold qualities or attributes that you never intended — but, then again, that’s one of the beautiful things about discourse: it shifts and changes as much as art itself does. The fact that there can never be any one “correct” interpretation of a text is central to the ongoing conversation of cultural criticism.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Textual analysis in practice

Building on this week’s reading, in our Lectorial we put these concepts into practice by analysing a Brooks Brothers advertisement from GQ magazine. We identified as many individual components as possible and noted their denotative and connotative meanings.

Denotative meaning (first order): a universal, literal interpretation/description of what is depicted

Connotative meaning (second order): a more associative meaning based on personal context and wider social/cultural conventions

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A reading of the advertisement might identify the following denotative components, along with their more associative connotative meanings:

Denotative Connotative
Bearded, mid-30s man Affluence
Hipster/fashionable style
Flowing, blue shirt with rolled up sleeves, patterned shorts, bare feet Comfort
Holidays/recreation
Boy being thrown into the air, smiling Happy, fun-loving father/son relationship
Adventure
Pool Summer, heat, holidays/recreation
Angle draws focus to the main figures
Resort lounge area with blue/white colour scheme Colour coordination, fashion awareness, aesthetic sensibility
Palm trees Exotic or tropical location
Holidays/recreation

When you look at this scene, very little of our understanding of the situation comes from denotation – there is nothing inherent in the image that definitively states the relationship between the man and boy, why they are in that location, etc. (In fact, they are likely both models with no previous relationship, and are only in that location for the photo shoot.) But through connotation the entire scene is built up in our own minds, as well as all the associations that come with that scene – and, the advertisers probably hope, an aspiration to achieve the same in our own lives by purchasing the product being advertised.

In the advertisement, to the right of the above image sits a panel with four levels of hierarchical copy including a cursive Brooks Brothers logo, a slogan (“the difference you can feel”, with emphasis on the “you”), and product branding. A connotative reading of this panel would identify the cursive logo as a signifier of luxury, trustworthiness and tradition, and the slogan as a signifier of quality, accessibility and affordability.

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Media 1, Readings

Textual analysis is my jam

This week in Media 1 our readings were about textual analysis, which is defined in Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis by Alan McKee as follows:

“When we perform textual analysis on a text, we make an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text.”

Textual analysis has been an interest of mine for a number of years – at least in an informal way. I’ve been reading and writing cultural criticism (particularly cinema and music) for a number of years, and have built up a working knowledge of the basics of textual analysis even though I never had a grounding in the fundamental terms and definitions. So this week’s readings have been particularly enjoyable.

Textual analysis is a methodology of reading and interpreting works (texts), but it’s less rigorous than the methodologies used in science. Using a standardised, repeatable set of tools and methods work well when considering questions/topics of the natural world, i.e. those that only have one answer, but in artistic fields there are multiple meanings that can be interpreted – and all of them can be correct simultaneously.

This is because there’s no such thing as a single “correct” interpretation of any given text we analyse. Meaning isn’t inherent in the text, it’s assigned by the interpreter based on context.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of a text is irrelevant to its interpretation, because viewers interpret texts as “accurate” only when they conform to the viewer’s world view, making this an unreliable measure by which to judge texts. Similarly, as we’ve learned in past weeks, editing is a process in which decisions are made, and therefore even seemingly objective or “truthful” works (like documentary films) go through a process where someone decides whether to include or discard certain elements. Therefore all media is subjective, even documentaries, because they reflect the point of view of their author just as much as works of fiction do.

There are three levels of context that can be helpful to use when analysing a particular text:

  1. The rest of the text – i.e. the self-contained “universe” of the text. Some things make sense and are meaningful in the contexts of some texts but would be baffling or incongruent in others, depending on whether the text itself has been set up as an environment in which that thing could exist.
  2. The genre of the text – conventions and expectations based on the type of text being analysed. This relies on the interpreter’s familiarity with conventions of genre – i.e. characters breaking into song during a musical. This can also include eschewing conventions of genre to build meaning, such as a song appearing in a non-musical film (e.g. Magnolia).
  3. The wider public context in which the text is being interpreted – societal and cultural norms and cues that inform how texts are interpreted. I’ve explored this particular analytical context in the post Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory.

Within these contexts, semiotics is a way of labelling and making sense of different elements within a text (in semiotics these elements are called signs). Signs exist within a code, which can be thought of as the contextual language in which the signs are interpreted. Depending on the code, signs can be analysed in isolation, in terms of their place among surrounding signs, within a wider context that includes the signs found in other texts, or a combination of all of these.

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