Upon completing the Deleuze reading which was set for us this week, I came across this quote: “the frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be seen. It is legible as well as visible”. Deleuze speaks of this sort of ‘language’ of cinema; that we as filmmakers constantly read, interpret and re-interpret films in order to understand the capacity to transmit meaning from the frame to viewers. We were also instructed by Dan to take a frame from a selection he had compiled from the films we’d watched, and try to not only replicate it, but then to reinterpret it. I tried to keep Deleuze’s quote in mind when taking these shots.

The frame I had chosen was from Won-Kai’s In the Mood For Love:

This was my replication:

 
And this was my reinterpretation:

 

The replication was kind of difficult to come up with because it’s difficult to replicate the melancholic sort of feeling you get when viewing the original frame. As such, this is not a perfect replication. However, the key elements of what is in the frame and the angles at which they are positioned is very close I believe. I played around with a few different filters and brightness/contrast elements to get the colour you see in the photo.

The reinterpretation was merely a shift of angle, but almost tells a completely different story. With a more stylized shot of his face, the shot enables him to look more sad, giving rise to the melancholic feeling in the original shot. I also incorporated the use of the third of the frame in the original shot, but simply flipped it to the left side instead of the right. I used the same editing techniques on my phone to get the same result as the previous photo.