I really just don’t like horror, particularly any kind of really stereotypical, “oh let’s do a black and white, vampire horror film”. Really just don’t like it. I love the thrill of caring about a character, or a gripping moment but a moment where I’m genuinely terrified, not for the characters, but for myself, that’s really not a fun experience. A Girl Walks Home at Night is a Supernatural Thriller/romance film, a genre film. But it doesn’t just fall into a genre because of the kind of film it is. The film intentionally employs techniques from other films of that genre. Particularly horror films and particularly supernatural horror films.

The decision to shoot the film in Black and White is not at all surprising as it seems to be a nod to the old horror films. You can very easily find a lot of amateur horror that similarly does this, for instance RocketJump Film School’s “The Horn”, which though, yes it’s a satyr and it’s a short, it also uses this very cold, black and white palette as both a call back to previous films but also to ground the audience in the genre. There are only a few genres of film that feel the need to remind the audience that they’re watching a genre film, horror is one of them. The lighting and even subject matter is also very film noir, using femme fetales and lighting that calls back to even that genre.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is also very obviously a title that calls to mind some already pretty horrific things, though the audience will definitely be surprised when they watch the film and see what it really is.

Grizzly Man is one of those rare docos that just make you feel uncomfortable because Herzog presents you with a very controversial character in the form of Timothy Treadwell but doesn’t really give you any sense of how you should feel about the man. The difficulty with this is that many documentarians have an agenda and it’s very rare to see such an obviously weird documentary not take a very obvious point of view. Film Art suggests that a documentary is about presenting factual, external information (that is information that exists outside the world of the film), in a somewhat more objective light, however as I said, I feel like most documentaries intentionally attempt to persuade me of a particular point of view and as such, I find Grizzly Man to be a very different film.

It was interesting in the lesson, discussing the film and talking about the way in which Herzog kind of interrupts his own film to kind of be very existential and suddenly deep, almost trying to have an agenda but the agenda was not about the subject of the documentary, it was about the world itself. Film Art says that the label of Documentary suggests to the audience that the film is trustworthy in a sense, yet this film again, has a very distinctly different reading for me. I watch each and every person in that documentary and none of them seem like normal people, including Herzog himself. There is no real window into that world for me. No grounding character or person within the ‘narrative’ of the documentary and that is why I think the film confuses me.

Film Art describes a few ways in which an audience member can begin to dissect the style of a film. The first of these is to identify narrative conventions or formal system that essentially make up the organisational structure of the film. For Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence we can start with the way the fact that the film is definitely a narrative film.

It is very obviously an adaptation of a novel as the film only loosely fits a conventional Hollywood three-act structure. The film begins in an opera, a rather disconcerting opera in which you’re not quite sure of the characters or where you are, also the introduction of the two lovers occurs almost immediately in the story. The middle section is a lot of tension and struggle as Newland and Ellen try to break out of the society they inhabit. Finally the ending, shows the acceptance, really, there is no resolution to the narrative at all at the end and this also goes for each individual moment. There is not a lot of reconciliation of plot lines or characters at all in this film and this is often very typical of a dramatic film. Though we’re not talking about genre here, we’re talking about style. The use of techniques is very artistic. We could also similarly say that art is an important motif in the film as in the beginning of the film we are almost surrounded by very elaborate paintings and then in many of the location scenes the frame is almost composed as a painting would be. Most of the other techniques are very conventional, there is not a lot in the way of breaking of stylistic rules however the film is constructed to feel almost as if that society were the ones to shoot it. Even in the scene where the two lovers hold each other, there is a very painted look to it, a somewhat artificial quality.

This system moving from identifying the key narrative organisational system, identifying the techniques and then following them to their intended meaning is the way in which Film Art proposes you identify the style of the film you are viewing. Film Art suggests that you can also use the technical construction of a film to talk about the style of an artist or director and in this case Age of Innocence in many ways ‘breaks’ Scorsese’s style quite substantially.

When I watched Vivre Sa Vie, I didn’t notice anything remotely special about the sound of the film. It seemed mostly pretty natural, at times, even badly recorded. But upon researching the film, it would appear that Godard’s film was one of the first films ever to be shot outside a studio with unprocessed production audio. Even possibly, the first film to use production audio for dialogue when shooting on a location. All the environments in the film are natural environments and in some of these environments, it can become difficult to hear the sound over the background noise for instance the busy bars and cafes that the film is shot in. The music soundtrack of the film is also quite possibly one of the most interesting experiments, as the music was recorded live on location directly onto the single track that would be played back in theatres.

Film Art defines a connection between form and sound in the way that the way sound is constructed can become a pattern that is introduced and obeyed or disobeyed throughout the film. Form is the way a film is constructed from the building blocks of repetition and differences and sounds can be used in a similar way. Aside from the technical construction of the sound, the recording, the space and even certain effects can be repeated to immediately bring the audience into a specific emotion or understanding. One of the best examples of this is Star Wars, sound effects in that film are incredibly important and convey not only specifics of the story, but also character and emotion. No one can say that R2D2 or Chewbacca don’t express emotion and this is evidence of the power of sound in motion picture filmmaking.

Narrative is often talked about as if story and narrative are in fact the same thing. Narrative tends to be a more technical term for the way in which the elements of the story are presented to us. Film Art puts it: “we can consider a narrative to be a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space.” Cause and Effect is probably the most important element of Narrative storytelling because cause and effect is almost entirely what is shown to the audience in the cinema.

Mystery Road beautifully uses narrative as not only a way to show the action taking place but also to create meaning. Through cause and effect we are given insight into the way the film world operates and a window into the culture the film is exploring. Narrative is incredibly important in the portrayal of characters too. Mystery Road is not a static film, there are actions and reactions littered throughout. Jay’s decision to remain distant from the community has repercussions and leads to lack of trust from fellow community members. As a film, it brilliantly organises the events of Swan’s investigation, the entire time, the film uses very realistic construction of time and space, short of being Stanislavski. The shootout at the end of the film specifically uses long, uninterrupted cuts. This narration creates suspense in a different way than, say, Enemy of the State. Narration is the process of presenting the narrative to the audience and in Mystery Road, Ivan Sen constructs his narrative through the characters and society within the story.

Narrative is often organised into Story and Plot elements and these elements are linked but not the same. Plot details anything within the narrative of the film that is explicitly narrated to the audience. Story, is a broader concept that encompasses the details of the film world, the diegesis. These elements combine to form the narrative of the film.

Zodiac, in the scheme of the cinema screenings, was kind of a return to normal hollywood cinema, familiar as opposed to the bizarre Holy Motors or the very artificial Life Aquatic. I love the sort of research-sudo-non-fiction (some people call them newspaper movies but I don’t know how I feel about that) genre like that of the recent Oscar Winning film, Spotlight (also starring Mark Ruffalo, perhaps he really likes these non-fiction roles). A key difference is the suspense element and I think the suspense feeds directly into the cinematography. Fincher is very deliberately creating an atmosphere of terror with these films especially in certain scenes (most notably the basement scene) where there isn’t any real danger.

Looking at the format of the film, many have stated that the film was shot entirely on digital formats but Fincher has since stated that the slow motion murder films were shot on high speed film stocks because the digital medium was not advanced enough to shoot at high speed with Full High Definition resolution. The film was later edited with DVCPro proxies. The film was shot on spherical lenses, unlike films of the period Zodiac is set within, this, as well as the aerial footage can make you forget that the film is set in the seventies as really the only cues are in the mise-en-scene.

The film’s use of perspective is also very typical. There aren’t a lot of 180 degree rule breaks and most two-character scenes are either composed with the two characters on either side of the shot or with over-the-shoulder shots. Even in the scene with Allen, the cops and the reporters the composition is very simple and effective. The perspective very rarely takes the form of one particular person in the shot and for the most part, the perspective only shifts between Paul and Robert.

Mise-en-scene is one of those academic terms that has never quite made sense to me. I’m convinced that on no film set has one ever uttered the word “mise-en-scene” because it’s not strictly speaking, a technical term. Bordwell and Thompson dissect the term into a few different categories.

As a self confessed Anderson fan, this isn’t my first time studying his artistic sensibilities. His use of focal length and symmetry is particularly fascinating. Audiences may not be able to put their finger on what exactly creates that sense of artifice but there’s something unnatural about shooting with a wide-angle lens, a foot away from an actors face rather than a more conventional portrait focal length and distance.

Wes Anderson’s Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a masterpiece of Mise-en-scene. In terms of Setting (the first element of mies-en-scene), the film is relatively minimalistic (the theatre location, the islands, the Belafonte and Operation Hennessey). Anderson’s style is intentionally artificial. Anderson constructs the Belafonte in one of the scenes is as a huge diorama over 100 feet in length.

Costume in Life Aquatic is similarly important as contrast is a key aspect of the film’s costumes. The Belafonte crew wear powder blue pants and matching tops with a bright red cap, each character wearing the cap and the uniform in slightly varying ways. This is juxtaposed with the Hennessy sailors and the extraneous people aboard the belafonte in khaki clothing which directly clashes with the blue uniforms.

Wes Anderson very rarely uses shadow in Life Aquatic. Most shots in the film are lit in a very flat manor and are also lit naturally which contrasts with the very artificial use of setting, costume, makeup and cinematography. The use of 3-point lighting is very minimal, more often, Anderson and his crew use available natural light and means to manipulate light (reflectors, diffusers etc.)

When it comes to the staging of the film, Anderson very deliberately places talent within a scene to again create a very staged feeling. Probably the best example of Staging Mise-en-scene is the submarine scene in which each of the cast members are placed perfectly in the shot so that they are almost all visible in the frame despite how packed they are within the scene.

Aside from the very obvious aspects of mise-en-scene, Wes Anderson very deliberately manipulates space and time, most obviously space with mise-en-scene. The almost constant use of wide angle lenses distorts the space to give the audience a broader view than they would normally have, allowing Anderson to fill the frame with elements of mise-en-scene, even moreso than many directors of this time.

La Jetée is in many ways an extremely modern film despite it’s actual time of creation. I was extraordinarily inspired by the film because felt like the genre of film that I love and I could see elements of the film that would be brilliant to re-contextualise. I could think of many modern films that could have been directly inspired by La Jetée including Looper and Oblivion. The feeling of the film itself was very sombre and dramatic and I could see why the construction of the film was considered avant grade, though I felt the story itself followed very classical form and could quite easily be turned into a modern blockbuster by removing the voice-over and having a moving frame rather than purely stills.

One of the key elements of film form described by Film Art is the idea of Unity/Disunity. In my opinion, the idea of a cyclical narrative (some would call this elliptical storytelling) is the most obvious form of unity within a screenplay. Many of my favourite scripts employ this technique such as Nolan’s Inception. La Jetée’s conclusion is profoundly successful because of it’s setup at the beginning of his film, though the way in which it is communicated is somewhat vague and took multiple viewings before I actually understood it. I think, from a cinematography perspective, the scene does not have enough repetitive elements to cue the audience that they are at the beginning of the film, we also do not see the main character as a child in the scene at the end which, in my opinion, severely diminishes the effect and the “ah hah!” moment is diminished because the only cue is the narration.

In a poetic sense, the form of the piece is very rondo. Film Art would describe it as a sort of ABACA structure. The character begins at the Jetty (La Jetée), fast forward to the future, the experiment then back to the past the first time, the development and the final time at the Jetty. This is very classical form.

Holy Motors makes one feel like they have accidentally consumed illegal substances on the way into the theatre because not only does it seemingly avoid any kind of story (at least in classical form), it is also completely absurd; complete with gorilla families, talking cars and computer generated alien sex. It was suggested in class that the film is intentionally lacking narrative, though if that was the intention of the filmmakers, they were unsuccessful, I tend to think of the film as having many seemingly disconnected narratives. At no point in the film, does the audience lose interest. Film Art: An Introduction suggests that all art contains form and this is the reason we are annoyed when someone changes the channel in the middle of a television show or we lose a book half way through. Our mind’s are not designed to appreciate the film simply for the experience, we crave the ending, the resolution, beginning, middle and end, three act structure.

Holy Motors, though seemingly lacking resolution does still follow film form. When it comes to Repetition and Variation, the film skilfully upsets your expectations. By constantly leading you back to the limousine between these seemingly ridiculous, eclectically arranged scenes, the film’s repetition, creates the expectation that the narrative should tie up the loose end, or at least explain the significance of the limo, or the characters that we see throughout the film, things that have been repeated. Film Art refers to these as formal expectations and explains the construction in terms of poetic form (AB, ABA etc.). Holy Motors seems to abuse conventional form by setting up so many expectations and subtly coercing the audience toward believing a resolution is imminent and then tears those expectations apart. For me, certainly, I spent the entire film wanting it to all make sense, almost the “Inception” conclusion, when suddenly you understand that the reason Cobb’s wife killed herself was because he put the idea there in the first place. That sudden feeling of all the puzzle pieces fitting together, instead it was the realisation that the pieces were from 3 different boxes and half of them were missing and there was no way the pieces were ever going to come together.