DOLLHOUSE

Continuing from my blog post on Wes Anderson and The Royal Tenenbaums, I started reading The Wes Anderson Collection, by Matt Zoller Seitz. The book is divided into chapters, each focusing on one of Anderson’s films, starting from Bottle Rocket and ending in Moonrise Kingdom. Each chapter starts with an introduction to film, including analysis, from Zoller Seitz, and the rest of the chapter includes images and the transcript of an interview between Zoller Seitz and Anderson. Roller Seitz brings an informed and interesting point of view to Anderson’s films, and he asks engaging and thoughtful questions about Anderson’s style, techniques, practices and intentions. The images are what originally drew me to the book, as they contain stills from Anderson’s films, stills from films that inspired Anderson’s films, original storyboards and diagrams by Anderson, drawings by Anderson’s brother, Eric Chase Anderson, and various images from the production design department of his films.

I was reading the chapter of The Royal Tenenbaums, and Zoller Seitz noted a moment in the film where Margot turns on the light of a model set for one of her plays. Zoller Seitz said that he laughed when he watched the film again a couple of years later, because he recognised the cutaway wall of the diorama and how all of Anderson’s films feature shots that have cutaway walls, or are dollhouse shots. These dollhouse shots show Anderson’s characters in the worlds that they have created around them, be it their bedrooms or boats or train carriages. The space around these characters are meant to say as much about the character as the actor themselves, as well as being aesthetically striking and idiosyncratic. The book showed shots of various dollhouses in Anderson’s work, including the train carriages in The Darjeeling Limited and the ‘Let me tell you about my boat’ sequence in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

I began looking into more of Anderson’s dollhouse shots, and it made me want to show a character in their own space. I have always loved going to other people’s bedrooms and seeing how it reflects on their personality or their sense of self. I also love going through people’s things and gathering information and making assumptions about people by going through their houses, but lets leave that at that. So, I’ve done a diagram of a dollhouse shot I would like to do in one of my three short videos, and I will be drawing up storyboards to show in week 7 for the final project pitch. In the meantime, here are more of Anderson’s dollhouses:

Natalie Portman in Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier

Richie’s tent in The Royal Tenenbaums

Edward Norton in Moonrise Kingdom

The Bishop triplets in Moonrise Kingdom

 

mimo

My name is Mimo. I like to watch TV and films with my neighbour's cat.

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