Study Document
Film Still Analysis
1 The 400 Blows
The mise en scene of Figure 1 from The 400 Blows shows two youths scattering a flock of pigeons in the streets of Paris. The centermost youth is the main character Antoine Doinel. He and the boy beside him and tramping through a city that is full of adults—but the adults are all in the backdrop, away from the action of the still but not unaware of it. A few of them look over to the boys who are causing the birds to suddenly take flight. Their looks of disapproval seem to suggest that they are out of sympathy with the rambunctious nature of boys with their desire to interact and engage with the natural world. The adults seem to suggest that their world does not condone such behavior as that of disturbing the peace and calm, the status quo, of traipsing through the middle of the street just to upset the birds there.
One adult in the background stands at the corner of the sidewalk staring censoriously at the youths. The other adults are mostly or partially obscured by the birds taking flight—but not him. He is the only still figure—the other adults are all in mid-step. He alone looks on like a stern authority figure who hovers over the boys like an avenging angel who will have his way come Hell or high water. The boys have their backs to him and are oblivious to his nefarious presence.
The still captures the essence of the film, which is a character study of the main character Antoine—a dreamy but rebellious youth, who has no place in the world as he has no father and no sense of a home or of a purpose in life. He does not understand the purpose of school or of the rigid structure of Parisian social life. He wants to walk in the street and disrupt the stillness because he feels a great disruption within his own soul.
2 Get Out
The mise en scene of Figure 4 from Get Out shows Rose Armitage seated dead center in the middle of the frame sipping milk from a glass and she sits cross-legged at the foot of her bed looking down at her laptop. She is illuminated by the computer screen and the lamps on either side of bed tables illuminate the dimly lit room. The frame contains perfect symmetry except for two items—one a teddy bear on the left bed table; the other a tray for items on the other bed table. Aside from this difference, the left half of the frame reflects perfectly the right half of the frame, right down to the row of photographs framed and hanging on the wall behind Rose’s head over…
…frame and then are made free to roam over the geometrical shapes that dominate the still.
There are the square patterns of the checkered red and white table cloth, the rectangle of the TV in the background, the rectangles of the art frames hanging on the wall beside the TV, the rectangles of the panes of glass in the sliding wall behind the elderly person seated at the table, and then there are various cylindrical and cone shaped objects on the table, from a bottle of wine to candle holders and candles, salt and pepper shakers, bowls of soup and a bowl of fruit. These are complimented by the cone-shaped lamp shade in the background that sits just behind and above Polley’s head as she squints at the viewer. The effect gives a dramatic sort of dim halo visual over Polley, as though she is heroic for delving into her own personal history and origin story.
Here squinting through her own camera at the lens through which the viewer looks is a reflection of the main theme of the documentary, which is that everyone sees through their own lens and sees and tells their own story. Polley, in assembling the parts of the documentary about her family, shows the viewer that this is essentially how she sees it—even though she allows others to tell their story, she is still the one putting the…
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Film Analysis from a Design Perspective: Reading Raging Bull Elements of Design The focus of this paper is a pivotal scene from the film Raging Bull, starring Robert DeNiro as real life middleweight boxer, Jake La Motta. Jake's emotional status is reflected in multiple aspects of the film production, such as his physique and costuming, the cinematography, the editing, and the direction. Film communicates the narrative's physical reality and psychological reality with
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I. Critique
While Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is ranked at No. 6 in AFI’s 10 Top 10 in the genre for Science-Fiction, the film itself has so much in common with noir film (the kind of black-and-white films that typically offered murder mysteries or cops vs. robbers as plot vehicles) that it is often considered to be a neo-noir classic (Doll & Faller, 1986). However, Scott’s film blend noir with
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Introduction: Contextual Information
Released in 1987 and based on a 1973 book by William Goldman, Rob Reiner’s film The Princess Bride has been aptly called a “cult classic,” because of the way its mediocre box office performance belies its perennial popularity and the ways the film has infiltrated the public consciousness. As with other cult classics of the 1980s, The Princess Bride has offered popular culture in America several catch
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Blade Runner: A Marriage of Noir and Sci-Fi Blade Runner is a 1982 film noir/science fiction film set in 2019 that depicts a world that is threatened by human advancements in technology. In the film, robotic humanoids become self-aware and decide that it is within their right to live past their predetermined expiration dates and set out to find a way to live among humans and defy scientists, whom arbitrarily decided
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BEREFORD'S DOUBLE JEOPARDY Double Jeopardy An Analysis of Bruce Bereford's Double Jeopardy Introduction to Film Professor Kim Elliott-White Double Jeopardy Double Jeopardy (1999) is a thriller by Austrailian director Bruce Bereford, which stars Ashley Judd as Elizabeth "Libby" Parsons, a woman wrongly accused of murdering her husband, Bruce Greenwood as Nicholas "Nick" Parsons/Simon Ryder/Jonathan Devereaux, Libby's husband, and Tommy Lee Jones, as Travis Lehman, a former law professor who is Libby's parole officer and eventually
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Il doit tuer par programmation des etres proches ou qu'il aime. He must be killed by relatives or loved programming he loves. Redevenu autonome, il tuera de sa propre main son beau-pere puis sa mere.Again become independent, he will kill his own hand and then his father-his mother. Enfin, il sera accule au suicide par desespoir, victime touchante de toute cette manipulation. Finally, it will be driven to suicide