Monday – Film, Space, and Mise-en-Scene

READING SUMMARY

This reading discusses the filmmaker’s choices with how movies and television shows are filmed, meaning what images we as the audience see and how we see them. A shot is an excerpt of a film, or what is recorded by one camera operation. There are many different types of shots, like close-up or medium shots, two-shots, high- and low-angle shots, objective and subjective shots, horizontal and swish pans, and zoom and freeze frames. Combining these shots is called a sequence, and there are multiple types of sequences as well: linear, elliptical linear, associative, and montage. Cuts join two separate shots; there are straight, contrast, parallel, jump, form, match, and final and rough cuts. Transitions bridge scenes together with fade-ins and -outs, dissolves, wipes, and irising-in and -out. All of these things are choices made by the filmmaker for how we see the film.

OUTSIDE EXAMPLE

Over spring break, I watched Notting Hill again. This was shortly after I did the reading, and I immediately connected it to the scene when William walks through the market heartbroken as the weather/seasons and time changes around him. Months go by, showing changes from spring to fall to winter, and a pregnant woman is later shown with a baby. William goes months, possibly a year, without Anna, but acts the same way as he continues to walk through the market alone. However, this scene only has the screen duration of about a minute and a half.

READING CONNECTION

The Notting Hill scene with the seasons is fairly famous and well-done. It is a long shot of William, showing his full body from a distance with background. The sequence of scenes (as it is more than one, taking place over many months and different seasons) is a montage, meaning it is a series of shots arranged in a certain order for a certain purpose. It could also classify as somewhat of an American montage, which is time collapsed together as shots are blended, like calendar pages blowing away month after month to show changes in time. However, instead of calendar pages, William walks through many seasons in the market with the same ‘walk,’ and we see changes in friends and people (like the pregnant woman with a baby at the end of the minute-and-a-half scene) to show that many months have gone by. Overall, this scene involved many choices made by the filmmaker to produce, and used multiple of these ‘choices’ covered in the reading, like long shot and montage. This Notting Hill scene is very well-filmed and does a great job of using these techniques to show time duration and William’s state of heartbrokenness as he gets through it over the course of many months.