Sunday, March 13, 2011
Shoot the Piano Player
I chose to watch the french new wave film Shoot the Piano Player directed by François Truffaut. One particular moment that demonstrated Mise-en-scene in the film was when the one of the bad guys was showing off his scarf that was "made of metal". Fido didn't believe that it was metal so the bad guy swore on his mother's life. Cut to his mother in her house. She falls down and dies. I also really enjoyed the scene when Charlie (or Edward at the time) goes to the rich guys office to play piano and hopefully become rich and famous. A woman is leaving the office with her violin case. Instead of showing Charlie playing the piano and the man looking impressed. Truffaut decides to keep his camera lens on the violin player as she walks away from the office. We hear Charlie's fantastic piano playing and can tell he got the job by the crest-fallen look on the poor violin players face. This film exemplifies the movement because of its rejection of classic film form (They even take a jab at John Wayne) And the film had numerous "long tracking shots" Such as the scene I just mentioned with the woman and the scene where they are driving the car to the cabin in the woods. The film also was focused on an individual character (Charlie) and his struggle with whether he was meant to become a criminal like his brothers. All in all it was a very good movie for a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yeah, I love the violin/piano shot from this film.... One of the interesting things about this tracking shot is the way it functions to juxtapose or contrast two conflicting chains of meaning (the positions or experiences of the violinist and the pianist, respectively). In other words, we usually think of long tracking shots as devoted to a single subject matter and inter-cut shots as the means of conveying two or more intertwined characters. Here, though, it's the tracking shot that accomplished the intertwining (and more forcefully than, say, a standard shot-reverse shot sequence). It's a particularly exquisite variation of the "L-cut" technique we studied in Shelton's "My Effortless Brilliance." The first of the scenes you focused on here actually has as much to do with montage (the sudden cut the mother's house) as it does with mise-en-scene (and you never really clarify how you see the mise-en-scene itself being manipulated here). But yeah, both the scenes you're pointing to comprise rich and innovative variations of standard cinematic technique.
ReplyDelete100/100
CS