Month: April 2020

An Analysis of the End of Tell No One by Guillaume Canet (2:00:05–2:06:44)

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by Joalda Morancy, Shahrez Aziz, Wyn Veiga, Ashwin Prabhu, and Frank Martin

Plot & Occurrences

As the film comes to an end, it becomes apparent that Alexandre will finally receive closure in regards to the dark conspiracy that was revealed to him in the previous scene. After learning of the absolute truth from Margot’s father, he heads to the lake where he initially fell in love with Margot as kids. After finishing his drive, he exits the car to see the damaged dock where the initial incident occurred. A reflection of his relationship, the dock has broken as a result of the damage over the last eight years. He continues to the tree where they would mark each year together, reflecting on their relationship. A crucial element of the scene in this is Alexandre’s bloodied hand in the everlasting beauty of the forest, a signal of how their relationship has been through so much torment.

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The Cinematography of Retrospection in Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One

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by Meagan Johnson, Joon Choi, Meira Chasman, Matthew Martinez, Dylan Kanaan

Editing: 

As Alex reminisces, there is an intertwining of two contrasting scenes: the funeral of his presumed deceased wife and their joyous wedding day. This style of cinematography and editing closely resembles cross-cutting; this ultimately promotes the feeling of parallel action. Cross-cutting is defined as the switching back and forth between two or more scenes in different locations that appear to be occurring simultaneously. Tension is increased as the cinematographer accelerates the rhythm of the cross-cutting.

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Gone Home as Melodrama and Gothic Fiction

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Group project summary, by leader Counti McCutchen

Gone Home utilizes several of the themes that serve in melodramas and gothic fiction. The staples of melodramas include, well, drama—exciting characters and events that play on the viewer’s emotions. Gone Home delivers on that perfectly. The characters have secrets, even characters other than Sam. The mother is showing concern about Sam and might be getting too close to her coworker, Rick. The father is struggling with his books and potentially alcohol. Both parents are struggling in their marriage. These are familiar tropes in drama that Gone Home makes its own through the lens of the player and how Sam reacts. Historically, melodramas also have interspliced songs, which Gone Home has with cassette tapes that can be played throughout the house. Unlike most melodramas, however, there is not hammy or unrealistic acting. Since no actual actors are present, this would be hard to deliver on anyway. Sam’s diary readings come off as sincere and realistic, hinting more toward drama rather than melodrama. However, they are emotional, especially with their culmination at the end.

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Tragedy in Last Day of June, Through Murray

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Group project summary, by leader Joe Gill

The Last Day of June is a beautiful, heart-wrenching game that effectively utilizes Janet Murray’s constructions of Agency and Transformation in order to create an effective tragic video game. The game centers on Carl and June, a couple whom tragedy strikes. After a car accident takes the life of June, Carl gains the power to control his neighbors in the past, and through changing their actions the day of the crash, he hopes to ultimately change the fate of his wife. The tragedy of the game is brought to its full emotional power in part due to the effective construction of bounded player agency and creative character transformation.

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Tragedy

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Group project summary, by leader Loki Aguilera-Keifert

So I went through the two readings from Janet Murray, and while they don’t necessarily cover Tragedy across the board, I thought there were a decent amount of really key thoughts that she expressed.

For instance, when she talked about the game Myst, I enjoyed reading her analysis that the “most dramatically satisfying endings are the near-identical losing branches” in which you choose to free either Achenar or Sirrus instead of their father. Regardless of who you choose between the two, you end up imprisoned in the “very same dungeon from which he has escaped…throughout the game you have peered into each brother’s dungeon through a static-ridden, credit-card-size window embedded with the parchment page of an enchanted book” as both a last laugh sorta move and a sudden 180 flip in spatial positioning. Your mobility significantly reduced, your realization that you are the superimposed static image in the window–it’s pretty damn tragic hahaha.

I also thought the following question would be good to raise, also from Murray’s work:

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The Legacy of Der müde Tod in Last Day of June: Creating Tragedy in Games

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Group project summary, by leader Leo Alvarez

Tragedy is hard to pull off in video games, a medium so driven by the player’s desire to accomplish tasks and achieve the goals set forth by the game designers. What’s more, joining the formerly separated roles of the viewer and the on-screen character into one presents unique challenges in terms of creating motivation and working with the newly bridged psychical distance to create an effective tragedy. With all of these obstacles in its way, how can a game like Last Day of June possibly hold a candle to a tragic film like Der müde Tod? In its use of an episodic structure, a “retry narrative” and a final sacrifice, Last Day of June carries and builds on the legacy of Fritz Lang’s silent film Der müde Tod, ushering the death-defying romantic tragedy template into the era of video-games, and exemplifying how tragedy can be possible in a game.

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Camera Dynamics in Chungking Express (1994)

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by Gabriela Horwath, Wyn Veiga, Tomas Pacheco, Mimi Taylor, Joon Choi

Focus Blur – Gabriela: 

Specifically analyzing the first that appears blurry to the audience, the use of pan, tilt, and zoom creates a fast paced shot that allows the film to achieve a dramaticized appearance of the characters in action. In one of the first shots of the film where He Qiwu is chasing an assailant, the image produced by the movements of the camera are shown as blurry. When He Qiwu is first walking through a crowd, the skillful panning tracks him and shows the crowd around him passing by; this further highlights that it is a busy shot. In addition, pan is used as the camera moves alongside He Qiwu while he is running. This effect puts an emphasis on how fast he is running as well as the distance he is traveling.

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The Expiration of Time and Love: Analyzing Speed of Motion in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express

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by Meagan Johnson, Emily Nagler, Dylan Kanaan, Joalda Morancy, and Haina Lu

California Dreamin’-The Mama’s and the Papa’s (to supplement your reading)

The context in which Wong Kar-Wai actually made Chungking Express is interesting to note as it relates to the techniques he uses to alter speed of motion in the film. According to Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai was actually working on a different/epic movie, he had been editing for multiple years but had felt stalled in the process. Just as a writer needs to take breaks at times to look at their work with an objective lense, he felt he needed to step away for a bit, and decided to use the time to put out a quickly produced / quick hitting film, which would become Chungking Express. The context in which he made the film – moving from editing a film that was long, slower paced in time, to producing a film that was quick paced in time, and then returning back to the slower paced one – is in various ways actually reflected in his treatment of time in Chungking Express. As the remainder of this post will discuss in different ways, Wong Kar-Wai manipulates time through film techniques that alter the speed of motion. This manipulation of time is not meaningless however, the ways in which he does so is to reflect how time moves differently for different characters/situations, connecting us closer to their stories– instilling empathy in many respects. While Hong Kong films, at least at the time, were known for their fast paced approach, Wong Kar-Wai created a film in Chungking Express that is both fast and slow. And perhaps, his approach and reason to this was in-part to reflect how he perceives time as moving at different speeds within his own career.

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