The medium of a film bends all literary techniques: in a world where information is absorbed visually, the look of the image becomes all-important. Just as the storyline shapes how the viewers think, the actual image itself has immense power to sway our perception and convey a message. The photography implemented in films tells an audience how to think about the characters, who they’re rooting for, and who to sympathize with-- creating the film’s moral structure and message. In The Usual Suspects, Gladiator, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, each movie argues that the moral high ground should be given to the character that the audience perceives as most helpless or maltreated. This perception can be altered and stretched to the limits of possibility using strategic film photography.
The Usual Suspects establishes immediately that this will be an almost exaggerated example of a crime and drama epic-- using low key lighting with fast film stock as well as low camera angles to create drama, intrigue, and power dynamics in the opening scene. Of the three movies, Suspects comes the closest to classical cinema, implementing a variety of realistic techniques (the interrogation scenes come to mind) and taking greater liberty with style in during the film’s suspenseful heists. In the midst of all this, the character Verbal Kint stands to the side of most shots and stares at the main action from the background. Next to the drama and intrigue of the other criminals framed in the suspenseful shots, Verbal looks inexperienced and lurks in the background. Hints from the lighting sometimes illuminate Verbal to highlight the contour of his face, calling attention to him; yet he remains an unremarkable character in most of the main action. He is also portrayed as handicapped, and the film implements close up shots on his limping gait as well as the acting skills of Kevin Spacey in order to bring his disability to our attention. As the police interrogate Verbal, sitting on a desk to create a high-angle view onto Verbal’s face, we begin to sympathize with his weakness. At the end of the film when it’s revealed that he is truly the evil mastermind, our allegiance with Verbal holds true and we cheer as he enters the getaway vehicle and drives away to cause more cold death and destruction-- all through the power of some lighting and camera angles. In that way, Verbal has tricked us as an audience into sympathizing with him. In an analysis of The Usual Suspects by Bill Johnson, he asks the question: “could a powerful man of will bend all others to see what he wanted them to see? Yes. Dramatically yes.”
Stunning shots and effects along with notable use of color and clarity make the cinematography in Gladiator memorable. Shot in high-contrast lighting that embodies the “epic” effect of the story, the corruption and secrecy of Rome’s elite jump through shadows and puddles of light reminiscent of film noir. The film’s execution mirrors “the dominant literary techniques” of an epic story-- “hyperbole and exaggeration” (Eric M. Lachs). In well-lit arenas, our hero Maximus is forced to slay or be slain in battle after battle of gritty, violent action scenes. From the very beginning, the injustices performed to kill Maximus’s family in the storyline have our sympathy-- however, this is only strengthened as we watch him literally struggle throughout the film. Through stunning long shots from a birds’ eye view and deep-focus shots enveloping the whole colosseum, we get a picture of just how small Maximus is amongst the crowd cheering and booing his attempts to fight for his life. In a series of medium shots where Commodus meets our gladiator “backstage” before their final fight, we begin to notice the contrast between Maximus’s dirty attire and beaten physique next to Commodus’ spotless bone-like armor and poise. Power dynamics make the film-- and also align the audience’s sympathies. No amount of brooding and frowning from Joaquin Phoenix can outdo the film’s tone of political depravity, cultivated through its alignment of Maximus as a martyr-- and thus, the film’s view of honor and respect are made clear in its ethical discourse of politics and tyranny.
Our third film is exemplary in not only the questions it poses but the way it gives us a clear picture of how to feel about them. Scholars like Christopher Grau have offered that “[the film] implicitly offers a philosophical position.” The intense formalism of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allows a wide range of possibility to explore ethics. Instead of focusing on pure content, the expressionist Michel Gondry designed a wildly stylistic form to shape our perception of ethics. Realists working with realistic cinema may have been limited by the difficulty of describing having one’s memory erased while remaining true to our visible reality. Sunshine’s technique of implementing warm colors in slow film stock to signify bold, enthusiastic periods of Joel and Clementine’s relationship, usually shot in high key lighting, versus cool colors to signify confusion, anxiety, and degradation related to their memory loss helps an audience quickly identify Lacuna’s effects on the couple. The colors are intense and call attention through slow film stock. This positions Lacuna as the dark force from which Joel and Clementine try valiantly to escape, creating our sympathy and thus the film’s depiction of the dangerous medicalization of our personal lives. Its heavy use of anxious oblique angles and skittering cameras as well as high-angle shots in which Joel and Clem are viewed from above (on the lake, in their bed, when Joel is literally shrunk to toddler size, etc.) also positions them as trapped and helpless, creating an “underdog” effect in which the audience subconsciously begins to root for them against the doctors and technicians.
One could argue that who we are is what we stand for. The medium of film holds immeasurable power to create stories and worlds that force us to question our morals and think critically about the world around us. When we begin to sympathize with a character, we begin to trust them and their ethical judgement and allow the film to communicate with us on a deeper level. These three films, The Usual Suspects, Gladiator, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, use different theme and character and win an audience to a character that appears, on the surface, helpless and maltreated. By using film techniques in photography to illuminate these characteristics and create these characters’ worlds, the film can then communicate its moral structure through this character. When a film is taken apart shot by shot, that communication can be analyzed, and we can ask ourselves again: what are we standing for?
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