"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens up between its origins in the kabuki style and its subject of starvation in a mountain village! The village enforces a tradition of carrying those who have reached the age of 70 up the side of mountain and abandoning them there to die of exposure.
Keisuke Kinoshita's 1958 film tells its story with deliberate artifice, using an elaborate set with a path beside a bubbling brook, matte paintings for the backgrounds, mist on dewey evenings, and lighting that drops the backgrounds to black at dramatic moments and then brings up realistic lighting again. Some of its exteriors use black foregrounds and bloody red skies; others use grays and blues. As in kabuki theater, there is a black-clad narrator to tell us what's happening.
This artifice supports a story that contains great emotional charge. Kinuyo Tanaka plays Orin, a 70-year-old widow whose resignation in the face of her traditional fate is in stark contrast with the behavior of her neighbor Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi), who protests violently against his destiny. Their family attitudes are similarly opposed; while Orin's son Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi) loves his mother and doesn't have any desire to carry her up the mountainside, Mata's family has already cut off his food, and he wanders the village as a desperate scavenger; Orin invites him in and offers him a bowl of rice, which be gobbles
Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s play, The Love Suicides at Amijima explores the disgrace of Jihei and Koharu’s misbegotten romance, the underlying conflict of the hidden innuendos aimed at the Japanese social class and the sense of duty formed between two women from unseemmingly different backgrounds. In order to fully understand these themes, on must take into account the societal structure of Osaka, Japan in the 1720s. Within this culture, every individual was instilled the notion of familial obligation and had to adhere to the rules placed upon them by society. Chikamatsu Monzaemon does an ideal job of capturing these concepts within the play.
Lewis uses lighting to dramatize the opening scene of the film and characterize the protagonist of the story. The most noticeable utilization of film noir lighting is in the beginning
While the film is in color, sometimes it appears to be in black and white. There are no bright colors in the film. Most of the colors are either browns, beiges, whites, blacks, and grays, so that even when the characters are outside or in daylight, there are contrasts between lights and darks. For example, at the beginning Mr. Gettes is seated in a somewhat dark office, yet he is wearing an all-white suit. Later, when he goes to examine the dried up river bed, his black suit contrasts with the bright sunlight and light colored sand.
This film is a black and white film and the lighting is more towards dim effect which terrified the audience. Music plays the biggest effect in the film. Bernard Hermann’s theme is used for this film because it uses mostly high-pitched string instrument notes so the suspense and horror mood can be formed to the audience.
The Song is considered the absolute law of the Yami with no room for gray areas or interpretation and their myths, unlike in western culture where the word myth is understood as false, are considered as the only real truths and never to be questioned. It holds all the taboos, rituals, and social reasoning of the Yami, and the history of the family reciting until present time. This genealogy component of the song is why each family has their own version of creation in the Song.
The camerawork emphasizes the sense of detachment between the characters, and Billy’s inability with connecting with others. In addition, the film has a contrasty, bleak look to it, like a faded photograph. Gallo shot the movie on reversal film stock to capture that contrast and grain, in attempt to reproduce the same look of football games from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
This film’s mise-en-scène shapes my feelings by visually being straightforward and realistic. Visually the film makes me feel like I am a part of the character’s different paths in life, including the citizens of the small towns that are equally being affected financially. This is evident in the visual decay of each town. This film, despite the tense and criminal scenes, has the power to make me pause my scrambled thoughts as the camera pans to a West Texas inspired sunset that expands across the bleak earth. This ultimately makes me feel warm and experienced as if I was one of the citizens that face such harsh economic conditions during the day yet an alluring scenery at night. Another aspect of the mise-en-scène in Hell or High Water is the use raw lighting. Through the use of hard lighting, such as the bold shadows and sunlight beating down, the movie truly captures a sense of
Rivalry with an older geisha almost destroys her career. Sayuri is tormented and inspired by love for a man who she believes she cannot have. The story covers the period of the second world war - the end of an era for Japan.
One of the ways why cinematography made the film was the lighting. To get the feel, the lighting appeared to be fake shadows that were painted on the set. The fake shadows that were painted on the set gave the lighting appeared to be harsh and sharper to set the mood for the audience. If it weren’t for the painted shadows, the movie wouldn’t have been so successful in the horror genre. Since it was a silent movie, if it weren’t for the shadows, you wouldn’t of seen it as a horror film, but as an original film that was trying to be creative.
Katherine Boo, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former reporter and editor at The Washington Post, has worked for over two decades “reporting within poor communities, considering how societies distribute opportunity and how individuals get out of poverty” (Boo 257). In November 2007, she and her husband, an Indian citizen, moved from the United States to India to study a group of slum dwellers in Annawadi, Mumbai (Boo 249). While studying this group of individuals in India from 2007 to 2011, Boo’s goal was to learn why the individuals within this slum have not banded together against a common enemy in order to gain upward mobility. She illustrates several common issues of developing nations including: corruption, education, the mismanagement of foreign aid, and the possibility for social mobility in her book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. In this literary work, Boo accurately portrays the acts of corruption and as well as how corruption has entered the sphere of education, which is typically an individual’s only avenue to social mobility and success in that area. She argues that instead of rising up against a higher power, the individuals within the slum fight against one another to get a leg up on their competition, even if it keeps them in the same social class.
Most of the actors are wearing darker clothing as well which makes their faces stand out even more. This lighting style also adds to the tension and the mystery of the scene. It makes the audience on edge. The contrast filled lighting of film noir is also effective at bringing out the extremes of emotions and thought. The darkness of the genre makes anything that goes wrong seem less taboo, because the lighting of the genre sets up the norms for the world that the film lives in—and in that world, bad things happen. The lighting of the film helps the audience understand the world that the characters are in.
Cinematographers and art directors play a very important and creative role in film production. They work closely with the director and give a film its unique visual look and identity. The art director, David Lazan and cinematographer, Mauro Fiore, shot the film almost entirely in sequence, following the clock from the crack of dawn to a very dark night of reckoning. Compressing intense action and emotion into a brief time frame became one of their key challenges. They had to make sure the film felt like it was one single day unfolding which became the single biggest challenge during the production.
Before I go on rising my argument. I want first to point out the main semiotic of the film. The audience hasn 't realised the colours of the water yet. The sign of creation of an undersea wonderland, but its also about the brightness and darkness of the water. The colour tends to darken and in most of the scenes, whenever danger lurks.(Ashiru 2015) Like what had shown in
His cinematography “creates an exceptionally inviting, varied look for this nocturnal story, and special visual effects are smoothly integrated into the action. The makeup that adds pale eyes, ghostly pallor and tiny blue veins to the principals' faces manages to create a frisson of danger without marring the actors' attractiveness” (Maslin). Rousselot used dark-lensing, a way to attain low key shots and thus created a huge contrast to the sets and costumes (Maslin). This made the characters seem as though they were the only important things in the otherwise dark and gloomy shots.
Sestinas Song of Evil So much evil. The awkward moments of disconnection.