This week I viewed two films to assess the way cinematographers and filmmakers create and pace films with rhetoric and other clever ways to win you over scene by scene. The first film I would like to address in this discussion would be Rebecca, a film presented by Sleznick International a little over eighty years ago in 1940, also starring some iconic names in Hollywood such as Joan Fontaine, Laurence Oliver, and Judith Anderson. The film is recognized in large for its intense dramatic sequences involving the entanglement of an eccentric and wealthy man Max, and a personal companion Caroline, working under a very high-class lady. The plot moves quite quickly as the movie progresses from scenes where Max and Mrs. Danvers meet in the Monte Carlo, to being married and driving home from their honeymoon in a sequence of scenes that spans no more than 4 minutes. While that is abnormal to transition through such key developments, the film handles these gaps tremendously as the marriage continues, revealing the deep secrets and drama that this movie really conveys subliminally. From how the scenes are designed to the lighting, this film tells a story from your eyes, not your ears.

            The second film I watched this week to get a feel for how cinematographers and film makers create a vision for a scene was a beautifully written movie presented by Paramount, Smoke Signals is a film that released in 1998, featuring Adam Beach, Evan Adams, and Gary Farmer. The film starts with a native American medicine man-like speech detailing subliminally the events leading into the introduction to the plot where the viewer is then introduced to the cast of characters, Victor, a young Native American living on a reservation in high school, and Thomas, also a young Native American boy, and a whole slew of characters that have varying importance throughout the film. While the movie tries to take a serious tone with some very tense family drama and outright dark themes varying from alcoholism, racism, and domestic abuse. However, the script has quite a bit of very dry humor attached to it at almost every angle to lighten the mood. A great scene this takes a very large part of the vision in my opinion is when Victor and Thomas meet Suzy Song after travelling to Phoenix from their reservation by bus. Thomas and Victor make this trip due to the death of Victor’s father, Arnold who left Victor when he was just 12. With some apparent emotional trauma, Victor handles most confrontation surrounding the situation of his father’s death with a little bit of aggression throughout the journey, while Thomas on the other hand, sees Victor’s father as a role-model and someone to look up to, thus causing him to light up the room with stories and memories/exaggerated memories of Arnold. These clashing ideas of Victor’s father create some resoundingly good tension points to keep you interested throughout the relatively bland journey by greyhound bus. Finally, after making their way to where Arnold was living when he died, they meet Suzy Song, Arnolds next door neighbor and life partner after Victor and his mother were abandoned by Arnold. The scenes that transpire from this meeting explains immense details of the story through vague conversation between Suzy and Victor regarding how the fire that killed Thomas’ parents and nearly killed Thomas and Victor was started by Arnold himself on accident while drunk. This conversation takes place after Thomas had passed out earlier in the evening. Furthermore, the scene not only supports this plot point with extremely well-acted conversation pieces with tense moments, but the film also does a wonderful job of sequencing memories, or flashback sequences that seamlessly flow back to the main plot, and in these flashback sequences, they reveal incredible detail that one party wouldn’t have known giving the viewer a whole different perspective to the way the characters portray themselves in the movie. Finally, I feel the film makers that developed this movie used camera angles and well-placed lighting to tell the viewer bits of the story before they are told in a way. An example of this would be right after the scene I have analyzed above, Arnold says in monologue regarding the day he left his family in Idaho,  “I broke three hearts that day,”, and this is at first shocking to the viewer as the movie does a great job of indicating that Victor is an only child, and Victor’s mother was the only other person in the house. However, the camera immediately changed to a sleeping Thomas, subliminally telling the viewer who the third heart was.

In conclusion, I feel these movies both in their own ways show how developing a scene or a plot for a movie is so much more than just the script and the writers. Its everything from the types of lights used, to the way the camera changes scenes to tell the viewer something. Film is a fantastic media to express ones feelings and thoughts.