Nick Hunter Blog Film Technique 3/6/20

Religion in the Movies Blog

Paris Texas

Opening, there are shots of a beautiful desert with a guitar playing in the backward to set a western theme. The next mood we see is an odd one. There is a man that is well dressed in the desert with a baseball cap and is dirty from all of the sand and dirt he’s been walking across. This gives him a rough appearance. He is following the phone lines on his cross country journey. His brother pulls up alongside him on the road. His brother tries talking to him but there is a shot from his point of view of him looking at the power lines. This is where he wants to go and he continues looking back at the power lines. At the motel, the first shot is focused on a pair of red heels. There was an airplane in the shot landing in the background of the heels. Then, there’s a man looking through binoculars at the plane landing with shoes lined up next to him. The shoes, plane, and phone lines all indicate some sort of travel because people travel in shoes and by plane. Phone lines travel from place to place with telephone calls. The scene on the overpass sets up the mood of alienation, with the man screaming at the top of his lungs over the bridge talking about how the world is ending and no one can hear him or is listening to him. Travis wants to speak to him because he’s damaged but he says nothing. The next scene is a special one, Travis is eating lunch under an overpass with his son and really interacts with him. The scene sets the urgency of how Travis wants to have a relationship with his son because of where they are eating lunch. No one stops on the side of the road under an overpass to eat lunch. With his wife, the wall between his wife and him is the wall on the back. To the customer, he sees a fantasy room that’s all done. Her view however, is just her in a mirror and it is an unfinished wall. This creates the mystery on the customer’s side as he doesn’t know what it is like in the prostitute’s room. He leaves the room, and from the women’s view of the glass, you can see the telephone, another communication device. When the wife finally says Travis’ name, he turns around and see his wife with her hands pressed on the glass and Travis’ face where hers is supposed to be. Meaning that apart of him is still within her and that he has always been with her over the years. 

Bunny

  Bunny brings a sort of peacefulness to death by the way it was filmed. The Bunny sees a moth that is buzzing by a light above where she is cooking. The moth then goes to a picture of her and her husband on their wedding day. The moth is continuing to bother the bunny until she has had enough. She is an old bunny and has a walker and takes her awhile to get from one place to another. She is chasing this moth around whacking it with a spoon until she connects with it and it falls into her bowl of dough that she was about to bake. The bunny then is furious and stirs the bowl madly and dumps the bowl into a pan and places it in the oven. The bunny then proceeds to die in her sleep but we don’t know that until later. This is because, the oven is shaking mightly then opens up, with the moth at the front, there is a bright light in the oven where the bunny then crawls to. Once in the oven, the oven closes and then we think the bunny died. Turns out, the bunny had died earlier and the oven transforms things from dough, to bread for example. It makes changes. Therefore, there is a change from the bunny living to the bunny dying. We then see the moths in the background of the picture of the husband and wife next to each other, which exemplifies the husband and his bunny wife. 

Pink Floyd

The British flag falls apart in the opening scene, and it makes you question whether the war was really worth it or not. The teacher at school, likes to have power over his students because as we see, at home, his wife controls him. Thus, explaining why he is so awful to his students as while he is eating dinner with his wife and she’s controlling him, it cuts to him spanking one of his students. The next scenes we watched, the students were all wearing masks and walking in the same single file line. They are walking into a machine that grinds them up and turns them into hamburger meat. This represents that the students aren’t really learning anything. They are being brainwashed because of the way they are being taught. They think being productive to society is doing something that is methodical and training of some sort. There is no room for creativity. The students were zombie like and being looked at as if they are not unique or special. When they talk about breaking down the wall, they are talking about this psychological wall that the student’s buildup from the rest of the world because they are repressed of their feelings. 

Harold and Maude

Harold likes to fake suicides and mess with his mother.  Harold is completely consumed by thinking about death.  His mother thinks that something is wrong with him because he likes that idea so much.  This movie is shot in a very bland way in my opinion.  It is a lot of conversation and characterization.  The camera is always at angles that make you feel like you are amongst the people in the movie.  I think the colors used in this movie are all kind of low in saturation so not very colorful.  This emphasizes the contract between white and black, life and death.

Northfork

This setting of this movie is very striking.  I like the views of the west.  This seemed to have a lot of symbolism and different intertwined stories as well.  The arc is definitely a religious reference.  I can definitely see the buffalo relating to the boy.  Buffalo are nomadic and movie with each, never really settling down. That relates to the way the boy never really settles down and is nomadic himself, since he doesnt have a home.  

Cabeza de Vaca

I was at the Saac Meeting during this portion so I did not get to see this film.