Hello everyone, I welcome you to “Inside a Directors Mind”. For those unfamiliar with my work, I am Julian Schnabel, director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This film follows the tragic struggles Jean-Dominique Bauby faces, a young man who suffers from locked in syndrome; a stroke causing the body and facial muscles to be immobilized while consciousness and eye movement remains. My purpose for tonight is to share three aspects this film employs, allowing it to reach its level of success. These aspects include sound techniques, visual motifs, metaphors and camera angles. Adding to these features, this film also explores the resilience of the human spirit, showing how robust one’s will to survive can be. The use of different sound techniques …show more content…
Many visual motifs were included which held a significant meaning, directly relating to the title of the film and Bauby’s feelings in his position. A reoccurring scene throughout the film is one of Bauby trapped in a diving bell, with the sound of his muffled screams as he sinks slowly to the bottom of an ocean. This visual motif held great significance in the film, on the title of Bauby’s memoir. The metaphor is used to explore Bauby feeling as though he is slowly sinking, like being trapped in a diving bell, having no control over his life or how quickly it decays. This motif intensifies to viewers the little control Bauby has over anything in his life and the hopelessness he feels which is why this motif is included in times of struggle Bauby faces in the film. This is shown when Bauby initially tries the method of communication with his speech therapist, with the seen proceeding with the motif. More positively, a motif including a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon and flying away is also repeated in order to present to the audience the freedom of Bauby’s imagination. Also included in the title, this image represented to the audience how Bauby allows his mind to break out of its cocoon, his body, into the world of his …show more content…
In many scenes, the camera is positioned to reveal Bauby’s first person prospective. A confronting scene where this filming technique is present is when Bauby has his eye sewn shut. As the doctor begins sewing Bauby’s eye, the audience can see, through an extreme close up, the needle and thread, pulling the flesh closed. While this scene is extremely confronting, its purpose is to unsettle the audience, displaying the feelings of horror Bauby is experiencing. Through movements that are out of focus, consisting of unusual framing, we also learn just how little vision Bauby has in different environments, allowing the audience to get a stronger understanding of how much Bauby struggles in his daily endeavours. Beginning the film, a low camera angle is used from Bauby’s perspective, with various doctors looking down on him. This low camera angle portrays to the audience the little power Bauby has at this point in the film along with the overwhelming feelings that he is experiencing. As the film proceeds, we notice that the camera angles become frequently more level with Bauby and other characters are shot to an equal scale from a third person perspective, allowing the audience to understand Bauby is of equal significance to those around him. This is evident when Bauby is sitting with his publishing assistant, with a level camera angle which illustrates to the audience Bauby ha accepted his conditions. As the scene proceeds,
The auditory sensory details Bottoms utilises create an atmosphere of anxiety by choosing words and creating sounds that make the reader feel uneasy, or unable to relax. He stimulates the feeling of suffocation when describing the bulldog’s breathing; “...every fourth or fifth inhale was a panicked, gasping
In the short story “Touching Bottom”, the author Kari Strutt uses a variety of examples of symbolism as a way to emphasize important traits about the narrator to the reader. First of all, Strutt uses the yellow towel as a symbol for the narrator’s feeling of comfort and security. For example, when the narrator opens her eyes for the first time underwater as a young girl “[she] [is] afraid”(124), but when her father greets her with a yellow towel after she surfaces “the fear, what [is] left of it, [evaporates]”(124). This shows the reader how the narrator finds safety in her yellow towel since all of the fear that she has trapped in her body is released when she is wrapped in the yellow towel. Furthermore, Strutt uses the contrast between murky
Neill, Alex. “Empathy and (Film) Fiction.” Philosophy of film and motion pictures : an anthology. Ed. Noel Carrol and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 247-259. Print.
Distinctively visual language and cinematic techniques highlight to the responder the particular literal and metaphorical experiences characters are faced with, within a text. Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Maestro, Don McLean’s song ‘Vincent’ and the intriguing film Australia by Baz Luhrrman, explore the ways in which the human experiences of an individual’s connection to landscape is fundamental in shaping one’s sense of identity, personal growth and development. Composers further explore the realisation that our lives can be enriched by an understanding and appreciation of art as well as a deeper understanding of the importance of love and lust. The depiction of characters is conveyed through distinctively visual images to highlight the subsequent development of courage and resilience leads responders to a deeper understanding of how human experiences can create a sense of individuality.
Golding constructs these images carefully, and at their very centre lies the concept of the beast. In the heart of the island, crawling about in the dark foliage of the jungle, the boys begin to unknowingly personify the beast as the snake. They become overcome with fear of the unseen monster which attacks from all fronts, land and sea, and from which there is no refuge. This broad abstraction of the beast later crystallizes to the reader when it evolves into the Dead Parachutist, who, while being human, has departed, still snared by a "complication of lines." His man-made trap, which will remain long after his earthly body has deteriorated, gives the illusion of life to the deceased soldier. This Dead Parachutist is aptly referred to as a "message from the adult world", as the parachute stands as the clinching metaphor for the hollow and bureaucratic constructs that serve as both the pillars and bars of society. For beyond the wars, the...
Even though it is most commonly known as of the first modern horror films that has made its way on the top ten highest grossing films of all time, Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 film, Jaws, illustrates the unquenchable human desire for purpose and wholeness which advocates that adopting the belief of “anatta” or “no-self” is the way to be liberated from this “fragmented state of unelightenment” (Sluyter 97-98). In the bigger picture, the main antagonist of the film, the shark itself, reflects us as individuals according to Sluyter. To be more specific, the shark is meant to symbolize our “fragmented point of view” we have of our lives and our constant search to remedy our emptiness by “trying to concretize ourselves” with impermanent items
Just by reading the first paragraph your mind is already full of images. For instance in paragraph one he says “I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurney’s outside of the operating rooms.”reading this you get such a vivid image of kids squirming on the gurney’s, it’s kind of terrifying. By incorporating imagery to the essay Baca is not only creating a movie in the reader's mind, but he is also building a type of emotion with his use of word choice.
Gallagher, T. 2002. Senses of Cinema – Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?. [online] Available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ophuls/ [Accessed: 8 Apr 2014].
To the readers, this reveals a further truth within the narrator each time. This repeated image that is described is a signifier to her true trauma. The first mention of the body in the river is a critical signifier in the story.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a script which falls somewhere in the middle of the Classical Design Triangle. It presents moments of causality in a non-linear temporal arrangement. The single protagonist, Jean-Dominique Bauby, is passive due to his affliction yet struggling with both his inner conflict to resolve his life’s choices and the external conflict to regain some semblance of a normal existence. Plot points for this script were not as clearly defined as they are in a script which fully utilizes the Classical Hollywood narrative structure. Some categories of the beat sheet were difficult to realize and therefore my interpretation at some points may be purely subjective and coerced.
The opening paragraph of the story emphasizes the limitations of the individual’s vision of nature. From the beginning, the four characters in the dingy do not know “the colors of the sky,” but all of them know “the colors of the sea.” This opening strongly suggests the symbolic situations in which average peo...
Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren is one of the most intriguing and significant experimental films of the 1940’s. Maya Deren is a surrealist experimental filmmaker who explores themes like yearning, obsession, loss and mortality in her films. In Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren is highly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theory of expressing the realms of the subconscious mind through a dream. Meshes of the Afternoon, is a narration of her own experience with the subconscious mind that draws the viewers to experience the events being played out rather than just merely showing the film. I chose Maya Deren for my research because her intriguing sense gives viewers an enthralling experience by taking them to a different, semi-real world of the subconscious mind. Meshes of the Afternoon not only reveals Deren’s success in a male dominant arena, but also provides a sensational and escalating experience for the spectators.
As an audience we are manipulated from the moment a film begins. In this essay I wish to explore how The Conversation’s use of sound design has directly controlled our perceptions and emotional responses as well as how it can change the meaning of the image. I would also like to discover how the soundtrack guides the audience’s attention with the use of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds.
Since the creation of films, their main goal was to appeal to mass audiences. However, once, the viewer looks past the appearance of films, the viewer realizes that the all-important purpose of films is to serve as a bridge connecting countries, cultures, and languages. This is because if you compare any two films that are from a foreign country or spoken in another language, there is the possibility of a connection between the two because of the fact that they have a universally understanding or interpretation. This is true for the French New Wave films; Contempt and Breathless directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and contemporary Indian films; Earth and Water directed by Deepa Mehta. All four films portray an individual’s role in society using sound and editing.
“Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine, some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.” - David Fincher. David Fincher is the director that I am choosing to homage for a number of reasons. I personally find his movies to be some of the deepest, most well made, and beautiful films in recent memory. However it is Fincher’s take on story telling and filmmaking in general that causes me to admire his films so much. This quote exemplifies that, and is something that I whole-heartedly agree with. I am and have always been extremely opinionated and open about my views on the world and I believe that artists have a responsibility to do what they can with their art to help improve the culture that they are helping to create. In this paper I will try to outline exactly how Fincher creates the masterpieces that he does and what I can take from that and apply to my films.