Contemporary Film Analysis: You, The Living

Objective:

The review will emphasize on how the movie communicates cinematically by analyzing the specific formal techniques on the film’s use of camera movements, mise en scene, editing, colour, sound and music as well as the cinematography and performance of the actors. What is a contemporary film?

A movie created in the Contemporary Period (1980 to the present) is called a contemporary film. The predominant style of the period is described as postmodern because many contemporary films are ahistorical, apolitical, inter-textual, and not that attached to the standards of a single culture or genre (Sparknotes 2015).

There are different film genres including action, adventure, drama, horror, Westerns, comedy, and more. You, The Living’s genre

The first one is Songs from the Second Floor and the third, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.

Analysis of the Film

You, The Living is set in the Swedish city of Lethe. The interiors were designed to reflect a 1950’s vibe which according to Roy Andersson, was how Sweden looked like when he was eleven years old. The houses was built and inspired by the German architecture of the 1930’s, and coming from the working-class stock, that’s what Andersson is comfortable with (Clarke 2008). He films in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, restaurants, offices, a bar, a barbershop, a courtyard, and a bus stop under the rain – all of these were created on a set.

Evaluating the mise-en-scène or the organization of everything that shows in the framing” (The Elements of Cinema 2014), Andersson is not just a director but a talented artist as well. You can see the similarity in the huge, extravagantly made sets and the bizarre, hazy locations. He uses high key lighting with little shadow. The backgrounds are lit uniformly, thus shadows are almost absent from his film. By doing so, the characters are always illumined and presented for