New York Stories: Life Lesson And The Mystery Train

Many cinematic experts, such as the famous director, Martin Scorsese in his essay, “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,” stressed on the importance of being a visual literate to fully understand and truly experience the story being told on a screen through an intricately designed film. Not only does understanding the cultural, historical, and technical significance of film language help one enhance their visual experience when watching a movie, but also helps in understanding how to create better films, and to genuinely appreciate the work put together by a team of directors, producers, writers, actors, etc., in the universal tongue of cinema. This essay explores the role of cinema as a language and discusses how different

This time transition is evident in both the movies, Martin Scorsese’s “New York Stories: Life Lessons” and Jim Jarmusch’s “The Mystery Train.” In “New York Stories: Life Lessons” the viewer experiences Lionel and Paulette’s relationship unwind over time, and the director makes that possible through the proper use of transitioning by making the right cuts. Moreover, in “The Mystery Train,” although the “time period” is the same day, the transition cuts help the audience transition themselves from one story to the next while tying them together as incidents happening

From taking multiple, long filmed, wide angle shots, directors began to evolve into complex and intricate visual narratives of the protagonists. This allowed the directors to use close-ups and integrate various camera angles that gave a different perspective to the scene and insinuated a different meaning to the shot other than just the apparent meaning. This made certain shot compositions “ring a bell” and began to speak to each individual viewer differently, in a completely unique way, thus breathing life into each frame and giving it its language. For example, in “New York Stories: Life Lessons” the shots of Paulette are always taken in a way in which Lionel seems to be standing on a lower ground, looking up towards Paulette. For a regular viewer, this might not be of much significance, but for those who analyze the “cinematic” aspect of a film can’t help but notice how such a shot signifies Lionel’s reverence for