Monday 11 January 2016

Sophie's textual analysis of "The Usual Suspects"

The Usual Suspects

This clip starts off with a close up shot of matches, lighting up a small area of the frame, which showed the characters dark, black clothing and had low key lighting. It also started with high pitched music, which included a lot of violins. This made the ambience of the beginning very mysterious and eerie. At this point, the editing is slow pace which makes the cuts from shot to shot join nicely, this creates suspense because it takes a while for you to understand whats happening or whats going to happen. The clip then leads to a medium shot of hands lighting a bunch of matches, the room is filled with silence but you can hear a foley sound of matches lighting. This makes you wonder what this character is going to do with so many matches. There is then a medium long shot of the character sitting on the ground. Around him, there are a lot of props; ropes and wooden boxes. The lighting in this scene is rather dark, until the character purposely drops his matches on a puddle of fuel, which creates flames that trails around the room at an extreme close up, past a dead person, they use a tracking shot to film this sequence so you can see where the fire leads to. The next shot is a long shot, we first of all see liquid that stops the fire spreading and then it tilts up at the second character in this opening, stopping just before we can see his head, which creates fear and mystery from the audience. The camera then continues to follow this second character down the stairs at a long shot. The lighting of this scene is very dark, and the characters clothes are dark too. We start to hear very creepy music, as well as the footsteps of this man, which shows he may do something bad as the loud footsteps draws attention to him. The next shot is a medium shot, of the second characters neck down to his waist, you see him light up a lighter which then he lights up a cigarette, revealing his identity to the first character. This scares the audience because we can't actually see him even though the other character can, and his shocked reaction makes us very unsure about this unknown person. The music is very quite but very tense in the back ground, this creates suspense. The two characters then exchange very little dialogue, discussing how the character that is sitting on the floor feels. The lighting of this shot is still very low key lighting and the characters both have dark clothes on, this shot is a medium shot of the first character. The other character then pulls out a gun, which we see in a close up shot to create tension, he the says "are you ready?" which then leads to the other character asking what time it is, this creates confusion as the audience doesn't know what they are actually talking about. The second character steps forward in this next shot, it is a medium shot, the audience can only see his dark clothes and the gun pointing at the other character. The volume of the creepy music goes up and creates a lot of suspense within the audience. The editing suddenly goes quick pace and all we can see is a boat, in the dark, as we hear too gun shots. This is off-screen sound which makes the audience shocked and confused as to whether he was actually shot or not. This  is a very good thriller opening as it is very tense, confusing and really keeps the audience at the edge of their seats wondering what is going to happen next.

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