Screening Report

Screening Report

Paris Texas – Lighting

In the film Paris, Texas, the use of lighting played a very significant role in the viewer’s experience. The most significant use of lighting is in the very famous scene when Travis tells the story of his past for the first time to his estranged wife. The use of lighting is unbelievable in multiple different ways and plays with the perspective and emotion of this powerful scene. It is set at a striptease club where Travis’s wife, Jane, works in Houston, Texas. Travis is sitting in a small dark room with a telephone and has a view through a one way mirror where a bright room and wife are shownon the other side. When Travis picks up the phone to address his wife, he is facing away from the room and is in the dark while his wife is illuminated in the room behind him. Travis begins to talk and starts to tell the story of him and his wife and how they came to be separated. We learn that Travis was an alcoholic and a terrible husband who has a very sinful past. The lighting symbolized this scene perfectly, showing a dark man with a dark past repenting to his wife who is lit up in an almost angelic fashion. The darkness Travis is in ads to the seriousness of the situation.

Once Travis’s story is told, the camera view flips to inside the other room, facing the one sided mirror we cannot see through. Once Jane begins to talk she turns off her light in order to see Travis’s silhouette appear in the mirror. The lighting is flipped and now the viewer sees Travis in the light. This is very significant because as the viewer learns Jane was not perfect in the past either, and they both have a dark past. With Jane’s light turning off, Travis’s face lights up and Jane and the viewer can now see her from the other side. In my opinion, the lighting shows that Travis has finally repented for his past actions and has come out of the darkness.

The lighting make this scene one of the most powerful I have ever seen.

La Jetée - Rate

In the film La Jetée, the rate of the film stood out to me. A typical sound film is shot at a frame rate of 24 frames per second as stated in the glossary of terms. However, many of the images La Jetée still images lasted much longer than this amount of time. This made many of the images burn longer in my memory, and caused the film to be more slowly paced. This was very interesting to me because I have never seen a film that is told through still images. It is almost as if I was being told a story through an extended slideshow. What is truly makes the static images intriguing though is the theme emphasis on time and memory in this film.

This film tells the story of a prisoner who is sent back and forth before and after World War III to stop the world’s demise. He is haunted by an image from