Film Review

Being a bit of a film geek, I was excited by the fact we got to watch films for contextual studies in such a famous cinema. I was able to see all the films except for the last as it clashed with an interview. The films I enjoyed the most were ‘Une Femme est Une Femme’, ‘The Long Goodbye’, ‘Slacker’, ‘Sherlock Jnr’ and ‘Man with a Video Camera’. Trying to find a link between these vastly differing films was a struggle until I realized it was the simplest of things – they were all odd and quirky in their own way but still correlated with real life that we can relate to or empathise with, without using kitchen-sink realism.A photo I took inside the cinema

‘Slacker’, directed by Richard Linklater follows a range of different characters over a day. Every day we're bombarded by strangers who we pass in the street but mean nothing to us, just another face, and in their life it's the other way round, but this film shows how everyone has a life and somewhere to go or something to do. ‘Slacker’ completely eliminates the stereotypical main character. There are no heroes or villains, just people with opinions going about their everyday life, as seen in the opening sequence starring the director himself, . I also liked how it all flowed. Often, instead of cutting straight to an entirely different person, the camera would cling onto a passer-by and follow them until it hitched onto another person passing by them.

I found the conversations between most of the characters quite interesting but at some parts during the film, especially towards the end, it got a bit tedious. Film critic Vincent Canby’s review for the New York Times in 1991 also mentions the wearisomeness, ‘after a while, a certain monotony sets in…A terrible transformation occurs: the unusual begins to look numbingly normal.’ This was the shared opinion of the majority of my peers too, but I think that it was Linklater’s intention. Everyday life isn't interesting and intriguing all the time. There are always boring moments and ‘Slacker’ shows exactly that.

A scene from 'Slacker', source.

Whilst Linklater’s characters and mini storylines portray a sense of reality people can relate to, it’s the camera work in ‘The Long Goodbye’ that achieves this outcome. One example is the scene where Phillip Marlowe and Eileen Wade are talking to each other by the window. A scene from 'The Long Goodbye', source.

For the majority of the scene, their faces are in the foreground and fill up most of the frame. Then, still with their faces in shot, you see Wade’s husband stumble into the sea, Marlowe only noticing when we, the audience, notice. Only seeing and knowing what is going on once Marlowe finds out, allows the audience to empathize with his character. As in real life, we can’t predict exactly what will happen, we only know once it happens. A similar idea is used in ‘Black Swan’ where, throughout the film, the camera follows the main character directly behind her, with the back of her head and shoulders filling most of the frame, as seen at 0.40 in this trailer; .This results in the rest of the scene being revealed to the audience only once it is revealed to the character, like with Marlowe in ‘The Long Goodbye’.