Textual Analysis: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

 

Within this Blog Post I will be analysing selected screen shots from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The first screen shot comes seconds into the opening, introducing the director, David Fincher. The shot is of a black sea, representing the descent into shame, a sea of troubles, a natural, unstoppable, inevitable force.
The black hue to the entire opening gives a negative undertone, the colourless opening revealing the conventions of horror, murder, death and evil. Key themes within this film.
The words 'DAVID FINCHER' are capitalised, larger to the rest of the title, giving David Fincher primary credit for the film, as he is the director and famous for  a lot of different films the film wants to make clear that this is a David Fincher film.

There is light at the top of the screen, off screen but the source is unidentifiable. White being a symbol of Hope, but, as we can see, the black tone is consuming all other colour within this opening.

 
 


The second screen shot is of the title of the film, even this is getting overrun by the oil, this domination of oil is a theme throughout this opening that is an allusion to crime, crime is everywhere in the world, crime is destroying everything also, as this is a crime thriller, my theory is believable and relatable.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an ambiguous title as we are unaware of this girl, we assume she is integral to the plot, maybe the main character, or victim. As this is the first time we are made aware of the film's title (apart from prior knowledge) it is important that representations and symbolisations are instant. The text is of white again, and it is being overlapped by the black oil, this infers to me that not only the film is full of crime, but maybe The Girl gets involved within crime also.



Even though the theme is the same, following this liquid, this is an entirely different meaning, before it was destroying structures, now it is running through a keyboard like a rives, an infestation of intelligence and at the professional work place, crime is infiltrating the online area also, not only physical crime but mental crime, crime involving knowledge and data.
As this is a change in concept, it is highlighting all the different areas where crime is involved, and there's a lot of them, shown by the plethora of situations involving this oil, this plague.
This is the first hint to location I receive as the keyboard is in English, and therefore, it singles it down to Europe or North America. I would assume Europe due to David Fincher being announced as the director.

The final screen shot is of a face being covered in oil and then a match being dropped into their eye, a visually discordant sequence, definitely. This highlights the realism of violence within the film and of society, the eye is a replication of the world, and the world is getting destroyed with the plague of oil and fire.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, according to my interpretation of the opening 5 screen shots is of crime throughout the world.

 The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, to conclude, utilises colour and visually discordant sequences in order to create certain representations effectively to its desired destination, I think this destination was a foreshadowing of the narrative in the film, which is a representation of society.

New Technologies: Voki

I decided to research into other modes of communication so when I have written my evaluation I can use technologies to convey the messages. We will end up using a plethora of different technologies, for example: Voice Over
On Camera
Prezi
and Voki
I quickly tested Voki out and create a character with a little message. I messed around with some of the special features and made a funny little persona.

Preproduction: Lighting Practice

We was given the Nikon DSLR to shoot pictures and videos of different lighting in preparation for our thriller opening. We was also allowed to play around with a few different lenses, we managed to experiment and create some original, interesting shots. We was able to adjust lighting and focus to make professional looking photos with different atmospheres.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We then improvised using different coloured folders; pink, blue and yellow to create different ambiences and was able to change the potential genres, for example; fantasy, horror and parody. This was extremely interesting as we acquired the ability to physically affect the mise-en-scene with props.

 

This is the equipment we used, a bright flash light and coloured folders. By getting practice with this equipment we are allowing ourselves to, in effect, throw ourselves into shooting with enough practice to create our desired effects.

 

David Lynch: Thriller Director

David Lynch

 David Lynch is the notorious American film director of films such as; Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet. Films with more sick and violent themes, definitely not family films, his films are extremely disturbing, for example his biographical film named The Elephant Man.

The best way to describe him or his works are as an absurdist, his work is very surreal.

Motifs in Lynch's films: Leading film critics Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas", if you've ever watched one of his films you will understand what we mean, Blue Velvet is a surreal film that you won't understand unless you think like David Lynch.

Even though he is an American film director, his films are influenced by a lot of European film directors, such as, Fellini and Tati, however he was influenced by Stanley Kubrick a lot and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

As we are shooting a thriller opening, I will study a lot of Lynch's movies, especially the openings, and how they convey messages.

Planning: Storyboards

A key part of Preproduction is storyboarding our Thriller Opening.

This helped us greatly as it allows us to visualise the scenes and shots we are going to do, I am happy with the visualisation we have with these storyboards.

Filmmaking: Initial Ideas

As we are creating the opening to a Thriller, we thought it would be best to create a brainstorm of ideas, it was interesting to find out what 'Thriller' meant to each of us, when talking about Thrillers to one of us it meant Silence of the Lambs and Se7en and to another member of our group a Thriller was more like Primal Fear and Memento. We discovered sub-genres and let them influence our decisions and ideas; Psychological and Crime Thrillers primarily. When thinking about our plot a plethora of narrative devices were flying through my head, Plot Twists and Deus Ex-Machinimas but we eventually settled on making it very implicit attacking our viewers phobias and fears of darkness, heights and insects.

 

The Kuleshov Effect

"The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s.It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation." - Wikipedia

Me, Emma and Jake attempted to recreate this effect within the school premises as it would be important to understand the effect of cutaways to maximum capacity to prepare us ultimately for our AS Thriller Piece.




Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet Filmmaker who was originally involved with the dissection of the basics of filmmaking, he researched the dissection of film for juxtaposition and in consequence revolutionised the assembly of film.

"In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope, Alfred Hitchcock called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of film.” Sir Hitchcock says that if a close-up of a man smiling is cut with a shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed as “kindly” and “sympathetic.” By the same token, if the same shot of the smiling man is cut with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as “dirty.”" - Elements of Cinema