Although a composer’s choices about the type of moving image and its features are usually deliberate, they don’t necessarily convey the same meaning to all viewers in all contexts. They may not work the way the composer intended, or they may carry additional meanings the composer didn’t anticipate.
Read an excerpt from student writer LeShawn Carter’s analysis of a theme in American Beauty, a full-length film he viewed in an introduction to film study course. Carter is careful to consider the director’s technical choices and composition in his analysis of the scene.
Sam Mendes’s American Beauty has no shortage of scenes in which the camera work and mise-en-scène suggest that the characters are trapped. Lester Burnham is shown, for example, encased in window and door frames and is tightly framed by the camera. One scene in which the eye seems to get a break is the plastic bag scene, which we’re supposed to see as beauty and perhaps freedom as we watch a plastic bag dance around in the breeze. The bag seems to move freely, but in fact the bag is not free at all. Mendes shoots the scene so that the bag is still constrained by the wind and the wall. It tries to escape but is pulled back into the shot again and again—reinforcing the theme.
As you develop an interpretation about the meaning of a video, an animation, or a film, be sure to ask questions about the genre or type of moving image, its features, and the purpose and audience for which the text was composed.