In class today, we began watching the film No Country for Old Men, and were given the task to keep MES in the back of our minds as we watched. Over the next four days, including today, students need to create a sentence per day regarding the MES choices made throughout the film. If you miss a day of the movie, you can easily catch up by watching on Netflix or setting up a meeting with Mr. Rivers. In addition to a sentence, we need to relate the choices to the narrative elements of the film. In my case, my sentence for today was: "Deep focus is used in the scene where the hunter follows a blood trail to the site of what looks to be a drug deal gone wrong, ending in a shootout, making sure to show all of the details, which could represent the conflict of the movie in a way that possibly revolves around a murderer or gang conflict." The hunter strolls along a crime scene, and the camera zooms out to capture the entirety of the disaster. This allows the audience to grasp how devastating the situation was by showing the bloodshed of the scene as well as the busted cars and dead bodies. There were also a stash of drugs in a car with a man begging for water, but when the hunter returned with water, the man had been shot. This is obviously part of the conflict because a murder or gang attack has taken place.
Now that mise-en-scene is pretty deep in our minds, I've began to notice it outside of the classroom. For example, I have been watching Breaking Bad(mainly because of how suspenseful that first scene we analyzed was) and I see it all the time in there. For example, the show can deal with drugs a lot of the time, and the same deep focus is seen quite often throughout the series. Countless times, people walk away from a building, and the entire environment is captured to ensure that the explosion and the effect it had on the nearby people was captured.
Great description of the learning that took place in our class today. Happy to see your specific sentence as the evidence of your learning. Effective details and a nice tone that blends the casual tone of a blog with the academic language of a senior English class. Nice work. The extension is another great opportunity, and I love that you've been getting into Breaking Bad, but think about how you can focus that example. Rather than generalize a single sentence to include several hours of film, think about how you can use an image or scene to generate a specific evaluation of mise-en-scene's functions.
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