Hollywood studio style. Use this week’s films.
I watched Casablanca (1942), with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It has been a few decades since I last saw Casablanca, I tried to pay attention to the small details of filming, angles, panning and editing along with watch the lighting, of the Mise en scene.
The opening introduction to the movies shows a boat and other modes of transportation overlaying a map drawing the audience to another place and time and leaving the audience on a busy street in Casablanca. We are seeing that foreigners are mingled in with the locals and the police are moving in on a foreigner in particular. When he isn’t able to show his papers he runs, the police shoot him in the back. The camera follows the police
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I felt that many of the scenes cut or faded into the next extremely well or seamlessly. Like the first scenes at Rick’s Café Americana, showing us all of the foreigners talking of their dilemmas to leave Casablanca. We understand that all of these conversation are taking place at the same time. Then cutting to Rick’s hand signing the check informs the audience that he is the owner and an important character in the movie. All of the editing happened so seamlessly that it brings the audience into the scene without noticing the “shifts in position and angle” without our even realizing that we were becoming part of the scene (Sikov, 2013). The camera and editing styles help us to identify with the characters in the scenes.
The point of view editing was used by Alfred Hitchcock in Rear Window (1954), it is a technique using a series of three separate shots, one of the character looking off screen, a point of view shot showing what they see, and a reaction shot of the character reacting to what they see (Belton, 2013). Lastly, I had forgotten that Humphrey Bogart was a very handsome man and that the film made his skin look very smooth for a man. I like the way that Bogart’s face for the majority of the movie was shown with shadowing on it. It gave the character Rick an air of mystery about