No Country For Old Men Editing Analysis

Final Paper – No Country For Old Men

Firstly, the title of the film I used is No Country For Old Men, this title is acquired from the beginning line from the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats’ famous poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The title is self-explanatory, but as I was watching this film the title increased in depth more and more, because the end of the film is summarized in the five words that make up the title. Especially the final scene where Tommy Lee Jones’s old character Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is sitting and discussing his dream with his wife Loretta Bell, played by Tess Harper. The Coen brothers (Joel Coen Jesse Coen) directed this film and they did a phenomenal job. The story takes place in 1980 West Texas’s desert countryside as a welder man

The editing styles can be either categorized into the intrusive editing style or the interpretive editing style. The editing style used in this film is classical cutting, which allowed the directors to inflect their narrative and point of view of this intense Western sequences. This editing style shows distinctions and prominence in the final product, making it gorgeous and enriched with quality. The sequence starts when Chigurh goes to the Texaco gas station and fills up the car and gets some snacks, there are mostly crosscutting back and forth between this one scene, with different angles. The scene consists of Chigurh and the store clerk, talking to each other trying to pass the time, the clerk gets the vibe that this is not a peaceful customer, which brings trouble with him. So they talk back and fourth to pass the time, Chigurh’s lines are very intimating and insulting, because the audience are still getting introduced to his character, so this scene cemented his character and the editing helped greatly with that. For example when Chigurh chocked after the clerk told him that this place is his wife’s father’s, Chigurh told the clerk that he married into the gas station that it is technically not his, the clerk tried to deviated for the insult, but Chigurh kept telling him that he did marry into the place, until the clerk gave in and admitted that indeed he did merry into it. This editing sequence shows how persistent and serious Chigurh is and that everything is either black or white, you can’t sugarcoat anything with his character, it’s just the way it is. The shots are over the shoulder shots, the way those shots are cut and edited together is amazing, the scene flows smoothly because of that, also there’s an icebreaker part of the scene that’s shot in a Bird’s-eye view of the snack wrapper, which I thought was the Coen brothers use of dark humor due to the intensity of the rest