This week, I will be writing about Dark City (1998) and I will link it to French Impressionist cinema. The reason I wrote this is for the Film Studies (UJMB2083) assignment.



Dark City, 
was a drama and thriller film about a man named John Murdoch. Waking up in a hotel with a dead body and found himself being wanted for a series of murder, John has could not remember any of it, except the Shell Beach postcard he got in his pocket. He then found himself chase by a group of strange bald men in suits that people call the Strangers. The strangers is the one group that controls the whole city, they are these alien creatures that shuffle people's memory letting them have other people's memory and forget everything including daytime. The movie is about John finding ways to remember his past, together with the scientist that helped the aliens, it is his job to save the people in Dark City and defeat the aliens that captured them. The film features mostly dark scenes as the city does not have daytime.

French Impressionist, 
it is also called the first Avant-Grande or narrative Avant-Grande, the term was commonly applied to a group of French filmmakers in 1920s. The periodization of this film movement is split into 3 periods of time, Pictoralism (1918) which is films that manipulated trough camerawork, mise-en-scene, and optical devices, Montage (1923) which is the popular use of rhythmic and fast-paced editing, and the last period which is Diffusion (1926), other stylistic and formal modes started to appear in films.

David Bordwell's family resemblance model,
which is to indicate films that used the French Impressionist method.
That include Camerawork, Mise-en-scene, Optical devices, and Characteristic editing patterns.

Camerawork includes camera distance which is close up, camera angle which is high or low, and camera movement. Mise-en-scene includes the lighting, the decorations and the arrangement or movement of figures in space.


Dark City is a French Impressionist film.
As we can see, there are several elements that support this statement. The clever use of low key lights in this dark visual film has carried out high contrast visuals that then created the effect and sense of mystery to the audience. For example, when John was talking to the doctor that was lying down on the floor because John just used his powers to pushed him, it sent out a feeling of John is feeling nervous and confused when talking to the doctor. Also, when the Strangers' hideout were even darker, there is only a feel lighting on the walls, the ceiling, and the floor, it creates a mysterious and horror mood to the place and the characters in the hideout. Moving on, there are many shots with high and low camera angles, for example when John saw the Shell Beach sign and the camera immediately turned up to show the height of the sign. Also, when the moment the Strangers was talking, the camera angle is very low and far to show how enormous the hideout and amount of the group of people are. The mise-en-scene used are gothic and stylized, giving the feeling of uneasy to the audience, there is also many shots that use single source lighting, which enhanced the ambiance of the scenes in this film.

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This week our lecturer let us write about any movie. So, I'm choosing one of my favourite movie Her (2013) directed by Spike Jonze. I am choosing this because it was one of the most mind bottling postmodern movies. Despite there is no specific aspect of how we need to write our weekly journal, I will be talking about the messages carried out by this movie, and how it is going to relate to the society in the coming future.



Plot

If you are not familiar with this movie, I will talk about the overall plot of this movie. So it starts off with a man named Theodore who writes love letters for people as his job. His life was so plain, have a few friends and he is going to get divorced by his wife. One night he stumbled upon an introduction booth of a new operating system, this new operating system is like no other, it is the world's first artificial intelligence operating system. And after he set it up, he meets with an artificial intelligence female voice called Samantha. And the story goes on when Samantha evolves and the whole story goes complicated.



Meaning of the Movie

Postmodern movies, they all have a meaning behind why the movie was created, what do they want people to understand. Nonetheless, Her the movie has a deep message within it, it shows how much a man would fall for someone or something even that it is not human. It lets us question what is the limit of love, and how much does it need to consider as love. From the movie, there are almost all the emotional interactions an ordinary couple would do, looking from the perspective of the man, he just wants to find someone to understands him, and Samantha is the right partner. Even if she is living on the internet, this does not stop them from loving. Maybe she was programmed to be that way, and he blindly falls for her knowing that they are two forms of organisms.

It also let us question the issue of being too technology dependent, at the extend that we no longer need physical interaction with other people to feel love. Are we going too far? Should we change some things to connect the human world back to how it was? Will it be safe for our human existance if this kind of relationship happens? These are the questions audiences will ask after watching the movie, I think it will have everyone waking up from this attachment of mobile phones and digital devices. Humans should have more interaction with the world, and the technology advancement should focus on other parts like curing diseaces and saving people.


Future representation

The movie does not show how the world would be in next twenty years I assumed, mainly because it focused on how the human-internet relationship was carried out. Most of the shots were focused on the man Theodore himself and not much on other characters, this puts the viewers in his shoes, letting us feel what he was feeling. Most of the scenes were softly filtered with warm color grading, to enhance the feeling of affection and how much he actually feels about love. The staging were simple, using locations with minimalistic design, usually how society perceived the future.


Impressions

I really like the way it blends sci-fi with romance, it wasn't the ordinary movie one could find, the way the film was shot are quite unique. I recommend people who like sci-fi movies and romance movies to watch, because this is quite a good movie.