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.

(550 words)