Film Technique Stephen Durbin

Bunny

            The short film Bunny was centered around life, death and the afterlife. The film opens with a shot of a bluish light, and a darker object floating towards it, then panning down to an elderly female bunny baking in her kitchen. The bunny is then distracted by a moth that is flying into her light repeatedly, and as most people know moths die when they are around a hot light for too much time. This ends up being a foreshadowing of what is to occur to the bunny. The moth is symbolizing the bunny and the light is symbolizing death, and that it is time for the bunny to pass into the afterlife. She then knocks the moth into a picture off the wall, which she then proceeds to be angry and picks up the picture, revealing that the wall behind it was a different color, symbolizing that the picture had been there for quite some time. The picture seems to be of her and her husband, a long time ago before he passed away. She then puts the picture back and starts to prepare her cake again, possibly symbolizing that she is preparing herself for death.

            Moments later, the moth comes back into the house and immediately begins to bother her and go towards the light. She then becomes very angry at the moth, chasing it around until it finally falls into her cake batter, she then stirs the batter quickly and throws the batter into the oven. She then starts a timer and falls asleep in her chair. She is woken by a blue light coming from the oven, so she goes to investigate what is going on. She then climbs into the oven, and then begins to fly upwards, with moths around her all going to the blue light. This symbolizes that it was her time to go, and she followed the light to heaven to be with her late husband. Just as the cake batter made a transformation from one state to another, she also made a transformation of states, from life to death, and to the afterlife.

Harold and Maude

            In the movie Harold and Maude, there is a mother and son (Harold) and the film is about the relationship between the two of them. They do not have the greatest relationship because Harold wants to be loved and get attention from his mother, but she doesn’t give it to him. The mother constantly tries to set Harold up on dates but he always plays suicidal pranks to scare the girls off. In one scene, Harold’s mother is talking to a date she got for Harold, and in the background of the shot, we see Harold set fire to himself. The girl immediately yells Harold and to her surprise, Harold is standing right behind her, alive and unburnt. The girl, freaked out, runs out of the house. We then see a shot of Harold next to his mother, from a low angle. Harold turns to the camera, and smirks as if he is showing how proud he is of himself and saying ‘did you see that?’. Meanwhile, Harold’s mother seems to look at him in disgust, and looks down and up his body, as if she her sizing him up like they were going to fight. Harold then turns back to his mother, raising his head in confidence as he does, and then sees his mother and his smirk fades quickly.

            Later in the film, we move to a scene when Maude is teaching Harold about life and death. Harold is much more interested in death rather than life. Maude talks more on life, and about living the best life Harold can. She asks him what flower he would be in a field of flowers and Harold responds “I don’t know... one of these, because they’re all alike”. At first the camera angle is far away showing the field of flowers where all the flowers look the same. Then the camera zooms into the field, and you can see each individual flower, showing that each one is different. Maude then talks about how every flower is different just like every person is different. The camera is then on Harold and Maude in a graveyard, which is close up. You see the few individual graves around them symbolizing each individual person there but with all the same gravestone. The camera then slowly zooms away showing a massive field of white, identical tombstones. This is to symbolize what Maude is saying about people. From a distance, we may all look the same, but when you look up close we are all so different in every way possible.

Paris, Texas

Paris, Texas begins with a man in the desert wandering around aimlessly with a water jug. As he takes the last drops from the bottle, we see his view of the land, and we see nothing but desert for miles and miles, symbolizing he has a long way to go on his journey. The next scene opens up with Travis walking along power lines when his brother drives up and finds him. When his brother approaches him, behind Travis is a rocky mountain, and behind Walter there is a grassy smooth mountain. When Walter tells Travis to get into the car, Travis keeps glancing at the telephone lines he was following. This is a symbol of the lack of communication he giving his brother.

            Communication is seem as a symbol many times during this film, along with travel. In one scene, Travis leaves the hotel he is staying at with Walter. When Walter finds him Travis is walking along a railroad track. Later, he is sitting outside with all the shoes from Walters house. He is also looking with binoculars at a nearby airport at the planes. Both the shoes and the planes are symbolizing travel in this scene. Travis always seems like he has somewhere to be and some place to travel to, yet he does not know where.

            The next scene, Travis is on the move again, this time he is walking over a very big bridge over top of a freeway. There is a voice that is yelling on the bridge, and Travis moves towards it. The man seems to be trying to communicate with the cars below him, but the communication is not reaching the people in the cars, who are all traveling on the freeway.

            Travis begins to get better at communication. He talks to his son and decides to go on a road trip with him. Travis stops to eat with his son, but he does so on the side of the freeway. This is an odd place to communicate with his son, but it seems to work for Travis. Travis finally reaches where he is going, which is a brothel that his wife works at. He goes there to communicate with his wife through a two-way mirror. Travis can see her and hear her, but she can only hear him. It is ironic because she says to him that she understands its difficult to talk to strangers, when in fact they are not strangers at all. When Travis revisits her, she finds out who he is. He has her turn off the light in her room so that she can see him in his room. The images of their faces line up in the mirror so it seems that they are both on his face. Travis then tells her where their son is and she kneels down, telling him how she feels guilty that she didn’t raise him because she didn’t think she could.

Pink Floyd

            Pink Floyd showed visuals of animated and real video to capture the destruction and devastation of war and on the societal affect. There were many symbols throughout the film, including a cross showing up multiple times. Another scene showed school kids on a conveyer belt, symbolizing that we are not being taught to think for ourselves in the school system, but rather being “built” or “manufactured” to think and act a certain way. This causes the viewer to think about themselves and if they were “manufactured” to be a certain way.