Mystery & Suspense in The Lodger
You can only get the Suspense element going by giving the audience information.—Alfred Hitchcock
Suspense, Hitch always insisted, was fundamentally different from Mystery. Because the press so often mislabeled his movies as Mysteries, he took more than one occasion to get specific about the difference. The most famous of these was in [...]
Mise-en-scene & Concentrated Exposition in John Huston’s
In This Our Life
1942′s In This Our Life has become a footnote in John Huston‘s esteemed filmography. Coming after the knock-down drag-out success of his first film, The Maltese Falcon—its powerful, and historically unusual, portrayal of institutional racism is electrifying, but it is this subplot alone that garners any and all critical affection the film receives.
This last, [...]
Spotlight on—the use of Setting in John Carpenter’s The Fog
What is Setting?
Setting consists of three elements: places, props, and times. Visually, it’s the where, when, and what of a story, and it’s one of the most powerful aspects of mise-en-scene.
The human being is all-important in the theatre. The drama on the screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, [...]
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer—John McNaughton—1986
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a film of profound emotional impact. It takes subject matter familiar to the movies—the psychosexual killer—makes it wholly its own, and it does this on the tail end of the biggest wave of cinematic Psychomania in history. Formally it is masterful in its deployment of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and [...]
Team Fortress 2—Valve Corporation—2007
The bulk of my playing experience has been on the XBOX 360—the system of Team Fortress 2‘s origin. However, the screenshots in this article are primarily culled from the Mac version (on Steam). I only took pictures of levels/characters that are included in The Orange Box, and the only noticeable difference is the “press F5 to save this [...]
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