Today, we learned about the ton of aspects of a movie’s mis-en-scene. We learned that we could use the many details in a film to argue our interpretation of it. There are way too many aspects for me to go into with this blog because we looked at so many aspects and we looked at a lot of different film clips from Manhattan to show how these aspects were employed, such as the camera choice of the movie, the lighting, different things in the background.

One that interested me the most was that there are so many little details that a director puts into a movie that the audience bypasses. One example of this is the separation of characters in scenes by very thin lines in the background that appear between them. This was seen in Manhattan when Mary and Yale were at the mall and you can see the very fine line separating them, while in the apartment scene with Issac and Mary they were separated by entire rooms. These details foreshadowed the distance in their relationships and showed who would end up being together in the end.

Important lighting was shown in the a scene in his Issac’s old apartment where there is a light shining directly on Tracy while the rest of the scene is dark, which shows her importance and foreshadow them being together. The movie was filmed in cinemascope in order to get the whole view of Manhattan’s skyline and emphasize the city’s beauty and importance. What really interested me too and it was something that I would have never picked up on was the fact that in every scene, the characters are off center to be symbolic of certain things. This is a employed a lot in Woody Allen movies. For example, the scene with Yale and his wife, is shot with them off center which symbolizes their off balance relationship and their off balance morals.