Today in the lecture we learnt about Juxtaposition. The definition
of Juxtaposition is;
‘In a film, the contiguous positioning of either two images, characters, objects, or two scenes in sequence, in order to compare and contrast them, or establish a relationship between them; see also sequence, symmetry, and composition.’
From what was discussed in class and what I have seen on
films and T.V. shows, the use of juxtaposition is quite heavy and very
impactful. Some good examples of juxtaposition are;
The Baptism Scene from ‘The
Godfather ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfbYp9oaIT8
A very similar scene in ‘Breaking
Bad’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYcOl33-mI0
Both of the clips above have a very strong use of sound. For example in ‘The Godfather’ as the action build up so does the organ in the background.
In Breaking Bad the music adds adds to the juxtaposition as it is happy
uplifting music and the pictures show are of brutal prison murders.
Lev Kuleshov, a Soviet filmmaker, was among the first to
dissect the effects of juxtaposition. Through his experiments and
research, Kuleshov discovered that depending on how shots are assembled the
audience will attach a specific meaning or emotion to it.
In his experiment, Kuleshov cut the shot of an actor with
shots of three different subjects: a girl in a coffin, a hot plate of
soup, and a pretty woman lying in a couch. The footage of the actor was the
same expressionless gaze. Yet the audience raved his performance, saying first
he looked sad, then hungry, then lustful.
In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope,
Alfred Hitchcock called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of
film.” Sir Hitchcock says that if a close-up of a man smiling is cut with a
shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed as “kindly” and
“sympathetic.” By the same token, if the same shot of the smiling man is cut
with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as “dirty.”
Both these examples further illustrate the power of editors
as storytellers. The data gathered with the Kuleshove Experiment were heavily
used by Russian filmmakers, especially in respect to the Soviet Montage.
Eventually, this became commonplace.
The findings from the Kuleshov Effect have deeply affected
how filmmakers shoot and edit their movies.
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