The following extracts were from a piece of work handed in on Monday 12 November to Andrea. We were required to watch a chosen film, in this case "The Shawshank Redemption", and analyse it in the form of a mise-en-scene, a moving image and a deconstruction.
This was the first piece of work I had completed for two years since leaving school, and so I found it a little difficult to get my thoughts and feelings onto a laptop screen again. However, due to my love of the film and wanting to do it justice, I managed to pump out over 4000 words of what I hope, is sensible text.
This was the first piece of work I had completed for two years since leaving school, and so I found it a little difficult to get my thoughts and feelings onto a laptop screen again. However, due to my love of the film and wanting to do it justice, I managed to pump out over 4000 words of what I hope, is sensible text.
The Shawshank Redemption from a preferred reading, explores many key tropes; imprisonment, friendship, hierarchy, homosexuality, anonymity, class and divide, institutionalism, punishment and the rights of freedom. The film centres around the lives of a group of prisoners, meaning the majority of the scenes are filmed in similar surroundings. However, the audience are aware that ten years pass from the beginning to the end of the film, and use this time to empathise with three main characters and their adventures – Red (Freeman), Brookes (Whitmore) and Dufresne (Burton).
In order to explore how the director uses camera codes to allow the audience to follow the diegesis and understand the linearity of cause and effect, both a frozen image and moving image will be evaluated.
The chosen mise-en-scene appears at the beginning of the film (0:08:52).
The medium close-up shot is in soft focus, meaning the audience are attentive to the two characters at the fore front – an officer and a newly arrived prisoner. As the shot tracks down the line of men and we arrive at the front, it is as if the audience are witnessing the action from their own point of view as a person. We are on the same eye level as the characters, and this somewhat normalises the action. The medium close-up allows us to see into the background of the shot, even if it is a little out of focus. It means the audience can get used to the range of characters and their positions right from the beginning, empathising with whom they wish, as if they were there amidst the action. The scene denotes a long line of prisoners that have just arrived into Shawshank. It shows them stepping out of a bus to be greeted by several prison guards, many with batons and other weapons. The weapons themselves solely connote power and punishment, even if they are not being used. Seeing the guards in the background with batons raised in their hands produces a major action code, which is very important when analysing using a semiotic structure. The guards promote their stance and hegemonistic approach whilst holding these instruments, which the audience understand could be potentially violent. The batons could also be seen as objects of the phallus – the shape and way they are held by the guards suggests that they could be used to signify homosexual activity later on in the film.
In the forefront of the scene we see an officer make eye contact with the prisoner at the front of the line, with the rest of the line of around seven visible men trailing off to the back of the shot. The scene also connotes the prison wall with which the men have just entered, with the outside building in the natural world being visible to all. The wall is high with several more armed officers guarding and watching the action down below. Either side of the line are high barbed fences, with older-serving prisoners jeering on the opposite side. Included in the line of new men is Andy Dufresne, with whom the rest of the film centres around – although this shot is focusing more on the powerful position of the officer rather than Dufresne himself.
The lighting effects used in this scene signify loneliness and darkness. The denotative light is dreary and submissive, with no bright sunlight or noisy wind. This silence and dull, grey light connotes the life that these new prisoners are expected to now lead. They will no longer see the brightness of the sun from their cell, nor experience weather in the outside world. The silent wind connotes that of their cell and the loneliness that they are about to experience. This matched with the dull light portends depression and a dull reality to the prisoner’s new surroundings. The dreary lighting also blends into the same colours as the walls, ground, fences and the cell-mates clothing. This may symbolise the monotony of prison life and how every day blends into one another. Also how the men ‘become part of’ the walls and ground, with many of them serving long sentences, some even dying inside.
The denotative colour of the overall scene including walls, prison uniforms, vehicles and shade of the face ignite feelings of suppression, cruelty and punishment for the audience. Watchers are sutured into seeing if the dull colouring develops into further scenes of depression and death, which could be seen as being an enigmatic and metaphoric device used by the director.
Costume and its binary opposites are very apparent in this scene, and it is the first time the audience sees the obvious divide between the prisoners and the guards, who can almost be seen as hierarchical in this suppressive environment. Introduced to Levi Strauss’ semiotic analysis model, binary opposites serve in this instance on a visual level. Firstly, the colours of guard’s uniform are more vibrant and apparent than that of the prisoners, whose clothing blends into the melancholy feel of the scene. Denotatively, the guards clothing is mostly navy with gold studding, consisting of a hard cap, tie, white shirt, badges, shined shoes and weapons. This polished look is shown directly opposite to the drab look of the prisoners. This is reinforced to the audience by the shot as a whole, with the officers and prisoners being shown on opposite sides to one another, emphasising the difference in status. The officers polished shoes and cap visor suggest he is a tidy individual, with a great respect for his job rank. His bright white shirt connotes that he is able to wash his clothes effectively and takes pride in his appearance, with his many badges signifying his position within the prison and his importance to the audience. The colour navy is linked to other public services, for example the police and navy. It is a colour of status and profession, unlike the brown and greys of the cell mates, which are only usually linked to lower-paid occupations (for example, care taking or refuse collectors). Culturally, it is how the audience recognises the difference in position and allows them to continue to understand that there is a divide within this institution – as there is with most institutionalised environments. It signifies the ideology of the situation – a man has committed a crime, therefore imprisoned and so has to deal with being at the bottom of the ranks in prison, with towering and uniformed guards and officers above him. The badges on the officer’s uniform denote his position within the tiers of the prison, and so suggest that this particular officer, who is one of the central characters in the ongoing scenes, is rather high in rank. It could be argued that with the audience seeing these rank badges, they can be used as an enigma code. We are yet to really interact with this character; however it may be a clue to telling us that he is to feature heavily in the central plot merely due to the status he is shown to be. Culturally, he could be argued as being a stereotypical example of a prison officer of those times – facial expressions, uniform, and actions. Roland Barthes (‘Mythologies’ 1957) argues that that representations of the everyday life are neutralised in film, which can be achieved by using stereotypical devices. Arguable, Darabont has done this exactly for this effect – to normalise the situation to achieve positive audience reception. Differing from the uniformed look of the guard is the somewhat scruffy look of the line of new male prisoners. They too are wearing caps, which symbolises some masculinity, however they are in dull colours and slightly off centre. The front man’s shirt is open, and even though not entirely dishevelled, suggests a working-class persona and vanilla lifestyle. Contradictory to the officers, the cell-mates are not uniformed and all their looks differ from one another. The audience knows this is going to change once they enter the prison. This scene serves to show the new arrivals at their last point of individuality – they will all look the same in a few hours, and the only thing that will differentiate them will be their prison numbers. This is shown after this scene when the men are all given de-lousing showers and given their uniforms, signalling that they are now part of an institution.
Costume in this scene and the film overall is a huge comment on society, culturally and symbolically. Clothes signify individuality, which is exactly what these men are going to lose. The audience knows at a glance who is in the higher position in this institutionalised society. For example, the Warden is allowed to wear a smart suit and tie with polished leather shoes, which connotes that he has a higher rank than the guards. He is at the top of the tree and nobody else is above him in this walled environment.
Even without sound in this mise-en-scene, the characterisation of the men featured is very apparent. The action code of the facial expression shown by the male prisoner at the front of the queue denotes the feeling of resentment and fear towards the officer and his new milieu. He is standing upright in an orderly manner, which is followed by the rest of the line. The way the two front characters are interacting is mainly one-way. The prisoner does not utter a word, and the officer is not talking directly to him but to the new arrivals as a whole. The eye-contact here is intense, denoting the tense atmosphere. If the prisoner were a female, the way she would interact with the officer would be entirely different, commenting on the cultural way males and females act together. The woman would not stare at the officer or denote any interaction – this may be due to the patriarchal position of the male in that situation and the female feeling inferior. However, in this scene, the stare the prisoner gives – even though fearful – is that of male to male interaction. The cell mate realises that the officer may be on an ego-trip and taking advantage of his
position, however he remains quiet and formal. The key message of divide is brought to the forefront here, as the prisoner is looking up to the officer who is much taller –
symbolising his higher status. Another example of order and status later on in the film, is the use of the game of chess. This denotes class difference between the members of the board, and so is a metaphor for the lives of the prisoners compared to those of the officers and the outside world.
The use of setting in this scene signifies the key trope of institutionalism. The scene denotes a high walled area with guards surrounding the top level, with barbed fences and a bolted gate, showing the outside world. High walls connote being trapped, being institutionalised and culturally well-known to being connected to prison. The guards supporting the walls signify that the men cannot get out, and if they try they will be punished. The tallness of the wall may be a metaphor for the huge power that is above the prisoners, influential in every part of their new life. The barbed fences separating the new arrivals from the settled prisoners do just that. It shows the segregation that is apparent when more established cellmates are introduced to their fresh counterparts. It denotes a cultural differentiation to those that have been institutionalised for a long while also. In this scene, the fences also serve a purpose to keep the other cellmates back and to cease violence – we see previously how they are getting rather caught up in emotion and that if the fences were not there, the officers would have a riot on their hands. The audience are also able to see the area that is outside the prison walls in the background of the shot, behind steel gates. This symbolises how trapped the prisoners are and somewhat ironic that they are only a few yards away from their previous life of freedom. (...)
The aim of semiotic deconstruction is to ascertain how codes comes together to produce both a preferred and a polysemic meaning. The short sequence that includes camera techniques that implicate the spectator emotionally and empathetically comes at 0:35:10 minutes of Shawshank. The sequence begins with Andy Dufresne (Burton) making a small stone sculpture with his ice-pick device. The ice-pick instrument serves to be an enigma code within itself, as the audience do not yet know the way the instrument will be used apart from making sculptures; it is obvious from another scene with Red (Freeman) that the prop will have a higher use. The spectator does not see until the end that it has been used to dig a tunnel that ignites Dufresne’s freedom. The small stone head that
Dufresne is carving could be seen as acting as a metaphor for himself. He is a small person in a big pond that is prison. The close-up shot of Dufresne carving this provokes empathy with the audience. They see his attention to detail, his love for his past-time and the determination to finish in his eyes. Females, for example, may be more emotionally attached to Dufresne at this point, as his quiet demeanour transfers itself into a confident artist for this shot. Male spectators may also empathise if they too carry out this hobby. The lighting in this scene is very dark to emphasise the darkness of the cell. There are many shadows and Dufresne’s face is partially in shadow at one point. This may symbolise the two sides to his character – the one the guards and his friends see, the other who is digging a tunnel to escape that nobody knows about. The spectator feels as if the are in the cell with Dufresne with this close-up shot at eye-level. It allows us to see the exact detail in the actors face, leading the audience to feel a sense of reality and verisimilitude. Darabont is taking the more realistic over the formalistic approach to film-making here. We then see Dufresne walk up to the prison bars and take a look out. The camera follows him as he does this, but takes a step back to a medium shot. This allows the audience to see the whole of the top of his body, just in case any action was to happen in that area. The bars obviously represent Dufresne being trapped in prison – they can also stand for him feeling trapped in his own mind. After all, Dufresne has been wrongly imprisoned as we saw in the reconstruction at the beginning of the film. This in itself allows the audience to feel emotionally drawn to the character as they know he is innocent. It helps by Darabont directing him to be psychologically rounded, this fuels the normalised outcome. We then follow Dufresne to one of the walls in his cell. At this point, we can hardly see any action as he is almost completely in darkness. The main outline we can make out is that of the enigmatic ice-pick. Darabont may have done this to draw sole attention to the instrument and focus on its importance – the audience later on finds out that this weapon alone has led their innocent character to freedom. We then see Dufresne begin to etch out his name on the wall, to stand aside previous cell-mates names. Again, we cannot see his face whilst he is doing this. He begins to write ‘Andy’ into the stone, however the shot cuts before we see him complete the whole word, which maybe symbolises how he never actually serves his full sentence in prison, due to his escape.
Darabont then cuts to a scene where the audience is subjected to watching a black and white film. At this stage, the camera is in the point of view of a spectator actually sat in the cinema – we are watching the action as one of the characters would be. The action in the film-within-a-film is shown by the camera on a medium long shot, just as Red’s character sees it. Here, we still do not know the concept that this black and white film is working in – we do not know who is watching it or where it is being shown. After a few seconds the scene shows Red (Freeman) in the front row of what seems to be a make-shift cinema hall. Behind him sit the rest of the prisoners whispering and puffing on cigarettes. This is one of the first time the audience has seen the characters truly content and excited in their surroundings. Cinema in today’s reality acts as an escape from the real world – spectators enjoy being sutured into the diegesis of a story and plot and like to empathise with certain characters as if they were really there; this is what the prisoners seem to be doing here. We as the audience empathise with this response – meaning the classic narrative used here and the intertextual approach by Darabont is successful. The film featured, starring Rita Hayworth, is also in black and white. This is a comment on the social time frame of when the film is set, and so adds authenticity. The audience may not know the exact year that Shawshank is set, but has a clue due to the black and white screen being featured. The Hayworth film also links to the key trope of escapism, as the prisoners use entertainment here to relax and move away from their institutionalised environment. When Dufresne comes into the scene, the camera moves left to more of a central medium close-up of himself and Red. This is to fit both of the characters in the shot and allow us to see their facial expressions head-on. Red and Dufresne are both looking at the screen with amazement – we see this in Dufresne’s slightly open mouth and wide-eyes looking towards the movie trail. Dufresne is leaning over to whisper into Red’s ear also. This symbolises their close friendship and how Dufresne may look up to Red as a long-standing prisoner who has more experience of the lifestyle. Red is sat leaned back, which may suggest he is relaxed and content. The next shot we see is cut back to the movie on screen – we see a close-up of the actress Rita Hayworth’s face. At this point, the prisoners cheer and shout at the idyllic figure on screen. Even without sound and the hyena-type jeers heard from the prisoners, we can see that the men see Hayworth as a sexual female idol. This gives the audience a sense of realism, as she was also seen as an idol in the real world – Hayworth is not a made-up character. Laura Mulvey’s (1979) argument on the subject of the male gaze is very apparent here. Rita Hayworth is the object of the male prisoners gaze. Not only are they being voyeuristic in watching her draped in a towel on screen, but the object of their attention is unable to return their gaze – a sense of agency. Darabont’s use of a Hollywood star in this scene makes it ever more interesting for the audience – we can relate to being star-struck by seeing a celebrity on screen and idolising them in a sexual or professional fashion. Binary opposition is also visible here, as the Hollywood women are far removed from their lifestyle. The audience can see a glamorous, famous, wealthy, beautiful individual which is a steep comparison to the dark, dull, institutionalised and depressed prisoners of Shawkshank. We then see Dufresne ask Red for a poster of Hayworth – although we as the audience, as well as Red, are unsure what he wants to do with it, therefore privileging Dufresne’s character rather than the audience. This therefore, puts Hayworth in the position of an enigma code. The audience begins to question is Hayworth will appear again in the film. The audience then goes on to find out that Dufresne is using the poster of Hayworth to hide the tunnel he is digging to escape from his cell. To coincide with making sure the audience are sutured into the verisimilitude of the diegesis, Dufresne is presented with new posters over a period of time with different female models emblazoned on them, including Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch. (...)
Ultimately, The Shawshank Redemption is able to transcend the confines of its genre. Darabont uses successful editing and camera movements to provoke the intended emotions from the audience, as well as high-quality characterisation, setting, use of colours, costume and lighting effects. When analysing a film with a preferred meaning like Shawshank, it is easy to see how Barthes (1957) semiotic model, for example, is used in a triumphant way to aggravate meaning and purpose. The introduction of Dufresne as a character brings both a hegemonistic and pluralistic message to the film. It shows how even though there is the overwhelming sense of power from the prison board and officers, one man’s individual thoughts on freedom, hope and wrong-imprisonment lead to his positive outcome, and the downfall of the Shawshank prison system
Bibliography
Branston, G. Stafford, R. (2006) ‘The Media Student’s Book’ Interpreting Media (11-33), Oxon: Routledge
Darabont, F. (1994) ‘The Shawshank Redemption’
Castle Rock Entertainment
Jacobson, C. (2004) ‘The Shawshank Redemption Review Archive’ DVD Movie Guide [online] October 13, 2004. Available from
http://www.dvdmg.com/shawshankredemption.shtml [Accessed: 10/11/07]
Stafford, R. (2007) ‘Understanding Audiences and the Film Industry’, London: Cromwell
Unknown. Montage of photographs of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch. Available from Google Images [online] www.umich.edu/~quizclub/archives/2004/1full.JPG.
[Accessed: 10/11/07]
Branston, G. Stafford, R. (2006) ‘The Media Student’s Book’ Interpreting Media (11-33), Oxon: Routledge
Darabont, F. (1994) ‘The Shawshank Redemption’
Castle Rock Entertainment
Jacobson, C. (2004) ‘The Shawshank Redemption Review Archive’ DVD Movie Guide [online] October 13, 2004. Available from
http://www.dvdmg.com/shawshankredemption.shtml [Accessed: 10/11/07]
Stafford, R. (2007) ‘Understanding Audiences and the Film Industry’, London: Cromwell
Unknown. Montage of photographs of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch. Available from Google Images [online] www.umich.edu/~quizclub/archives/2004/1full.JPG.
[Accessed: 10/11/07]
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