Similar Text Analysis (2)

2^nd Movie Opening Analysis - Se7en

This opening sequence seems fascinatingly mysterious and it immediately establishes the character that seems to be ‘working’. The montage sequence which starts from the XCU of the book consists of juxtaposition of CU and XCU shots of the person writing, cutting photo negatives, sticking photos, scraping his fingertips, sewing the books, cutting the word ‘God’ from a newspaper and doing other weird, crazy things. This certainly doesn’t seem like the work of a ‘normal’ human being and we come to believe that this character has some (scary) mental disorders and possibly is a ‘psycho’. The XCU of his fingers also look bruised and dirty- maybe because he’s been scraping off the skin. Again, this shows that the man is trying to hide his fingerprints which means he’s doing illegal things- secretly.

When we see him scratching people’s faces in photos and sticking murder/death pictures in his book, we think/know he’s been murdering those people and writing in his book about those killings and sticking things up as evidence. The whole mise-en-scene and actions in this sequence is disturbing, distressing and gives out a pessimistic feeling. We also see quite a lot of shadows and darkness in the clip. This not only represents ‘a state of privacy/wickedness and impurity’ and ‘a state of distress or trouble’ but also helps to set the scary and uncomfortable mood among the audience. The introductory titles (in white) are also shown in black backgrounds as well. This goes very well with the amount of darkness we see in the videos. It can be said how darkness conveys fear, mystery and hidden secrets as well as danger. The makers probably wants us to feel all this while watching this sequence.

                                     

The words shown here seems to be scratched in and hence looks rough and ‘man-made’ just like the books and photos that the character is making. They also have this twitching and shaking effect which again looks scary and disorderly- just like the character we’re being shown. The title and the visual come up turn by turn while there’s a constant flow of the music. We also see some flashes of writings that can’t really be read between the things on the screen.  The non-diegetic soundtrack which is also mysterious and accompanied with cries and screams compliments the creepy, bizarre visual. This distorted, curious sound somewhat indicates the irrational inner-workings of this psycho character. This music creates tension and builds up the excitement and it gets pretty quick at the end of the sequence and because we get the gist of what is/could be happening, we want to know more about it.

We notice how both the video sequence and non-diegetic music sequence changes from a slow-pace to a pretty fast pace later when we once know what we are being shown. It’s like as if the director wants to show us a lot of things about the character’s unnatural behavior and because there isn’t much time to do so; we are being rushed through all those sequences. This title sequence is a brilliant example of how good things can be when the shown imagery- the film and the music is all synched to each other. Without even showing us the face of the character, it has been able to create the scary personality of this crazy ‘antagonist’. Because it is full of mystery, the audience is left want to go deep inside the plot and find the hidden secrets.