horribleives
Posts: 4248
Joined: 12/6/2009
From: The North
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quote:
ORIGINAL: chris kilby
Image systems are deliberately recurring motifs and almost-subliminal images in films which symbolise themes and other hidden depths and allusions. No, really. These can be subtle to the point of being imaginary or heavy-handed to the point of hitting you over the head.
Oranges seem to symbolise death in The Godfather films. Vito is shot while buying oranges and later dies with orange peel in his mouth. Michael is eating an orange when he orders the climactic murder montage at the end of Part II and drops an orange when he dies at the end of Part III. But they are everywhere throughout the trilogy. On tables during fateful conference meetings. In baskets, in bowls or on stalls; in great big piles in front of the camera or plaintively rolling about on the floor after a massacre. Fanucci helps himself to an orange from a market stall just before young Vito shoots him - big mistake! And Carlo and Johnny Ola even wear orange suits - arrividerci! So if Al Pacino ever hands you an orange you can't refuse, better say your prayers...
Yellow signifies danger in Jaws. Alex Kitner's inflatable, the lights on Matt Hooper's boat and Quint's yellow barrels. White picket fences (which resemble sharks' teeth) also recur throughout the film, sometimes in incongruous places - the beach!?!
In Star Wars the good guys tend to be colourful/rustic while the bad guys tend to be cold and colourless - black, white, grey. When they were fighting for the Republic, clone troopers were brightly coloured and distinctive, but later Imperial Stormtroopers a uniform white. Also, the Empire tends to be all straight lines while the Rebelion tends to be all funky curves, spaceship-wise. And blue/green lightsabres = good; red lightsabres = bad; and purple lightsabres = bad motherfuckers!
Eyes in Blade Runner signify both memory/identity and surveillance/paranoia. "Red eye" signifies if someone's a Replicant or not - which you'd think would make them easy to spot!
Phallic and vaginal/reproductive imagery and there is an awful lot of rape/penetration in the Alien series. In Alien: Resurrection the Xenomorphs were appropriately lit to look the colour of turds. And in Prometheus the new critters were a bit of an incoherent mess.
Labyrinths, geometric shapes and fucking horrible carpets in The Shining. But as the forthcoming Room 237 shows, this is barely scratching the surface!
Smileys in Watchmen.
There are a lot of straight lines in The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan has said these represent the order the anarchic Joker is out to destroy.
In Unbreakable, green is Bruce Willis' "super-hero" colour (he even wears a green "cape") while purple is Samuel L Jackson's colour.
The Matrix has a green tint to it and is very symmetrical. The "real world" doesn't and isn't.
Chinatown has twin motifs of water and glass/reflections - mirrors, glasses, binoculars, cameras, even eyes - all the corpses in Chinatown have their eyes open!
Eggs were a curious recurring motif (Mofftif?) in the last series of Doctor Who. The last episode was even a hard-boiled noir pastiche/Singing Detective "homage." (It was doubles the previous series.)
Then there's the feet in Tarantino's movies, although that's more a fetish than a motif!
They were throughout The Sopranos too, in much the same way as The Godfather's oranges.
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www.hollywoodunbound.co.uk - some nonsense about alien film directors and musclebound man-children.
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