Ok so in order to analyze this movie fully lets go through the overview of what it was about again. The movie stars Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta, a temperamental and very paranoid but vicious boxer and his relationship with this brother, who suffered from his rage and dark side, and his beautiful wife who was his ultimate prize. The movie focuses on his rise and falls and his alienation from his family and friends. Let’s look at the cinematography and editing in more detail. The boxing bouts were about ten minutes total but with editing, it seemed to go on for so long and that is one of the good things about editing. The other scenes were made to look more naturalistic compared to the subjectivity of the boxing ring shoots. This showed a difference in how Lamotta was portrayed and how he felt inside the ring compared to outside the ring.
Let’s talk about mise en scene and in this paragraph I want to focus on acting performance done by Robert De Niro. He was a method actor who liked to be his character completely much like Marlon Brando who I have talked about in my earlier blogs. De Niro took method acting to the max by gaining about sixty pounds in order to become the older fatter Lamotta version and the dedication to do this must have been a lot for him to go this far. This would differ from a movie like Monty Python which was very stylized in acting style because characters obviously knew there was a character and would try and interact with the crowd and spike lee did a bit of both in his movie, Do the right thing.
Another thing about the mise en scene that has to do with setting which I enjoyed was the fact that the film was done in black and white. This just showed the authenticity of the movie which differentiated from the other boxing movies as well as accentuate the times it was shot in. it was naturalistic mise en scene because it was historical because it showed that that is what movies were like in those days and also I think the black and white accentuated how the times were in a way, viewed in black and white. It was also quotidian mise en scene because it tried to show the everyday life of the Italian Americans living in the ghetto which was amazing because it showed the culture of those times which I really enjoy in movies.
Another thing was the editing that was done. One thing I like about the editing was the way the film was done in a way that unlike other boxing movies, the movie showed boxing in a way that the viewers saw what boxing is like from the actual boxer’s point of view rather than that of the audience. The slow motion to real time shots and the 360 panning showed the brutality of the boxing ring and also the two shot style that showed one boxer and then the other boxer showed the Hollywood continuity style as well as the eye line matching especially when LaMotta would go through the motion of throwing a punch and then the cut transition to a hand destroying the opponent. I liked it because it made me feel the pain and exhilaration of the boxing ring. This is one of the values of editing and it was showed here, the value of using editing to generate emotion and ideas through patterns of seeing.
I would say overall this was more a classic in film making than even the watching of the movie itself.
picture from
http://usesoapfilm.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/black-and-white-film-a-thon/
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