"What I See": The Eclipse

I recently attended a screening of the film The Eclipse at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Eclipse is an Irish film directed by Conor McPherson that isn’t quite classifiable by typical genres. Although it is not easily categorized, it does fuse, or at least employ, key characteristics of the drama, romance and horror genres. It is equal parts love story, ghost story and tragedy, and is as scary as it is dramatic. The film generally received positive reviews, but it was most praised for was its cinematography and acting performances rather than its fusion of the supernatural and the dramatic.

There are many technical filmic devices that helped communicate the mood and message of the storyline in The Eclipse. Much of the atmosphere of the film was created by cinematographic techniques. First of all, the takes are mostly long, so that the viewer is forced to hold their attention on the scene before them. There aren’t quick cuts that jump to other sceneries or important details. Furthermore, to emphasize the aloneness and depression that the main character, Michael Farr, a middle-aged single father overwhelmed with grief and apathy after the death of his wife, there are many extreme long shots of him in solitude in vast, open settings. I would assume many of these extreme long shots are filmed with a wide angle lens. For example, in one scene the camera follows him drudging along a deserted beach in clearly uncomfortably cool weather with his head hung low. All that the viewer sees other than Michael is the rocky beach, a few seagulls, and the seemingly endless expanse of the sea. The effect of the extreme long shot is that Michael appears very small, minute and isolated.

Many of the shots also played with lighting and exposure. For example, a few of the exterior shots, especially the extreme long shots, were overexposed. The effect of the harshly bright lights was a jarring one, especially in contrast to the very dark, almost disorienting, underexposed shots of Michael going in and out of nightmarish sleep during the night. The bright, washed out exterior shots make the environment that Michael lives in seem very bleak and unsettling.

Lastly, another aspect I found interesting was the framing of the startle shots. Last semester I took a course on horror film and neuroscience, in which we studied neurobiological phenomena in order to understand what is scientifically frightening to an audience and the tactics filmmakers utilize to exploit those fears. In The Eclipse, there are many abrupt “boo!” moments where bloodied ghouls pop out. Expectedly, these shots were framed according to the neurobiological principle about the startle shot, which asserts that since the brain is naturally accustomed to scanning an image left to right and top to bottom we are most likely to quickly perceive images that fall in the upper left-hand corner of the frame. Accordingly, we are most likely to be surprised by an image that pops out in the lower right-hand corner of the frame, because it is the last region of an image that our brain perceives. The startle shots of the ghosts in The Eclipse, wittingly or not, abided by this principle.

The Museum of the Moving Image

One of the most interesting aspects of the Museum of the Moving Image to me was the section with the optical illusion toys such as the zoetrope and the thaumatrope. During the lecture in class, I wasn’t really able to understand or visualize the short range apparent motion (or persistence of vision) phenomenon that these toys are examples of. It was hard to imagine how exactly they’d work and why they’d be so fascinating and entertaining to people. However, when I actually saw them in person, I was impressed by how realistic the motion and imagery actually seemed. In particular, while watching the tour guide spin the thaumatrope, a simple round white disc with an empty black cage and one side and a red bird on another, I thought to myself that I could make one on my own with a piece of paper and a pen. However, he helped me to understand why I wouldn’t be able to recreate it and exactly how the simple toy succeeds in essentially tricking your brain into believing that the two separate images are actually one: he said that a break is necessary between the two images, and the pause serves more or less as a mental rest for your brain so the images don’t overlap too much, only just enough to seem like one cohesive picture.

In the same section of the museum, there was a piece that spun rapidly under strobe lights and relied on similar phenomena for the brain to process as coherent motion taking place straight in front of your eye instead of spinning so quickly in a circle. For example, there was a drop that fell onto a hand, through the fingers, turned into a paper airplane and crashed into a bowl of dishes. If that description sounds like that doesn’t make any sense, then I’m describing it correctly. However, we were all pretty amazed to realize that it was a spinning wheel of unique sculptures that weren’t actually moving at all when the the bright lights came on and the strobe lights went off.

My other favorite part of the museum, coming from a background in fashion, was the wardrobe section. Not only were many of the costumes impressive in their own right, but it was interesting to hear the tour guide give a visual analysis of these costumes in relation to the context of the film, the personalities of the characters and the messages that were trying to be conveyed.