One way a filmmaker can make a movie more effective is through the use of sound and color. To understand how this works, let’s take a look at one scene in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic.
The Life Aquatic is about an oceanographer named Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) that has hit a low point in his career and decides to seek revenge on an animal called the “jaguar shark” that attacked and killed his best friend and fellow crew member, Esteban. In this scene, Zissou’s ship has been overrun by pirates.
The scene begins with Zissou bound, blindfolded, and on his knees along with the rest of his crew. The scene cuts from the camera in front of Zissou, to different shots of the backs of Zissou and his crew. The film shows these different shots from behind again, but in rapid succession, accompanied by several indecipherable voices whispering. This way of presenting the quick shots with whispering illustrates the panic and hopelessness that the crew feels in their predicament. To further drive the point home, Anderson employs a bluish tint over all these shots, and all of the crew is wearing some form of blue (the crew in their uniforms, Zissou in his bathrobe). The blue tint to these shots could be used to show the passive and subordinate position of Zissou’s crew. It could also be used to match the blue of the ocean and the sky in the background of most of the shots, signaling that the crew believes they will be somehow lost at sea (whether shot or thrown overboard).
Directly after the whispers, there is a quick jump to a shot of Zissou in the water from earlier in the film when his friend Esteban is killed by the jaguar shark. This shot focuses on Zissou’s face, which is described earlier by another character in the film as Zissou having “the crazy eye.” This shot is quick, only a couple of frames, but when the film returns to Zissou on the boat the blue tint is gone and has been replaced by a brighter, orange tint. Through Anderson’s use of color, the viewer is led to believe that something has snapped in Zissou, and his passive (blue) attitude towards the pirates is now replaced with an aggressive (orange) attitude.
Zissou immediately bites through his hand bindings and stands up, telling the pirates, “I said get your ass the hell off my boat.” He punches a pirate, steals his gun, and throws him overboard. Then the audio of the action on screen is stripped away and replaced with the loud dirty guitars of Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy.” Zissou makes his way to the front of the boat while firing several rounds at the pirates. However, the viewer only hears the background music of Iggy and the Stooges. The only audio that the audience hears from the action on the screen in this scene is one gunshot from Zissou that he uses to save an intern crew member, that intern’s one yell when his dead attacker’s machete slices into his shoulder, and a pirate’s exploding grenade. The rest of the shootout’s audio is replaced with the song “Search and Destroy.” Although the viewer only hears a few sounds of the actual action taking place, the energy of the shootout is still effective by letting the noisy rock-and-roll almost exclusively dominate the audio of the scene.
photo credits:
(http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/2832/1/DVD-REVIEW-LIFE-AQUATIC-WITH-STEVE-ZISSOU-THE-SE/Page1.html)
(http://blog.clarkhuot.com/tag/crazy-eye/)
