Movie Magic

Can you explain what the project was exactly ?

We watched five-minute excerpt of four different movies which were “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer, ”Kill Bill volume 1” by Quentin Tarantino, “Moulin Rouge” film by Baz Luhrmann and “Stranger than fiction” by chuck Palahniuk. We took notes about the colors used and their meaning according to the whole movie or only the excerpt. Then we had to choose two of those movies and create two mosaics, decorative designs made by setting small colored piece onto a surface.

What were your observations?

The two movies I chose to make mosaics on are “Everything is illuminated” and ”Kill Bill volume 1”.

“Everything is illuminated”

In the first one, in the scene I choose there is a house in the prairie surrounded by sunflowers. The background color is a skylight blue with some clouds. The over hall colors are a bright green, a sunny yellow. The house in this prairie is in a mixture of clear grey and beige and its roof is brown.

“Kill Bill volume 1”

In the second movie, the scene represents a plane in the twilight sky. The background and over hall colors are a degraded from a bright orange to a dark red (from up to down) for the twilight. The plane, as the only prop, is in a bright white with some red.

So what are your deductions?

For the first movie, “Everything is illuminated”, we can see how nature is important. I think Jonathan Safran uses the yellow and the blue for a non measurable happiness, we cannot even see the end of the prairie. This happiness doesn’t reside in material things: there is only one house in this vast plain and it is represented in grey beige and brown. Those colors give to the house a deteriorated aspect. The author may want to insist on the aspect that those people in this Ukrainian village can be happy without being concerned with material issues. I choose to represent the door of the house in black for mystery because while we were watching the extract, it stopped before we knew who were in the house. On a personal plan, I choose to represent this scene also because it reminds me Lyon in France. I’ve been several times in

For “Kill Bill volume 1” I think Quentin Tarantino used the twilight sky with this degraded orange to the red to represent tension. We can feel by this mean how danger is always present in the movie .The white used for the plane makes think at purity. For me, the white represents the principal actor which is a woman. She is represented within this red sky because she fights against evil: Good against evil. On the white of the plane, there is also some red trace and effectively, there is a part of evil in every good.

What’s your impression about the project?

The experience of Movie magic wasn’t an easy one because it is hard to focus just on colors while there is sound or/and people moving everywhere during the scene. We get really easily disturb by these details but if we concentrate enough, we can see in the colors, the purposes of the director. This project gives a completely different vision of the cinema experience.

By ISSABRE Hamadoun