2. The Modern City
Mystery films are oftenest in modern urban cities going
back to the time of film noirs, when these films
reflected the fears and insecurities of a post war world.
Too this day mystery films play are worries about the
modern films, whether they be in the politic world or in
our very own lives, mystery films play our sneaking
suspicion that just under the surface there’s something
dark and evil lurking there. The cities themselves often
feel like dystopias which with a film like Blade Runner is
very much the case; the dark and dirty, the glittering
lights of billboards and skyscrapers contrasting with the
griminess of the world the people below live in. For my
film I want to create the same sense of mood of gloom
that films like Enemy and Mulholland Drive by filming
the modern industrial city as if it were a desolate
dystopia.
3. Questionable Protagonist
Despite almost always being from the
perspective of one main character mystery
films often feature main protagonists who we
struggle to understand and often suspect to be
up to something. This reflects the feeling
within us not only of mis-trust of others but
even of ourselves and our own memories and
actions. In a film like Enemy the main
protagonist finds a doppelganger of himself,
making us question if this is really happening
or it’s just an expressionist point of view of the
main character losing his sense of reality. In my
film the main protagonist will be of
questionable mind-set
4. Technical Codes
Close up shots or ECU shots are used to show
people’s fear when they discover something, which
in my film will used when they main protagonist's
finds the disembodied finger. High and low angles to
either show a potential murder victim as vulnerable
and weak or to show the killer as strong an in
control. Fast paced music and moving camera shots
are used when the Hero is chasing a suspect. This
creates tension as the audience doesn’t know if he
will get away or not. In my film I will use a mixture of
Jazz to reflect the old-fashioned mood of the genre,
with modern classical music such as Phillip Glass in
order to create a building tension throughout the
film as well as atmospheric Synth moodscapes to
capture the feelings of the character
5. Lighting
Lighting in Mystery films is often stylised, with muted
colours reflecting the gloomy tone of the films. In
Enemy, the whole film is dipped in a sepia tone filter
giving an almost apocalyptic quality, reflecting the un-
ease felt by both the audience and the main character.
In my film I will a similar tone to Enemy, in order to
invoke a sense of suspense and dread in the audience.
Other more traditional films such as The Third Man,
and The Big Sleep use there B&W cameras, to the
advantage as naturally with B&W you deep dark
shadows. In my film in certain shots I will use B&W in
order to surrealistic tone to the film as well as using it
in an expressionist way like in 1920’s film like Dr
Cabaret of Caligula and Metropolis. In these films the
actual colour of the film would change from Sepia, to
Bluish hue to B&W all in order to reflect the mood of
the film and the characters. With my film I want to
page homage to this.
6. Themes (Part I)
Thematically mystery films have throughout there history
always subverted the common trends of there day. For
example in the earliest mystery films in the 1920’s and
30’s directors such as Fritz Lang pushed cinema into far
darker and more complex terroites such as in the film “M”
which was censored heavily for decades after it released
being outright banned by the UK and the USA when they
passed censorship laws for cinema, as well as in Lang’s
country of birth Germany, when the Nazis took over as
they found the film to subversive and possibly dangerous
to society. The influence of this film was evident almost
immediately in the dark, expressionistic film noir of the
post-war American era, which peered behind the surface
of the new society, showing a hideous dark underbelly.
Currently in the time we live in now a similar kinds of
ruptures in the fabric of society seem to be happening
with things like Brexit and Donald Trump, reflecting a lack
of trust, or even an active belief in the bad intentions of
the standard political narratives, told to us by our leaders.
7. Themes (Part II)
With the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the mystery genre which had
previously danced around the psychoanalytic issues of the
modern world, Hitchcock plunged deep into them. Vertigo,
considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made,
places the protagonist's psychosis and phobias right into the
centre of the narrative, making the audience both question the
character’s motives, but now also his mental state. This sense
of the audiences suspicion from the audience about the
protagonist prevails throughout almost all mystery films made
since then
