Bigger Than Life By Nicholas Ray - 1593 Words

Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life is a story of an American family man who tries to have it all and fails because of his addiction. In an effort to visually portray this, Ray largely abandons conventional Cinemascope practices and tends to revert to the paradigms of the Academy ratio. Rather than using Cinemascope to highlight spectacle, Ray films a small family melodrama. Instead of splitting the screen into thirds and adjusting the mise-en-scà ¨ne to visually fill up the screen, Ray uses close-ups, single-person shots, and symmetry. He frequently divides the screen in two at the center, essentially treating each side as an Academy ratio film. Since Ray focuses less on ‘clotheslining’ actors, he is able to bring the audience closer to understand the psychology of Ed Avery (and physcially closer to him than most Cinemascope films would go). The sequence towards the end of film is of paramount importance—Ray takes the tension, anger, cruelty, and derangement that has been building throughout the film and raises it to a high enough level that Ed is willing to kill his own son. To get this across, Ray uses composition to show Ed as isolated, sinister, and dangerous. Two of the scenes in particular from the sequence deviate from his regular techniques, as he stages the family in a single frame to highlight the growing distance between them all. Throughout the film, Ray used close-ups to show Ed’s mental state; in this sequence, Ray largely abandons that technique—Ed’s state-of-mindShow MoreRelatedSocietal Power And Racial Oppression1467 Words   |  6 PagesTaylor Bradley Honors English 11 Nicholas Period 1 Societal Power and Racial Oppression In the mid 1900’s, different parts of society struggled with power due to the idea of racial supremacy. 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