Crash: A Film Analysis

Paul Haggis In 2004 wrote and directed the award winning movie Crash concerning a variety of intertwine experiences concerning racial relations and the levels of socioeconomic status of the varied cast of characters. This movie deal with how humans being contract with actual life situations and tackles how racial injustices and stereotypes effect our society by sourcing a division of customs, disregarding civil and human rights, and representation how racism can source cultural, moral, and economical distress. This comprehensive essay will deal with the cinematic constituents utilized right through the film, and offer a critical examination on the variety of components and methods utilized to generate this powerful and compelling film.

Crash is a film that engages more than a few diverse stories and plots that all direct to somehow hook up the characters to each other in a sequence of incidents that occur throughout 2 days in California. America’s ever- rising melting pot is particularly signified in the movie as the viewers are introduced to a black detective of LAPD, two mischievous black car thieves, a white district lawyer and his discriminative wife, a white racist hit cop and his trainee partner, a black director of Hollywood and his wife, an furious owner of Persian shop and his family, and a blue-collar Hispanic man and his adolescent susceptible daughter. The characters unconnected yet interlinking stories were an extremely distinctive and efficient technique utilized to narrate this story in a provoking and extremely appealing manner.

The theme of the movie is connected to the variety of features of prejudice. The mainly invasive theme is racism. The white cop–whose father lost his janitorial business owing to special affirmative action practices–is fuming at African-Americans. A youthful African-American carjacker spurts the provocative Black Power expression of the 1970s. Stereotyping is an additional subject in the movie. For instance, the white wife of DA’s supposes the locksmith of being a member of gang since of his background. The conflict of cultures is demonstrated by the owner of Iranian store who construes the well-meant comments of the locksmith regarding a dented door as a shake-down for additional money. The subject of class difference is discovered in the distinction of characters. For instance, the African-American director and his wife are higher class in expressions of income and education even as the African-American police officer has afforded his means into a middle-class work and his brother a criminal and his mother is a drug addict. The DA’s wife, who exists in the well-off area of Brentwood of Los Angeles, is continuously grumbling in relation to her housekeeper/nanny, a stressed Latina. Cruelty is an additional idea investigated in the movie: a police officer sexually disgraces a naive woman, an HMO envoy erratically deny services to a anguish man, an annoyed man acquires a gun to obtain revenge in opposition to an naive man he believes has offended him, and an additional man is occupied in the contemporary slave trade. In actual fact, the occurrence of people’s cruelty is maybe the majority constant pattern. The stereotyping in opposition to one another is their incorrect beliefs regarding people; particularly about the diverse race (Sole, 2011).On the other hand, nevertheless, the movie as well encloses images of people’s humankind in addition, as the housekeeper approaches to the assistance of her employer, the police officer dangers his life to save the same woman he battered, and the carjacker confers up a prospect to sell a people van-load into slavery.

Everybody engaged in the making of this movie added to the cinematic experience. In Crash The preponderance of the actors were most well-known and noticeable celebrities in Hollywood, for instance Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, and Terrence Howard. These movie stars sneakily carried the film with their sparkling performances and dramatic ability as they naturally contrived in the course of each scene with ease. The realism depicted by the actors fetched to life their characters and in spite of the susceptible and insecure topics in the movies they manage to fetch every character to life, give them their individual exclusive and separate personalities.

In the movie the sound employed a contemporary dialogue and advanced every scene from an additional modern viewpoint. When slang terms were required by the characters it emerged to be utilized in a means that prepared the audience understand and narrate, for instance the dialogues amid the two black car thieves as they speak to each other by means of a apparently offensive word in the expression “nigger.” The country western and hip hop music being played and conversed by the two car thieves are important to the film since they indicate how music plays a large element in defining race and underlining a lot of diverse stereotypes. The songs that were element of the film soundtrack are played at instants that were important to the scene.

The outstanding acting was not the merely perceptible constituent that let this award winning movie to connect the viewer. The movie begins with the out of focus shots of the car headlights which might perhaps be setting up the viewers to observe that the film characters will not be what they appear and might as well lack spotlight right through the movie as well. The cinematography about the preponderance of the movie is delicate as the director choose to spotlight additional on close-ups and the rare feelings on the actor’s expressions and faces. There are extremely few scenes where several action is essential to bear the film, however the scenes that do include action, for instance the carjacking attempted of character of Terrence Howard’s, Cameron, and the resulting chase of police in the course of Los Angeles, it was steady with the storyline and essential to the on the whole plot. The viewpoint shots that were utilized in the movie bring the observers additional into the action of the movie and decreased the space between the characters and audience. This permitted the a variety of stereotypes and depictions of the characters to turn out to be additional pronounced, and although a few of the stereotypes were a bit decorated as it relates to society of present, the implied realism was in reality deeply influential.

Even though the in the film Crash cinematography is rather basic consecutively to spotlight additional on the acting, storylines, and on the whole subject matter of the movie, the editing of the movie is so elaborate that it is roughly offering the feeling of little movies in a movie as the scenes leap from every storyline. In the majority films the cinematography can effectively append credibility to the plot and development of character, letting a movie to have radiant construction and sensual detail. In Crash there are not numerous special effects, or contrasting lighting designs that have any minor effect on the appearance or sense of the movie. The film has several instants of low key lighting and the scene is mostly developed with the urban scenery of modern Los Angeles.

Conclusion

Stereotypes are not vague since they are all fake, other than since they are habitually surrogated for real depictions of individuals and experiences of life. Crash is capable to deal with a few stereotypes in a way that is interesting, yet thinking provoking by means of constituents designed to generate art in the course of cinema. The means this movie deals with societal prejudices and racism goes past the criticism we might be familiarized to in this age of conventional media and social networking openings, where anybody is capable to sight a huge selection of colorful social comments in addition to liberally express their free opinions. Other than the cinematic constituents used right through this movie, for instance location, the sound, movement of camera, editing, lighting, soundtrack, and the majority prominently the acting, radiantly contributed to the intersect storylines that modestly permitted the viewers to take a deep glimpse into their individual covert prejudices.

References

Haggis, P. (Writer & Director). (2004). Crash [Motion Picture]. (Lions Gate Entertainment).

Harris, Philip; Olson, Aaron; Levine, Deena; Shusta, Robert and Wong, Herbert. (1995). Multicultural Law Enforcement. 28-110

Sole, K. (2011). Making connections: Understanding interpersonal communication. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. ()