"The Graduate" was the first new Hollywood movie I actually watched, and it became the reason I fell in love with it in the first place. After rewatching it again, the familiar feeling made me feel like I was back at the beginning, and the lost enthusiasm was found again. The following content is a record of some of the important scenes of "The Graduate", as a commemoration, and as an archive of my own thesis materials.
Opening Scene
The first shot of the film begins with a close-up of Ben, whose vague facial expressions make it difficult to capture the exact meaning. The off-screen cabin broadcast reminds us that the scene is in the cabin of an airplane heading for Los Angeles. As the zooming technique expands the space within the painting, we find that Ben's facial features become part of the portrait complex of the cabin panorama: the faces of the other passengers in the cabin also appear to be de-dramatically unreadable. The only sound in the cabin was the announcement of the captain's arrival. The recordability presented by the broadcast noise not only allows us to focus on this scene, but also strengthens the overall perception of facial abstraction, achieving a feeling that tends to be phenomenologically real. At the same time, without comparison with previous close-ups. We can't even pinpoint Ben's spatial location and theatrical identity (although he himself is close to the center of the frame). This psychological ambiguity is also an important proposition of "The Graduate", which expresses the powerlessness of young people who are just out of school when they enter adult society.
Act 1, Scene 2
The camera is at a banquet celebrating Ben's college graduation. Ben, who has just stepped out of the campus, is out of tune with the utilitarian, realistic adult socializing. Unfamiliar guests surrounded Ben, making constant physical contact. Mr Loomis invites him to work in the plastics business, and an anxious Ben intends to return to his room.
Ben moves from left to right, traversing narrow horizontal spaces. The dominant voice-over from the host of the banquet and the image form a separation-counterpoint relationship, conveying Ben's identity, and showing Ben's social value naked in the adult world. Ben's lateral movement, interrupted by the guests in the foreground and background, began to pick up speed as he entered the wide depth of field space, ascending the attic and stepping into his room. His bewildered state of mind is figuratively extracted in this variation of the escape movement.
Act 1 Scene 3
The shot is on the night of Ben's graduation party, and Ben arrives at Mrs Robinson's home. Robinson, who is in a cold state of husband and wife, falls in love with Ben, and she uses her mature female body to constantly seduce Ben in the room.
Unlike the overall film rhythm, in this 30-second segment, the film uses a quick splicing of 11 shots. On the glass mirror on which Elaine's photo is placed, Ben sees Mrs Robinson behind him, she is walking into the room naked, and the montage method abstracts Ben's shocked state at the moment: the film first uses the same action of Ben turning around as three Shots from different camera positions were repeated; then 4 consecutive shots were used to connect the close-up body-facial response (breast, navel).
This extremely fast-paced montage is undoubtedly a depiction of the outside world based on Ben's subjective feelings at the moment. This visual shock to the body of the opposite sex fragmented Ben's reality and experience. With the extremely fast switching rate of shots, natural time is artificially compressed, becoming short and unstable, the adjustment of the spatial structure is broken, and the traditional analytical image form of Hollywood is temporarily replaced by an expressionist picture tendency. The sound and picture are separated, and we can only see Mrs Robinson as a presence in the space from the close-up of her voice and body in the intersecting dialogue shots, but cannot see her real facial expressions. The fast-paced, sometimes real, sometimes lost carrier sound rendering method that wanders in space guides us to simplify listening, and let the characteristics of sound as reality become our concern for Mrs Robinson itself. And this stylized use of sound, along with those close-ups and reaction shots, constructs Ben's subjective illusion of this real place.
Act 1 Scene 4
The shot is shortly after Ben's graduation party. At Ben's house, he is preparing to perform an afternoon party special for the guests. Ben is introduced by his father, wearing a wetsuit and walking awkwardly towards the pool.
This shot gives us Ben's subjective perspective. Ben's field of vision under the diving suit became very narrow, and his parents and visiting guests kept appearing in the flat space. If the previous shots let us see the power of montage in expressing the psychology of characters, here the voice becomes the protagonist. In this shot, the parents in the foreground and the crowd in the background are constantly saying something to Ben, but their voices seem to be hidden, and all the loud and complex sounds have disappeared, amplified by this silence. Facial expressions and body language take the audience back to the silent era, and only Ben's gasps accompany his movements in the scene. Here, the film shows us the null extension of the sound, the suppressed sound that creates the sense for the audience to enter the character's heart. At the same time, after losing his voice, the cold and abstract face and body language provide the camera with modeling power (this technique is reused by Elaine in the climax of the final scene), and Ben's father's palm covers the front of the line of sight from time to time after entering the pool, Once again, the oppression of the picture has been enhanced, and the heavy and repressed gasps allow the audience to truly feel Ben's mental state at the moment - his rebelliousness and discomfort in this role-playing game, the fear and deepness of his approaching adult society. Deep powerlessness.
Act2 Scene1
The most complex montage of The Graduate occurs in this sequence of shots. The first scene of the sequence is the swimming pool. The camera first superimposes the different angles of Ben here, and then in the long shot Ben gets up and walks into the house. The matching cut made Ben travel back in time and into the hotel room where he and Mrs Robinson had a tryst, and Mrs Robinson was in the scene.
The coaxial camera cut the scene to see Ben's close-up. The black background (actually the color of the bed board) made us lose Ben's spatial position. After the shape matching, Ben got up and returned to his home. He saw the restaurant in the dining room. parents are having dinner.
He closed the door and went back to the bed, and the switch of Xiaojing left Ben once again plunged into the dark environment and lost his bearings. After that, the film used similar techniques to switch back and forth between three places: home, hotel, and swimming pool, and finally ended the montage with a sound transition. The superb montage technique allows Ben to roam like in his own dream. The whole space is broken by the means used to build the illusion of unity, so that we cannot confirm the place, but we can feel the emotional fluidity of the place very clearly. The secret incestuous romance in the hotel, the party at home, and the reality that is temporarily escaping during diving are the first half of Ben's life in the film, and through Ben's room as the middle place, several spaces are intertwined, giving us a kind of A strong sense of omnipresence, the hidden external reality relationship is reproduced, which together reflect Ben's complex psychological state and fragmented perception at this time.
Act 2 Scene 2
The footage takes place shortly after Ben and Mrs Robinson established their relationship. Robinson's daughter Elaine is coming back from school, and the uninformed people try to bring Elaine and Ben together.
After taking a bath, Ben is washing in the hotel room at this time. A hazy mist surrounds the room. The microscopic movement adds a certain blurring effect to the background, and also highlights Ben's spatial position. Shot116 gives a close-up of Ben's shaving hand. In this close-up, the slightly abrupt shot is connected with the second close-up of the hand in Shot118 under the analysis lens-Ben's hand was scratched by a blade, which shows Ben's unstable emotions from the connection between the two. However, when this close-up occurs, the emotion implied in the shot is not clearly and fully accounted for, and the magnified hand movement is even more implicitly ambiguous at the moment it appears. In fact, the audio-visual synchronization point comes at the moment of pause in Ben's response to Robinson: Ben lets out a heavy gasp. Before this sound point, Ben's hand movements experienced a stagnation in a state of unrhythmic acceleration, and after this synchronization point, the hand movements returned to a steady rhythm. Undoubtedly, this close-up of the hand establishes its meaning in terms of the independent substance itself: its movement reveals the activity of the hand undergoing psychological adjustment in a state of anxiety.
Act 2 Scene 2
This is undoubtedly one of the most attractive shots of the whole film, and its frames at 53:08 have become the cover of the graduate's multiple disc releases. The scene takes place in a hotel room. During another tryst with Robinson, Mrs Robinson warns Ben not to allow him to approach Elaine because he is worried that Ben will fall in love with his daughter Elaine. Ben's self-esteem is damaged, and the two start a heated argument. In this 1 minute 52 second shot, the film externalizes Ben's mental state that is constantly being driven by desire.
The shot begins at the end of the argument between Ben and Mrs Robinson, with Ben venting his dissatisfaction with Mrs Robinson in a verbal offensive, while dressing up and trying to get out of the relationship between the two. As a mature woman, Mrs Robinson is clearly able to control the psychology of young Ben. She has always been in the foreground of the picture, not in a hurry, and when Ben's fierce remarks softened slightly, she first expressed her self-esteem that she did not intend to hurt Ben in euphemism, and then put on stockings by the bed. Robinson's legs fill the foreground with a slight lift in the air. The semi-abstract leg shape with strong sexual innuendo makes Ben unable to resist. The sound design of the film also focuses on rendering the rubbing sound of the mesh and the body when wearing stockings. The perceptual impression provided by this sound shows the seductive ability of the mature female body to Ben. With the obvious language pause and the diversion of eyes, Ben reluctantly chose to compromise, and Mrs Robinson regained the initiative in the relationship between the two.
Act2 Scene 5
The shot is on Ben and Elaine's trip. Ben took Elaine to the ballroom to keep his promise to Mrs Robinson. The vulgar and amorous place made Elaine uncomfortable. Sad and frightened, Elaine escaped from the ballroom filled with red light effects and ran sideways with Ben on the streets of the downtown area.
The follow-up of the telephoto lens not only maintains an objective distance, but also concentrates the power of movement on the straight line of the plane. The pedestrians with a large number of front and rear backgrounds seem to remain still in reality like a stunned photo. Ben and Elaine almost become images. The only moving reality. The mixed psychology of fear and guilt becomes a visible feeling in contrast with the static, forming a strong screen impact. During the movement, the sound and picture maintain an ambiguous counterpoint: the volume of the two is weakened by the sense of distance, but the design of the sound perspective makes the dialogue between the two have a certain whisper-like fit; the shouting of the noisy street , the sound of cars with a sense of speed, and the sound of dance hall music that maintains a psychologically continuous state dominate the vocal cords of the film, helping to express the complex emotions of the characters at this time, and improving the audience's psychological-physical correspondence during the movement.
Act 2 Scene 5
The shot is close to the climax of the second act of the film, with a telephoto pan. After a heated conversation with Mrs Robinson, Ben decides to confess his situation to Elaine, which also marks the beginning of his rebellion against adult society.
Ben runs at high speed in the rain, and the background environment is blurred. There are two forms of movement in the image: the microscopic movement of a lot of rain and the running state of Ben in close-up. Corresponding to the video movement, unnecessary sound components are reduced, and two kinds of sounds are attached to the space: Ben's running footsteps and the sharp sound of rain. The excellent synchronous integration of audio and visual makes the movement in the shot full of rapid rhythm and rhythm, which makes Ben's psychology of changing from escape to redemption very concrete, and like an arrow, it points the film to the character conflict in the next shot.
Act 4 Scene 2
Ben runs on the road in the townscape. Ben finds out where Elaine's wedding will take place and drives to it. The wedding was in progress and Ben almost reached the wedding chapel, but the car ran out of gas on the way and he had to get out of the car and run wild.
Telephoto panning, Ben's movement from right to left, and two staggered cars constantly appearing in the foreground.
In this shot, the sound of Ben's footsteps disappears, and only the sound of the wind from the high-speed vehicle is left in the vocal cords to convey a sense of time, and it is rendered in the form of a rendering that highlights the absence of the footsteps in the shot. The use of this omitted sound makes the movement of the characters not integrated by the audio-visual illusion in the scene. Ben's movements seem to be separated from the entity, but stray on the screen in a pure state, contrary to the visual habits of the characters. The direction of movement of the car and the multi-directional vehicle movement in the foreground together suggest Ben's mental feeling of fatigue and confusion at this time.
This state continues into the movement of the next shot. Ben was desperately running forward. In the compressed space, the cold and objective telephoto lens made it seem that he could never run to the end; and in the second half of the telephoto lens, the perfect tense of the movement was displayed: in the zoom After panning, the characters break free from the narrow space and come to the broad perspective space. The suppressed state of the vocal cords is released in the music punctuation like a strong blow, which makes a footnote for the completion of the movement. Ben's pent-up emotions are liberated upon arriving at the wedding chapel, and this dramatic perception heralds the climax of the film.
Special Discussion: Close-up
As an extension of photography, film also has a preference for raw images. Since objects are always ambiguous, they have theoretically infinite psychological and spiritual correspondences. And the screen is tending to reflect the ambiguous nature of natural objects, and the cinematographic lens is always pursuing what Lucian Sever calls "the nameless state of reality". In the specific analysis of the editing principles of the shot, relying on the ambiguity of this reality, the shot is required to maintain the meaning of this ambiguity to some extent, and to explore the external reality from the psychological-physical correspondence. The narrative nature of the film, as well as the nature of montage, requires the camera to be interspersed with the plot. "Any narrative film needs to be edited in such a way that it doesn't just confine itself to telling plot entanglements, but that it can be discarded in favor of certain objects in a suggestive ambiguity."
Through a large number of close-up shots of characters' faces, "The Graduate" fully demonstrates the cinematic quality of editing and objects. Different from the traditional Hollywood scene cutting method, in the scenes of "The Graduate", the facial close-ups of the characters are often placed at the beginning of the scene slightly abruptly, such as Act1 Scene1 Shot1, Scene2 Shot5, Scene4 Shot56, etc. The audience is unable to establish a spatial position, and the dramatic connection between things is temporarily put on hold. In this way, the film forces us to pay attention to the faces of the characters, and from this suggestive face material, associates the potential possibilities in the course of things. As a feature film, the effect of this feature is also widely used in the film's narrative. In Act2, the opening scene of Scene4, a steady push shot focusing on Mrs Robinson from the distant view to the close-up of the face allows us to establish a direct gaze relationship with it.
It's hard to guess what Mrs Robinson is thinking because it's the beginning of a scene and her expression is very vague on camera. In the next shot, a close-up of Ben's face is given. The analytical nature of the shot and the coherent ambient sound establish a temporal and spatial continuity between shots, but Ben's expression is the same complex and solidified. This prior blurring does not give the shot. The precise meaning, but to allow the audience to establish a psychological connection in the observation of the character's face. It wasn't until Shot131, Shot132, Ben and Mrs Robinson were framed at the same time that the duo's dialogue footage really revealed the meaning of their blurred facial expressions: their relationship was mired in frustration and suspicion because of Elaine's arrival.
Close-up of abstracted Ben
From the first shot of the film, Ben's facial close-up forms the motif of the entire film, and it appears repeatedly in almost all scenes. These close-ups of the face form an impression of extension and infinity in our minds, first of all as a repeatedly honed object. Under Nichols' tutelage, Dustin Hoffman delivered a riveting performance comparable to Bresson's acclaimed Diary of a Country Priest. In most of Ben's close-ups, what we can capture on his face is not the precise reaction associated with the front and rear shots, but the normality of existence, the freezing of a state - the lack of drama in his facial expressions Deduction, but always just a vague, like a momentary freeze of inability to react after a strong shock, a purely suggestive picture. Ben's blurred face is abstracted from the connection of the camera as an object in the repeated integration. Let us re-read the character spirit implied by Ben's face from the overall frame of the film: uncertainty about his own future, uncertainty about the adult world Fit, irrational desire for Mrs Robinson. In the long-shot close-up at the end of the film, the audience will find that Ben and Elaine have not found their own answers in their resistance to their future, and the young victory brings only the filler of unfulfilled dreams.
telephoto
Like other new Hollywood films, The Graduate has a strong sense of the times. The film abandoned the habit of traditional Hollywood set shooting, and used live shooting in scenes such as streets, dance halls, schools, etc., so that all kinds of realistic molecules entered the picture. The telephoto lens fashionable in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s showed objective documentary quality when shooting on location, and also allowed the street under the wide screen to be compressed into an all-encompassing corridor. The camera observes young people in different clothes on the crowded street from the far end. The realistic environmental noises such as sad jazz, brisk soft rock, and noisy crowds are rendered under the application of multi-channel technology. The unique sound space enhances the realism and credibility of the scene, quickly pulls the audience into the atmosphere of the times, and deeply feels the American social scene in the late 1960s.
hand held
Hand-held footage, popularized by the post-war documentary movement, is also used in this film, as does the shaky, shaky, and shaky images that inevitably result from mobile photography. In the climax of the final scene, the hand-held camera takes us to witness the chaotic wedding scene: Ben climbs the stairs and fights with Mr Robinson, who then roughly pushes the wedding crowd, brandishes the church cross in self-defense, and escapes with Elaine The two men triumphed in this revolt against their future.
Ben's rebelliousness and emotion hidden under the vaguely restrained expression countless times are fully unleashed in the final scene. For the first time, he is so psychologically close to the audience that strong emotions and character conflicts are shown in the shaking shots. The tension of reality allows the audience to participate in this war about love and freedom.
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