Please note that this is a post created for the Advanced Filmmaking class, taken at Singapore American School during the academic year 2020-2021 in the first semester (Aug 2020-Dec 2020). This was originally submitted as an audio file. The writing below the film is a transcription of the assignment.
Hello my name is Alisha Bhandari. Today I will be discussing the 2001 social realism film, About a Girl, directed by Brian Percival. This film won the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film and was written by Julie Rutterford who found her inspiration for the script from children and her experiences with children.
As mentioned earlier, this is a social realism film, meaning that it is a realistic artistic depiction of contemporary life, as a means of social or political comment. Throughout this piece, the themes and issues raised are teenage pregnancy, social deprivation, negligence, and ambition. These themes are made obvious through the director’s choice of color palette, character proxemics, jump cuts, and the mannerism and character of the central girl in the film.
I will be performing a textual analysis on the extract from About a Girl, beginning at approximately 5 minutes and 7 seconds, with the handheld shot of the girl walking alongside the canal, and ending approximately a minute later with nearly the camera set up. I decided to choose this extract because I loved the way the colors worked together to present the scene with the girl and her father. Brian Percival managed to give the audience the illusion that the father is neglecting his child at that very moment, even though it was a flashback to things in the past. I loved how the bright diner setting directly contradicted the intense and impactful conversation the two were having.
In the first few seconds of this extract, the girl is walking by the dark canal in the underdeveloped part of Manchester, we can infer this because of the way the set is dressed (very dark, run-down, graffiti all over the walls). The camera is at eye level with the girl in a handheld style, making the audience feel like they are walking alongside her and listening to her stories. Subsequently, this also tells the audience that she feels so isolated that she turns to the audience in hopes they will lend a listening ear. Contrasting the sequence outside the pub and the parts leading up to it, the film is approaching a bluer tint and a colder temperature, slowly desaturating from the bright sun that was in previous shots. This tells the audience that the story is about to get a lot lonelier than what the girl has already revealed to us.
Contrasting the unrest that the audience feels when watching the girl walking, the sequence suddenly cuts to a shot of herself sitting across from a man that the audience can infer is her father - since she brings up the thought of living with him. In this sequence, the set has elements of bright colors - reds and oranges and greens - but they are desaturated which pulls the attention away from the colors and towards the characters in the shot. This is a static shot in a closed form which is a stark contrast that causes an uncomfortable environment, telling the audience that there is nothing outside this scene except these two characters. Although the camera angle is at eye level with the girl, she is not the largest person in the frame- her father is. He is looking down at the girl, making the angle of the shot seem lower than it really is. They are at a social distance, with the father making every attempt to adjust himself so that he is further away from the girl, but fights with the constraints of the cramped diner. This particularly happens after the girl asks “What’s wrong with me then?” which directly contrasts the dialogue she was having when she was walking alongside the canal and tells the audience that she’s so independent that she can buy her own ice cream.
In between the flashback sequence, the audience is taken to a closed form mid shot of the girl sitting above the canal with her feet dangling off the ledge before moving to a wider shot. This tells the audience to first understand her feelings and to empathize with the girl until we need to take a step back and realize how small she really is in this vast world we live in. In this short sequence we can see that there are no other colors in this frame except for blue. Her cream colored coat is now a very pale shade of blue, as are the trees in the background and the plastic bag at her side. After the diner scene, the camera cuts back to the handheld setting, but this time we are closer to the girl in a close up (in comparison to the mid shots we see prior). She just revealed something that was incredibly personal and the director wants the audience to feel close to her, whereas at the end of the diner sequence when she talks about peanuts, the camera cuts to a ¾ shot to tell the audience that the conversation with her dad was very painful and she needed some space.
This film tackles a lot of serious issues that teenagers are forced to face everyday in poorer neighborhoods. I thoroughly enjoy watching social realism films, and this was definitely one that I am incredibly glad to have been able to analyze. This concludes my presentation, thank you!
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