Cristian
Cristian
Ms. R. Milani
Eng 1D1-05
3 January 2005
Fighting Against Prejudice
The Pirates of the Caribbean, set in the Caribbean Sea in the 17th century is a good example of negative prejudice. Gore Verbinski, the film director, highlights the negative prejudice using different techniques. There are two types of prejudice, negative and positive. Negative prejudice is prejudging someone in a wrong way based on their appearance or behavior. For instance, Commodore Norington from the French Military government just presumed that pirates are evil, lying, deceitful thieves who drink all day and just linger around anywhere. However, in the movie it was established that not all pirates are the same. As an example, Captain Jack Sparrow, pirate and captain of The Black Pearl sailing ship, seemed strange and ridiculous, but in fact he is a very honorable man. Furthermore, Jack helped young William Turner rescue Lady Swan from an evil band of pirates which were also the former crew of Jack Sparrow. Prejudging pirates based on stories told about them, is erroneous and negative.
The movie director used numerous techniques to emphasize the theme of prejudice. One of the techniques used is montage through editing. This type of montage indicates that the camera films a particular scene through diverse angles using a variation of movements including panning and traveling. Panning means that there is a stationary camera which rotates horizontally and a traveling camera moves itself horizontally. For instance, in the quarrelling scene between Jack and William, this is effective since the audience is given both perspectives, from each of the people fighting and highlights William’s feeling towards pirates. Another technique that was used to emphasize prejudice is the tone and attitude of a scene. These two techniques were made possible by using a combination of close shot selection, medium camera angle and increasingly suspenseful music. Through these filming methods, the dueling scene conveys a strong prejudice feeling and a suspenseful mood. Close shot selection indicates that the camera was filming at a very close range to the subjects, which gives the audience the feeling that they are actually inside the action. Therefore, in the fighting action, the viewer feels that they are in the same room where Jack and William are fighting. When the camera is filming the scene at eye level, this is called medium camera angle. This helps underline a point because the audience is feeling that the characters from the movie are actually speaking to them. When William and Jack were dueling, they also talked to each other. Whenever one of them said something, the camera was using medium angle filming and it resulted in giving the viewer the sensation that one of the characters are talking to them. Moreover, in this type of scene there is increasingly suspenseful music which means that the music keeps the audience engrossed in the film and the music makes the viewer eager to find out what is going to happen next in the scene. Also, the music assists in dramatizing prejudice by keeping the audience in suspense. There is also another technique which is sometimes used to realize a point in a film; rate of film movement. This technique uses different types of frame motions, stop, slow, normal and fast motion. In the quarrelling scene, normal motion was used because this rate of film is as fast as real life motion and the audience has a richer experience with the negative prejudice that is projected in the fighting between Jack and William. These series of techniques articulate prejudice in the fighting scene between Jack and William because the eye level filming provides the audience with the ability to understand what each character is feeling about the other one.
