The Strangers; Media Coursework
It is something we do naturally- something we do not think about doing. It is something we cannot control and we simply do it! It has been scientifically proven that we judge a person in the first three seconds after meeting them. 'The Strangers' is a short movie, magnificently created and thought of to show describe judgement, stereotypes and religion. Erez tadmor had to put a brave face on, to make this short eight movie make (and I do not regret spending these eight minutes watching such a movie made from an amateur director, because it really does make your heart beat so fast you think it is going to explode whilst also delivering a powerful message to its audience), which takes a lot of courage, because it shows the everyday lives of some people - and I can tell you from my experience after living in Israel for a few years; this does happen, but not every person is aware about what goes on behind closed doors because of the differences... such as religion - and the hatred they have built against others because of some of our horrific historic events which still haunt us today.
Although we see two different religions intimidating each other at the start, Erez Tadmor then twists the end to make us realise that our judgements may not always be true and that we should always question these judgements. In the end we see the two religions working together and win. They unite. This short movie is a high paced piece of reality which will keep you at the edge of your seat as you watch every second of this masterpiece, but we do not need to realise and take in the powerful message which is being sent to us from behind the screen... and from this very simple storyline. The story begins with an ordinary train- underground- and a Jewish man getting on it. We then see he chooses to sit opposite a man; a man who is reading an Arabic newspaper (or so we assume). Suddenly they begin to change stares; not very nice ones ("I hate you" kind of stares), and we could already sense the change of atmosphere on this normal, every day train ride. As we keep watching, we soon realise that we have less and less nails left at the tip of our fingers and that our heart is beating faster and faster, as if it is going to explode. We could already see sparks being sent from each other's heads, but what is yet to come is something much bigger then our imagination... 5 men from the other carriage of the train entered the carriage with the Jewish and the Muslim men, but they decide to ignore the Jewish man, because he looks "white" and start to intimidate the Muslim man who was reading the newspaper with the "unusual" writing. Now that is what you can call a change of atmosphere; I mean... we only had changing stares between the two men before, but now we have got five racist skinheads intimidating an innocent Muslim man by drawing the Nazi sign on his newspaper with a black spray can (now that's what you call intimidation!). To make this action filled movie keep moving forwards and keep us on our toes, a very unusual music starts to play in the background which helps our heart beat to it's rhythm. To beat faster and faster. Watching this movie for the first time really made me guess what is going to happen next, and I was really scared about what was going to happen. Erez Tadmor created a very good end to the film, and we see the Jewish man and the Muslim man escaping, and they make it out alive from the train. Although, there is no language spoken in this film; we do see a lot of body language and hear a cheer (or a scream) at the end of the movie.
Silent movie. No speech. Just body language.
What makes this short movie so amazing and interesting to watch, is the way the props were used, and although the movie does not contain any voices to talk to us, the items which were used by the director clearly symbolise many and different things, which we are aware of, but just choose to ignore. First of all we see a man reading a newspaper, he looks innocent. However, the newspaper is not written in French -the film was filmed in France, and we know this because we hear a ...
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Silent movie. No speech. Just body language.
What makes this short movie so amazing and interesting to watch, is the way the props were used, and although the movie does not contain any voices to talk to us, the items which were used by the director clearly symbolise many and different things, which we are aware of, but just choose to ignore. First of all we see a man reading a newspaper, he looks innocent. However, the newspaper is not written in French -the film was filmed in France, and we know this because we hear a woman talking in French from the microphone on the train- it is in fact written in Arabic. There is close up of the newspaper to make us [the audience] judge the Muslim man. "Is he a terrorist?"
You know how the media stereotypes all the Muslims... and now it is a natural thing for us to think that any Muslim might be a terrorist... Well the man sitting opposite him could have thought this and started to give him dirty looks. However, not everyone can read Arabic, as a result the director showed us another close up, but of a picture this time. The picture was about the war in Palestine, between Israel and Palestine, and so was the article in the newspaper. As soon as the Jewish man realised that this man might be a follower of Islam, and possibly be against the Jewish people; he proudly got his necklace out and started to play with it. I bet your wondering what he had on his chain... It was a symbol for the Jewish religion; the Star of David. Repeatedly, he slid the star from one side to the other side of his chain. (Okay, we get that you are Jewish!) It seemed to me that even the man sitting opposite him was getting a bit irritated; not just me, but then... Wouldn't you get annoyed if someone just stared at you with the look of loathing and repeatedly played with their piece of jewellery to get some sort of message across to you? Even if you have done nothing wrong? Well, I think I've made my point. However, the director does not only use these simple kind of symbols, Tadmor does make our brains work, like a little mind game, but as we join in and play he makes us aware of the outside world and the dangers beyond our knowledge barrier. After about a third of the film, the atmosphere suddenly changes and music starts to play in the background, this means the editor is preparing us for something more serious, but what can it be? A fight? A bomb? (Muslim guy... Terrorism... Relationships- Get it?) No. In fact 5 men come from another carriage and notice the Arabic newspaper. Suddenly, one of the new men gets a spray can out and draws a Swastika on the white newspaper. There is another symbol which the Jewish editor decided to use in this very powerful movie. This cross is widely recognised around the world and so it is easy for the audience to understand who these men are, why they are dressed like they are, and why they all have bald heads. The skinheads is yet another powerful symbol which can also represent "beware I am racist, so do not get in my way" type of person. To add to this, the racist men are all wearing the same type of clothing; white shirt, jeans and black boots. A uniform. (If that's what you want to call it). However, what is fascinating about this is the fact that they are wearing black boots, and you walk on boots. As a result, this could represent that they only see pure white, Christian people with blue eyes (blue coloured jeans may represent the eyes) as human beings, but all other races have to go. As a result they walk on the boots, which implies that anyone who is not white is on the lowest status in their eyes.
Furthermore, the camera angles also tell us a huge amount of information from the story. For example: the close up on the newspaper. As I have mentioned before, if we did not have the close up we would not have been able to tell what is in the picture on the newspaper page, or what is written in the article [for those who can read in Arabic]. The close up helps us judge this innocent man, and this is what the director wanted... he wanted us to make a judgement and at the end of the movie judge the judgement. To add to this, as the camera was focusing on the newspaper, it suddenly changed to completely focus on the eyes of the man reading the paper. However, this time the director chooses to show us an extreme close up of his eyes, which were quite shadowy and dark, and this could also help us with our prejudice against this man; "Terrorist. Beware!" this camera angle also has a great impact on the audience, and it would make you think he is not as innocent as he seems, to be honest he seems more guilty. Mysterious. We also have another extreme close up, but this time it is an image of the other man, his necklace, his star, the Jewish symbol. This is to make us realise why he is giving his "enemy" the look of loathing. Also the star on his chain is quite small, as a result the camera had to zoom in to get this image into our heads, and realise that it's a "Jewish VS Muslim war". Also the necklace is quite light and shiny, but before we see the necklace, we see the other man's dark shadowy eyes. This could imply that the Jewish man is in fact the good one and the Muslim the bad one. (Well, that's what I thought at the start of the movie; but it just depends how you look at the images on the screen). As we keep watching we have a medium shot: showing the racist skin heads coming towards the two innocent men (walking from one carriage to another can only mean one thing... trouble). In my opinion the medium shot was used to show that there are a few men coming forward for trouble, but we did not quite get to count all of the men- and this made us keep guessing how many there are. There a few more close ups as well of the faces of the racist men, which once again makes us wonder how many men there really are, because if we saw a long shot we could easily count up the number or approaching trouble makers and we would not stay as tensed, trying to win in this mind game. Finally we do see a long shot. It is at the end when the two "enemies" get off the train and become friends (personally, I don't think they should have made such a big deal because of their backgrounds at the start of their journey). I think this long shot was to show that now they are one, that they are together, just in one big picture. At the start when we saw the close ups of just their faces, it made the audience realise they do not like each other, and to me it seemed like a tennis match, or a ping pong game- just focusing on one person hitting the ball at a time; fighting to be the winner. However, when they worked together; they realised that they don't need to fight for the space, and that they can just fit in one picture.
To add to this, the editor used great sound effects to keep his audience's blood rushing through their veins, as their heart beat faster and faster (and when I looked around, I could see a few people biting their nails and covering their mouths). However, the director did not use any language in his movie; just plain body language, but he did use diegetic and non-diegetic sound. As the train approached we could hear diegetic sound and non-diegetic, this was the WHOOOSH sound and also if you listen carefully you could hear drums being hit too (I am sure you do not hear drums banging underground). The drumming, straight away builds up the speed of our heart beating, and making us prepared for the high paced moving movie. Talking about our hearts beating, when the skin heads approach the men, the background music suddenly becomes louder and louder. This sound could represent both men's hearts, but also could be the adrenalin rushing through the evil men's body (but personally, it was a great choice of a sound as it made me sit right at the edge of my chair- I nearly fell). We then hear another sound, and I would say it's the whispering of the men, but we do not see anyone's lips moving, as a result it was added it to create more tension and confuse the audience, the confusion would make us watch it to find out how this great eight minute movie ended. "Is it going to be a happy ending?" We soon get our hopes up that the Jewish man will escape these men, but sadly something very shocking happens. His phone starts to ring. The ringtone is a Jewish song- called Hava Nagila- and in less then a second; 12 eyes are staring at the man, (he should have left the train and forgot about his phone). This is one good diegetic sound, and it can also be used as another symbol to show that he is a Jewish man, but it also releases the tension of the audience, and I guarantee you that you will hear some laughs around you. Even you might laugh; well I found it funny. However, the director does not let us take our eyes off of the screen, and makes sure we keep them glued to the screen, by once again changing the atmosphere and suddenly everyone is running after eachother.
Finally, I think this is a great movie which explains the everyday life of the people around us behind closed doors. Erez Tadmor, himself was born in Israel, and I think he chose to make this movie to show everyone else how people are being treated, but he was not biased and made the Jewish man look as if he was the bad one. He [the Jewish man] started off with the intimidating, which implies that maybe he has treated Muslims the same way, but changed his opinion on them afterwards. It is understandable why this director has won 25 awards for his work, even though he is still an amateur director (I mean he doesn't work in Hollywood). However, we should not always focus on how a film is made, and how long it is, the important thing is the quality of the message- in this case- and what this man is trying to send across. If we see a person sitting opposite us we should not always make assumptions and let our judgements take over our minds, because then we will stay trapped in that little box (the train could represent the box) and you will never escape the racist skinheads (our judgements are the racist skinheads). The two men- Jewish man and Muslim man- have escaped, because they worked together and put their judgements aside. Now it is your turn to escape. It is our turn to escape.
Susan Lednarova Page 1
