I will be deconstructing four scenes from the film, ‘Stand by Me’, the opening scene, and back to the 50’s, the train scene and the final scene of the boys’ journey. Stand By Me is a coming of age film set in the 50’s where four boys Chris, Gordie, Vern and Teddy as we watch them go on a journey to adulthood. The film is more of process than an event. The boys’ purpose of the journey is to find a dead body.

In the first scene we see the title ‘Stand by Me’ in white font with a black background. There is no music. We then see a jeep in the distance and we are not quite sure yet what is going on. It is a hot landscape; we then see an establishing shot of a man in the jeep who looks quite dejected, cut to a newspaper with a headline saying ‘Attorney Chris Chambers Fatally Stabbed in a Restaurant’. Two young men then ride past on bicycles from the point of view of the man in the jeep and the audience is lead to believe that this triggers a flashback of his past.

The director tries to indicate to the audience what kind of film this is in the first scene. He is trying to prepare the audience what is to come in the rest of the film and already the spectators know that the film is a sad, thoughtful film.

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The next extract I will be analysing is back to the 50’s, the second scene. In this scene we see a young boy purchasing a magazine from a shop. We see that we have gone back to the 50’s as the boy pays for the magazine at a till from the shopkeeper’s viewpoint as the till clings. For the first time we hear a voice which is a voiceover of a man saying ‘I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead body’. The boy walks out of the shop and into a small, American ...

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