A Man Escaped

A Man Escaped was impressive.  This is why: I forgot the face that it was made in 1956 while watching it.  I would hazard to say I was as in engrossed and on the edge of my seat while watching it as any modern film.  There are a couple things I would like to talk about in this blog, the use of Mozart, and the voice over. 

The use of Mozart was significant, to me, in that it introduces the idea of a musical motif in a film.  I payed special attention to it throughout the film and I think I noticed it play mostly when the men walked down the stairs in the prison or through a hallway.  This reminded me of a certain Asian Cinema film I watched (the title escapes me currently) in which the main theme would play every time the man walked down a certain set of stairs.  It sets a sort of tone for those moments in the film, a sort of reprieve from what is happening or helps to signify a ritual.  In A Man Escaped this ritual is walking out to empty their buckets and wash, this seems to be the time that most of the planning occurs and also communication, it becomes an important ritual in the main characters day. 

I would also like to look at the voice over, as  Bordwell and Thompson write: “Fontaine often tells what his thoughts had been” (Bordwell and Thompson 1).  We begin to not be able to see everything from the image, we must now also rely on the narration to understand some things that are happening, and especially Fontaine’s thoughts.  In earlier silent film all details were given from the image (even in title cards).  Now that sound has progressed, the image doesn’t need to tell us everything, instead the sound and image can interact and give us a compiled “image” of what we are seeing.  We can see a good example of this when Fontaine has been told he will be put to death, it looks like he is crying on his bed but the voice over tells us he is laughing.  We wouldn’t have known this detail without the interaction of both the image and the sound.