Monday, October 7, 2019
Ringu
Remember how to look at a film through a feminist lens? Choose a five-minute scene in Ringu and examine the role of women and how they are portrayed in your selected scene and in the film as a whole. How does the director show us? Be sure to discuss this topic CINEMATICALLY. Back up all of your statements with evidence from the film. Your response should be 3 well-developed paragraphs. You must reference one of the big names (from feminist film criticism) such as Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, and Molly Haskell. You must state the title of the essay and use at least one quote. I have plenty of books in the library to help you with this.
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0:02:30 - 0:07:30
ReplyDeleteThis five minute clip begins with two teenage girls, Tomoko and Masami, are seen hanging out and discussing what they had done over the weekend. One of the girls recalls a mysterious phone call and video that adheres to an ominous urban legend about untimely death. The scene ends with one of the girls dying by the hand of an unknown source. In this scene, the director, Hideo Nakata, depicts the two girls as vulnerable and as if they are being watched by something. This relates to Laura Mulvey’s essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, as the female characters in the scene are put in a position in which they are unknowingly being observed by an external party; they are subject to a sort of paranormal voyeurism.
From the beginning of the film to 0:02:30, the shots that were used to follow the conversation between were as follows: establishing shot, medium shot, reverse shot. The first part of the girls’ conversation is normal, just discussing an anecdote. However, as the conversation turns more grim, Tomoko becomes worried, as something similar to the story being told happened to her. Her fright is depicted at 0:02:30 by breaking the 180 degree rule and showing the conversation from the other side. This creates an unsettling atmosphere and the camera stays on this side of Tomoko and Masami for the remainder of the conversation. There clearly has been a shift in tone, as Tomoko is worried for her life. The camera stays on this side of the two girls as they calm down from their fright and become more comfortable again. Likewise, the viewer becomes more comfortable with the drastic shift in angle. However, the 180 degree rule is broken once again, at 0:05:15, when the phone rings from downstairs. The girls are once again unnerved, as is the audience. Masami and Tomoko bolt down the stairs to answer the phone as the camera slowly follows them from behind, as if it does not know what is waiting around the corner. The rising tension as the phone rings, contrasted with the slow movement from both the actors and the camera creates a more ominous atmosphere in general.
I chose this scene to represent Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, as I think that it plays into the “final girl” trope that horror movies often explore, as well as having the female subjects be shown as vulnerable and as something to be preyed upon. The final girl trope refers to the common horror movie stereotype of the last girl to survive in a horror movie, typically in slasher films. This film portrays a more modern version of the trope with the character of Reiko, who is left to solve the mystery behind the video. While neither Tomoko nor Masami can be considered a “final girl” they are portrayed as the stereotypical teenagers who are oblivious to the danger that awaits them and can be observed through a feminist lens. This presents the question of why young women have been historically depicted as dumb and naive in horror films. Although Ringu is far from a slasher film, it was produced in 1998, an era during which such films were the bulk of the horror genre, with women dominantly playing the role of victims. This can be analysed through Mulvey’s essay, in which she notes “ traditionally, the women displayed has functioned on two levels: as an erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as the erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium…” and that scopophillia “has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt...asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness”. This can be interpreted as men projecting their dominance over women in the cruelest way, as well as the audience. In Ringu, this is not as extreme, but the shots of Tomoko leading up to her death suggest the presence of a third party, peering in without the subject’s knowledge. For example, at 0:06:04 is from another room, giving the appearance that the girls are being watched. The same effect is achieved at 0:07:00, with a close up from behind the fridge door as the television turns on in the background. At this point, the observer has made themselves known to the subject. At 0:07:51, the audience is given a close up of the back of Tomoko’s neck as she trembles in fear before she turns around and dies with a face of shock.
DeleteThe scene achieves showing the vulnerability of young women, as well as how easily they can be preyed upon, satisfying the trope of the final girl later in the film with Reiko, who is left to fix the problem a man created.
ReplyDeleteThe excerpt I’ve chosen from the film, Ringu, is the first showing of the threat in the film, the video that brings death. In this scene the main character is retracing the steps of dead students in order to find their cause of death through a vhs tape. The vhs tape depicts a montage of disturbing shirt videos that range from unrecognizable text to a woman brushing her hair. Narratively speaking, Ringu is a film centered around a woman solving mysterious deaths. She does the majority of the work to solve it but can’t without the help of a man. With the exception of the male, this film was a female empowered piece but that wasn’t completely true as she is written to only succeed with the aid of a man. But he dies and she doesn’t.
Cinematically speaking, she is portrayed at center frame, making her the focus of all attention and her emotions. This depicts her as most emotional after watching the video that causes death because the framing draws attention to her face. The framing is also important later in the scene as she is positioned in the background of the frame while her ex-husband is in the foreground. This could signify is assertion into investigation as she is no longer able to complete it herself because she has seen video and will likely die in a week. The mise-en-scene in this film includes the TV that always seems to take up a portion of the frame when the camera pans to the main character. This indicates a physical block on her journey towards discovering the origins of the tape. This block could include her death looming over her or, through a feminsit lens, men not allowing her to reach her full potential in discovering the tape’s backstory however, that isn’t completely correct because she does successfully over it. Ultimately, the cinematic elements in this 5 minute scene help construct the idea of feminism within this film by portraying her as the lead investigator but also emotional at the same time.