Similar texts - Main Task - The Good German

Textual Analysis of 'The Good German'

Screen shots of:

Actors & costume

Props/codes

Subterranean sets

Lighting/shadow

The Good German, a visually compelling neo-noir by director Martin Soderberghe, has a wealth of features to analyse and take inspiration from in the planning of our own noir film. George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, both mature actors in their late 30s or 40s, with theatrical, strong and attractive faces, are cast as the classic figures of male protagonist and femme fatale. Actors around this age appear frequently as the main characters in film noir to create a certain sense of jaded cynicism and darkness which would perhaps be less achievable with younger actors lacking in conviction. Set in post-war Berlin, a city devastated by bombings, the characters’ costumes are appropriate for the era, with Clooney’s character Jake dressed in a captain’s uniform throughout most of the film and Cate Blanchett’s Lena in longer 40s dresses or austere skirts with jackets. Already the location of the film denotes the dark side of human nature and its capacity for self-destruction by immediately confronting the audience with the consequences of war. While fitting for the decade, both costumes have connotations of repression and confinement, with the uniform and the strong presence of men in long coats and fedora hats symbolising a lost identity and anxious sense of displaced masculinity.

Soderberghe’s use of props offer recognisable, strong visual codes for film noir, and it is becoming more and more apparent to us that a key component in creating meaning in this type of film is to make the audience explicitly aware of its genre, so our audience can use a general knowledge of noir’s themes and moods as a subtext informing their interpretation. In this case, a list of notable codes used includes pistols, low-brimmed hats, cigarettes and dark, old-fashioned cars. In combination with these props, the sets used for filming are archetypically noir-esque, with some examples being cellar bars, underground clubs, underneath bridges and sewer tunnels creating a subterranean world of corruption, immorality and mystery. Lighting in The Good German reinforces these connotations, as the harsh divide of bright white light and deep shadow, often fractured or split through blinds or bars is suggestive of the ongoing internal struggle between the good and the bad, reflecting inner anguish and turmoil, while remaining highly stylised.

An interesting feature of The Good German is Soderberghe’s distinctive cinematography, bearing many of the hallmarks of old film noir and showing an unwillingness to adopt the more modern styles of camerawork seen in most contemporary neo-noirs with their ‘homogenised’ approach to noir. The editing employs vintage scene transition techniques such as screen wipes and slow fades to black, as well as stilted versions of shot/reverse shot whereby the camera only shows the character when he is speaking. While pertaining to the style of old noir and serving as a nod to classic filmmaking, the meaning created in these decisions includes a lack of cohesion in the screen-wipe and shot/reverse shot, suggesting a disjointed sense of time and a difficulty in communication between characters, and a sense of resolve and purpose in the protagonist as seen in old detective pulp fiction and comic books. (<- Image)The film was unusually shot with 32mm lenses and shown in a 1.33:1 ratio, rebuffing the accepted currency of widescreen cinema, as a steadicam glides slowly through car windows and along pavements following the footsteps of the protagonist, or slowly moving upwards with the use of a crane to reveal a broader scene from above. This slow and roving mobility of the camera and thus the audience’s eye creates an uneasy sense of omniscience, paranoia and covert knowledge. Overall the unique visual impression and the conventions Soderberghe has chosen to adopt in The Good German creates a dark underworld of misery and compulsion, and certain elements of this modern noir will be an inspiration to our own film.