This week in class our guest lecturer, Rexx, showed us the film Road to Perdition. This film is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It follows a man, Michael, who is in the mob, and his son, Michael, on their journey to seek vengeance against a fellow mobster, Michael Sr.’s brother by adoption, who murdered his wife and son. On their journey they are wanting to reach a relatives beach house in a town called Perdition. In religion, perdition is a state of eternal punishment and damnation – or Hell.

  For this week, we were learning about cinematography. Cinematography is the science or art of a motion-picture photography by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically or chemically. There were many notable cinematography techniques used in this film. I believe the main one being that any violence in the film was shown out of the camera shot. This film was meant to be very violent, it is about men in the mob after all, but all the violent scenes occurred out of the shot of the camera.

The most notable scene in the film not showing the violence was when Tom Hanks character – Michael was standing at the end of a street as Rooney came out with his men to get into his car. It is raining and the end of the road where Michael is very dark, so much so that you cannot see him. But then suddenly you just hear the gunshots and see Rooney’s men dropping to the ground. After all his men are dead, Michael comes walking down the street with his shotgun in his hands and all that is left is standing is Rooney. When Michael shoots Rooney all you see is Michaels face. You don’t see Rooney getting shot or actually see Michael shooting the gun at him, you just see his face and you can watch his expression as he kills his adoptive father. I thought that this was a very neat technique to use in a film that in a way centers around violence. As someone who is not very into violence – I liked that the cinematographers did this.

After doing a little research on the film and it’s cinematography, another technique I thought was neat, and something I realized after reading this, is that in the daylight scenes, the cinematographers placed a piece of black silk over the lens to filter out the light. It made sense to me after realizing how dark the film actually was. The cinematographers also shot at wide apertures to keep the depth of field sharply focused.

One more very notable thing that the cinematographers of the film did was that in the beginning of the film, they took farther shots of Michael. They showed in a lot through doorways and hallways, across a room. They kept him out of a lot of shots in the beginning to show that he is kind of distanced from his family due to being in the mob. I think another thing that this portrays would be the perspective of his father through the son Michael’s eyes, how he sees his father in the beginning of the film. He did not have a very close relationship with his father in the beginning. It wasn’t really until his mother and brother were murdered that he started having a real relationship with his father.

One more thing that we spoke about in class that I thought was cool was that they framed the characters a lot. There would be shots of characters down a hallway for example, and the way the hallways was, it would kind of lead down to the characters standing at the end of the hallway. They would also frame them in doorways. For instance, when Michael Sr. returns from murdering his brother to come back to get Michael Jr. to finally go to Perdition, they framed Michael Sr. in the hallway coming back and then Michael Jr. was framed in a doorway sitting on a bed waiting for his father.

There was a lot of action happening in this film and I really enjoyed seeing and getting to learn about these cinematography techniques. I don’t think I really paid attention to these things in films before, but I think that from now on I will.