Preview

American History X: Analysis of Lighting and Color

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
2190 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
American History X: Analysis of Lighting and Color
American History X
"American History X" is divided into two color schemes, black and white, and color, these schemes symbolize the before and after of Derek Vinyard's life. The film is about the life of an "idol" skinhead and D.O.C. member Derek Vinyard, and how his life of hate and racism has affected his family and himself. Throughout the movie the importance of color and lighting is obvious, because it divides the movie into two fused worlds of Derek. Some of the movie is shot in black and white to show that, at that point in time, Derek was a racist Nazi, and only saw people in terms of their skin color, black and white. The remainder of the film, shot in color, symbolizes that Derek sees the whole world, and sees people as people, not as black, white, yellow, or brown. He understands that D.O.C. isn't really worth all the pain and anguish that he's been taught. The lighting of the characters also changes in "American History X" because Derek's face gradually becomes fully lit when he becomes aware of the fact that the Nazi movement is wrong and he needs to get both him and his brother Danny out of it.
"American History X" opens with the credits over a black and white beach. I think the ocean symbolizes Cameron Alexander, the organizer of all the white power groups from the United State's west cost, and how he, like the waves of the ocean, is very ‘give and take'. As in you have to sacrifice some to reach the common goal. The ocean also seemed like it was in layers, and how Cameron was the collective ocean and was using the young, disconnected youth skinheads to build himself up. The next scene is one of the most intense of the whole film, Derek is woken up by his brother Danny to find out that three "niggers" are breaking into his car. Derek runs outside with a gun and kills one right outside his front door, he ends up just shooting the one breaking into his car and chasing after the one driving away. In this scene Derek is only wearing his white boxers and

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Joni Mitchell is an accomplished musician, songwriter, poet and painter. In her own words: “I looked like a folksinger, even though the moment I began to write, my music was not folk music. It was something else that had elements of romantic classicism to it.” Hard to classify, Mitchell has pursued her ways of self-expression, heedless of commercial outcomes. She connected with a huge audience in the mid-Seventies when a series of albums – Court and Spark (1974), The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) and Hejira (1976) – established her as one of that decade’s pre-eminent artists. From the beginning, she played guitar in different tunings to make up the fact that her left hand had been left weakened by…

    • 1656 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    And later in the story we find out that Edna can’t swim. The idea that the ocean is Edna’s sexuality/sexual freedom, and her inability to swim in it meaning an inability to express her sexuality freely could be supported by the description of her delight upon learning to swim:…

    • 3065 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    characters of different races. The story begins with a car crash between Detective Graham Waters (Don Cheadle), along with his Hispanic partner, and an Asian woman who begins to shout racist insults at her after the “crash.” Detective Waters goes to the nearby crime scene to notice a shoe on the ground and soon after all that is revealed is the shocked and upsetting face that overtakes him. As the story progresses we begin to see different acts of random racism such as a Persian man buying a gun to protect his store and the racist speaking gun salesman, two young African Americans are looked at with racial fear by a Caucasian woman (Sandra Bullock) who is soon robbed by the young black men, and finally we see an unbelievable racial profiling act by police officer John Ryan (Matt Dillon) against a black couple. The couple are driving a car that matches the description of the stolen car shown one scene earlier, but the license plate, nor the description of the couple match the stolen vehicle’s perpetrators. We soon find out they were pulled over for merely being black.…

    • 1160 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    You may not have perceived that this life, the way we have been brought up has condition us to be unseeing to some obvious situations in this world. Visibly picture in your head what it means to be homeless at that same time think why are those people homeless? During this recent article, Michael Sullivan wrote, I was homeless; ‘the look’ judged me worthless, to share with all readers in different communities. Sullivan has an overwhelming sense of personal experiences shared which gives a great insight to draw his readers to an emotional side as well as a connection of trust with him. While using examples of pathos and ethos his readers are likely to feel a connection to his article and see things differently as he did during his own life experience.…

    • 578 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    color was so profound in the movies. It just tells you what Martin Luther King Jr.…

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mississippi Burning

    • 693 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Racism is a major issue that takes place in the film, it is viewed negatively and the director Alan Parker attempts to show to the audience the downsides and how devastating it is, how unfair it can be. The constant, terrorizing attacks against black people by the KKK in are horrific and cruel. Innocent people are killed and homes are put in flames or destroyed for no other reason than the fact that a group of people are racist against others. Film codes used help to place a negative feel in some of these scenes like the use of fire, symbolising evil towards the racist acts. The music performed as well by the black community show the great amount of sadness the people have to suffer. Many various camera shots/angles and lighting for separate scenes change the feeling and the mood. This use of film convections affect the views and opinions of the viewer’s towards the subject of racism, helping people understand the negative of it.…

    • 693 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Directed by Orson Welles and released in 1941 by RKO, "Citizen Kane", is considered by mane film critics to be one of the greatest examples of film ever made. Many critics believe the acting is one of the major reasons for the film's greatness. Due to Orson Welles background in radio and live theater, others believe the music and sound effects are what truly make this film great. Orson Welles and Greg Toland, the cinematographer, both were considered to be revolutionaries in their time. Always trying to stretch their respective fields and experiment whenever possible, both kept pushing the envelope in order to see just how far they could go. With Welles and Toland now paired together, the possibilities…

    • 1681 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Another motivation that inspires his action is the personal degradation he must have experienced as a black man in a racist community that includes backwoods deviants, who look down upon the blacks in the community. Hate crimes appear in both movies, including hate-fueled riots, attempted lynchings, and the reappearance of the Ku Klux Klan. Other manifestations of racism were realized as well, such as injustice in the court system and the school system, where, in both movies, the protagonists' children are continually taunted for being the progeny of a "nigger lover."…

    • 1314 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Marlon Marshall in my opinion wasn’t serious about the juvenile program. You can tell that he really loved what he do as in selling drugs. Marlon loved how much money that was coming in everyday; he isn’t ready to give up that kind of lifestyle just yet. He basically states that he’s still selling drugs while he’s in the juvenile program. I think he wants to do better in life, but the only thing he knows is what he grew up around. Once he returns home he cannot violate any of his probation meaning: Getting arrested for a new offense while on probation. Failure to pay your fines, failure to perform or complete community service as instructed, failure to appear in court to show progress the probationer made on probation. failure to submit paperwork to court, failure to report to probation officer as scheduled, failure to pay probation fees to the probation department, failure to submit drug test, failure to submit to search and seizure by police officers of your home or vehicle. If he fail or violate any of his probation, the court may extend his probation, charge added probation terms, he will have to serve a brief time in jail, or revoke his probation altogether and require you to serve out any remaining time of his beginning sentence in prison. As far as Marlon future his goals was to go to college and enter the Police Academy. At the rate he is going his future won’t be so bright if he’s going to continue to sell drugs. To become a police officer you cannot have any kind of misdemeanor or felonies on your record. To better his future, I hope he change, have a turn around, become successful, and reach his goals.…

    • 322 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    As a young girl growing up in the rolling cornfields of Indiana I was cut off from the ocean, yet it still called to me. I saw the impact that the mistakes of humanity had on the ocean and its inhabitants. I saw the oil…

    • 601 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Crash

    • 466 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The movie promotes racial awareness, but like any conversation about race, it demands close inspection. We see a variety of African American men and women, several Hispanic characters, a Persian family, and several Asians. A scene will switch to another only because the initial characters story line is intersecting with that of the next. We meet the Cabot family because two young black men, stars in the scene, steal their car. Likewise, the Hispanic locksmith looking to make a living for his family is hired at the shop of the Persian man struggling with life as an immigrant. These are the lead characters, all intertwined in their daily lives. An idea or event is presented from the perspective of one person or family, and then the same event is expanded on by another characters connection to it. to present racism: Most of the characters are provided life circumstances to help us see where they are coming from The circumstances include Officer Ryans sick father, Jean Cabots depression, and the shopkeepers struggle with being a new immigrant. Each serves as an excuse for the characters racism (or at least a way to lessen its severity).…

    • 466 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In a shocking opening scene, teen Danny Vinyard who is played by Edward Furlong, races to tell his older brother, neo-Nazi Derek, about the young blacks breaking into his car in front of the house, whereupon Derek gets his gun and with no forethought shoots the youths in their tracks and he forces the other man to put his mouth on the curb, then brutally kills him by stomping on the back of his head, crushing his mouth against the curb. Danny watches in horror as this unfolds. The police arrest Derek as he smiles at a shocked Danny.. Derek having already been influenced by the latent racism of his bigoted firefighter father. Derek is driven to action when his father is shot and killed while fighting a fire in a suspected Compton drug den. Eventually Derek becomes second-in-command of a neo-Nazi street gang, The D.O.C. (Disciples of Christ), and entices young whites to join. Tried and convicted, Derek is sent away for three years in prison, where he acquires a different outlook as he contrasts white-power prisoners with black Lamont, his prison laundry co-worker and eventual pal. Flashbacks, told in reverse chronology and represented by black-and-white throughout the film which is opposed to the present-day events represented in color, Meanwhile, Danny, with a shaved head and a rebellious attitude, seems destined to follow in his big brother's footsteps. After Danny writes a favorable review of Hitler's Mein Kampf, black high-school principal Sweeney puts Danny…

    • 1246 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman engages the audience into the inner self of a young mother and wife throughout the story. The story has grown from a remedy to depression to a female defiance to a male society. Gilman’s purpose in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the courage a woman had to demonstrate a positive change in her self-identity and free her from the social, domestic, and psychological confinement that were placed on women in the 1800’s. By writing the story from a first-person feministic point of view the narrator shows the struggle of women’s independence and individuality in a male dominated society through gender stereotype that exist between the society and the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”…

    • 3424 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Essay On The Movie Selma

    • 644 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The movie started off with the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing, which resulted in the murder of 4 innocent young girls, and later on in the film a young black man by the name of Jimmily Jackson was murdered by a state trooper for being in a non-violent protest and he didn't fight back. All these murders happening left and right all out of hate because the of the pigment of someone's skin, because in the sick minds of some people being a shade darker than someone meant that they aren't…

    • 644 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The sea is a very important symbol in The Awakening. This vast body of water symbolizes freedom and escape. While at the beach, Madame Ratignolle asked Edna what she was thinking of, as a result of her silence. Edna sends herself into a flashback while reminiscing on a day when she was younger and she walked through a large field near her childhood home in Kentucky,…

    • 394 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays