Thursday, 19 January 2012

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is when a film 'borrows' things  from a film created before , they borrow things such as  mise en scene , sound , camera angles or editing , the film psycho was made in 1960 and is famously known for it's shower scene.



The shower head used in the film 'Psycho'  is exactly the same  shower head  used in the  film 'What lies beneath'

   








In these two movies the bathtub are both white and so are the tiles , the shower curtain is the same and the main object that was borrowed was the shower head . In the film 'What lies beneath' the husband  drugs his wife so she is paralysed then he puts her in the bathtub to drown . They didn't need to have to show the  shower head  that was unnessicary but they still included it which is exactly what intertextuality is .


 Again as you can see the first screen shot is from the famous shower in 'Psycho' in which the weapon used is a big knife , the second screen shot is from the film 'Fatal attraction' which was released in 1987  only 27 years after the film psycho and as you can see they use the exact same knife , coincidence ? No it's intertextuality.











                                     The camera angle is also very simular to each other



                                                             'Fatal Attraction'


 

In these two screen shots of 'Fatal attraction' and 'The Stepfather ' the bad guys are both climbing the stair case however the camera angles in the staircase climb in the film actually use the same camera angles .


Overall even though intertextuality borrows ideas from other films what it doesn't do is copy , each film tweek their own mise en scene or the camera angles so that the idea is there but it isn't the same .




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