Reading Meshes of the Afternoon

After our class discussion of reading film, I thought that "meshes of the afternoon" was easier to read. In class, we discussed ways to read film and when I watched "meshes of the afternoon" again, I paid closer attention to the ways of reading film. When you know how to read film, something as confusing and weird as "meshes of the afternoon" can seem much easier to comprehend. I noticed that throughout the movie important things are more obvious when using the rule of thirds. Also, using background to foreground and left to right helped play a role in understanding this film. Also, in this short film, I noticed there were scenes with nothing on the rule of thirds? It seemed as if they purposely left something off the rules of thirds "lines" to get the shot more complex? This is when i used the other methods such as left and right to try to figure out what the film was showing us. This helped because not every shot in the movie used the rule of thirds so I had to sort of slowly process the movie using other rules and re-watching certain shots time after time to understand what they meant, using other rules. Even after I watched the movie again using all the rules we just learned, I still found it difficult to understand at points. Yes, the rules make it more "readable" in a way, yet the movie is still hard to understand. I really think the creepy Japanese music and no verbal communication makes this movie that much harder to understand.