Importance Of Cinematography In The Film Night Of The Hunter

The act of watching a film is a fairly effortless process. Individuals around the world enjoy watching films as a pastime activity because it engages one without the need to put in effort. This effortless entertainment is possible thanks to the way the producers carefully control and edit films to insure that their audience will experience what the film was intended to make them feel. In order to ensure that the audience will be able to engage into the film and understand its meaning an element known as Cinematography is needed. Cinematography is a very important element to this process because it controls the way the audience views and interprets the images that are being displayed.

Cinematography is a key element in the film making process.

Some of these elements include lighting, framing, and lens angle. The characters’ identities and motives are not directly given to the audience, it is our job as viewers to understand and identify their purpose. Although this sounds like it may take effort, this is where cinematography comes into play and explains it for us.

Night of the Hunter follows the actions of four main characters, Willa, her two children Pearl and John, and her second husband Harry. The entire movie is in black in white, which helps set the tone by using dramatic dark and light shades to develop certain perspectives in the audience’s mind. For example, Harry is shown wearing a black suit everywhere he goes, in contrast to Willa who is shown wearing crisp white colors. The dark shades symbolize evil, and the white bright shades symbolize innocence. So this already provides an underlying tone for what these characters’ motives are without having to know the story line. As the movie progresses the audience knows for a fact that Harry is an evil man, but even before being told that he is evil the initial image the audience is given of him signals a negative interpretation of his

In the explanation of framing our book says “Framing turns the comparatively infinite sight of the human eye into a finite movie image, an unlimited view into a limited view.” (p.229) This essentially means that it is possible to control what the audience sees by shifting their focus and adjusting how much of the shot is available for them to view. Framing is crucial to some scenes in the film because it enables the producer to narrow the viewers focus in order to initiate a certain response. An example of this is when John and Pearl sit in the basement of the house while Harry is calling out to find them. In this shot we are shown John and Pearl in a small dark space and within the same frame the dimly lit stairs with Harry creeping down them. The reaction created by this frame is fear because we can see what is coming and it frightens the audience who is seeing the frame from a third person