So often, when I watch movies I don’t know how they make me feel so emotional. Now I understand that this is the “magic” of the camera. The cinematographer uses the camera to help make the viewer feel a specific way. In the film Babel, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu use different techniques to make the scenes reflect the themes and feeling of the film. The film takes place in Morocco, Mexico, Japan and the United States. The themes in the film include love, desperation, and uncertainty, as the characters try to solve their different problems. The techniques in the film include using grainy film, switching film types, using a handheld camera, using unbalanced shots, and selective focus. The overall effect of these technical choices is a film that makes viewers feel involved in the emotions of the characters.
This scene takes place on the roads in Morocco, where Prieto used grainy film to make the setting look even drier, dustier and older than it really is. This makes viewers feel the foreignness and emptiness of the place. I could feel the harshness of the lives of the people who live there.
In this scene, Richard Jones (Brad Pitt) is running to get help for his wife, Susan (Cate Balchette), who was shot. He is scared and desperate, running for help but not finding anyone. The scene is shot with a handheld camera, held by someone directly behind Pitt. The result is a scene that looks shaky, unclear and unbalanced. This reflects the feelings of the character, who cannot get help for his dying wife. Viewers can really feel sympathy for Richard Jones because we see everything exactly as he sees it: everything is scary and unclear.
In this scene, Abdulla (Mustapha Rachidi) holds his son, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) as he is dying. He has just been shot by police because they thought he was the one who shot Susan Jones. This is an extreme close up of the dying boy and the grieving father. Because we see them so close up (intimately), we really feel the father’s pain, and are able to empathize with him.
Again, the film is grainy, which makes the Moroccans’’ clothes look old and colorless. This helps to add to the unhappiness of this scene.
This scene takes place in the dessert of Mexico, where Prieto captured brighter colors. You can see the difference between the Morrocan sand, which is pale and colorless, and the Mexican sand, which is reddish and bright. This is because in Mexico, Prieto used 35mm film and in Morocco, he used 16mm. The difference in quality of the film makes similar settings look different.
In this scene, Amelia (Adrianna Barraza) is looking desperately for help because she needs to find her employers’ young children in the dessert. This is a wide shot, which captures the huge desert and the sky. This shot shows viewers how helpless and isolated she is: we can see that all around her there is nobody to help her. The shot is also unbalanced, with more room to Amelia’s right than her left side, which makes viewers uncomfortable. This reflects her own feelings of discomfort and desperation.
This is a shot where Prieto uses selective focus to suggest to viewers who is responsible for the shooting of Susan Jones. In this scene, Ahmed’s father gives him a rifle and tells him to shoot Jackals. Then, the adults leave the boys in charge of the rifle. After this scene, one of the boys will shoot at a tour bus, just to see if the bullet will travel that far. The bullet hits Susan Jones, who is in the tour bus.
This scene suggests that the adults are responsible because they left the boys alone with a gun: The boy is in the foreground and he is blurry, the adults are walking away in the middle ground, and the camera focuses on them so the audience can see them clearly walking away. The background is of the mountains that the boys will shoot on without supervision, and hit the tour bus. By shooting the scene behind the boy’s head, the audience sees what the boy sees: his father leaving him alone with a gun in a huge space. We are meant to feel the boy’s freedom, which is what makes the boy shoot at the tour bus.
The cinematographer and director can manipulate the audience by making different technical choices- and that’s what makes a movie unique. In Babel, Rodrigo Prieto uses different film gauges and filters for different settings. He also uses close-ups, wide shots, unbalanced shots, selective focus, and a hand-held camera to make the viewer feel the emotions of the characters in the film. This way, we feel like we are travelling to each country ourselves just by looking at the movie, and we are feeling the emotions of the characters, as if we are there with them. The technical choices Prieto makes are different for each scene, but these specific choices are constant through the whole movie, and make each scene unique.
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