Se7en Opening Credits Deconstruction

Deconstruction - 'Se7en' Opening Credits

Analysis

Despite being a horror film and therefore not relevant to our focused genre of film noir, the ‘Se7en’ opening credits have provided inspiration for our coursework.

Inspiration

I particularly liked the first shot in the opening where the camera is focused on the book with the unfocused hands in the background as this created a sense of mystery and anonymity surrounding the main character and intrigues the viewer to find out more. I found the constant changing of the shot’s subject interesting as gave us an insight into the complexity of the killers mind as they obviously think about every small detail and are quite smart. For example, they went as far as to cover fingerprints by literally removing them with a blade.

All these small details inspired ideas about my own project – film noir focuses on detective work, and detectives are likely to want to cover their tracks. The editing was also good and made me think about how we could incorporate glitches and flashes like are used here, however I don’t think this would be genre appropriate for film noir.

Effect

The trailer creates quite a gritty effect, as all the shots have dark lighting with lots of shadows, and the glitching creates tension and unease. The fast paced editing both puts viewers on edge and draws them in, as many small snippets of the killer’s obsession are shown without giving away any major details. Scratchy writing is also used, as well as the colour red to represent blood.

One technique that’s used is synecdoche, which is where a whole entity is referred to by only part of the body. In this case, the killer’s hands are constantly shown but not any other part of the body. This is possibly referring to the people he’s killed because he uses his hands for this, so by showing only his hands he is reduced down to simply just a killer. The hands are also mostly shown through shadows, which emphasises the mystery of his identity.