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‘Snow White’ (2012) By Pablo Berger

 ‘Snow White’ (2012) or ‘Blancanieves’ is a Spanish film that aims to mimic older silent black and white motion pictures in an era of moviemaking where the technical limitations that held back silent filmmakers no longer exist. This creates an interesting hybrid of high quality camera work in an old fashion frame.

 Berger’s film explores the upbringing of ‘Carmen De Triana’, a young girl in 1920s Spain (expertly portrayed by Inma Questa) who's father is a famous, rich bullfighter that has an accident leaving him disabled. In a misfortunate turn of events, shortly after, Carmen’s mother passes due to complications with Carmen’s birth.

Due to the absence of dialogue, ‘Blancanieves’ relies heavily on visual and sonic storytelling. Visually, Berger utilises a plethora of vintage silent film storytelling techniques such as multiple static shots, short snappy title cards and dramatised facial expressions. The most used shot in the entire film is the close up. Berger beautifully presents and portrays which ever detail or emotion he feels is important to the story via the close up. Each character has their own personality without us hearing a word. Whether its a close up of Encarna’s mischievous plotting face or a close up of the bulls eye ready to attack, Berger orchestrates the audience’s emotion effectively by presenting each of the characters intentions, good or bad to make us feel a certain way about them.

The lack of dialogue in ‘Snow White’ is made up for in orchestral form. The score plays for almost the entirety of the 1 hour 44 minute running time. Similar to the visual side of the film, Berger attempts to portray the characters emotions, this time sonically. The sad and more somber scenes will feature lower intensity music mostly compromised of strings where as the more action packed scenes tend to include a lot more loud brass instruments like trumpets for dramatic affect. The soundtrack eloquently accompanies the visual aspect of the film to create a wonderful story about a young girl overcoming a rough upbringing of misfortune turned to triumph. ‘Snow White’ is a great film in terms of storytelling, it’s not too obvious whilst at the same time being super literal for dramatic effect.

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“Le Monde Est À Vous”

My university film blog.