Betty Blue:
Betty wears very little or nothing at all, nude scenes – liberated sexuality, a sense of realism, intimacy
Red – represents danger, desire and strength (aftermath of gouging out her eye, which the director does not permit us to see, we are left with clues: red leather mule, red bloody handprints)
Make.up choices reflective of the human psyche – discovers her expected pregnancy was a false alarm
Constructing a world that borders on the fantastic
Beginning of the film: warm color palette – vacation, calm before the storm
Leon the professional:
Lighting: In the establishing shots of the sea, tree’s and city the lighting is very natural and bright creating an everyday environment. In contrast, the shots inside the restaurant ‘Supreme Macaroni co’ used chiaroscuro lighting which is artificial creating a more tense and serious atmosphere.
Leon costume involves him wearing a pair of sunglasses with black lenses that shows a reflection of a male character called Benny sitting a table with a red checked cloth and a bottle of drink, lighting his cigarette. This is included to hide his eye which is done in order to not reveal his identity. This creates mystery as the audience are wondering who the character is and who the character smoking is.
Props: a glass containing milk is the first prop the audience see of Leon which is not a convention of thriller films as it is more expected to see the character drinking alcohol. The drink of milk almost acts similar to a full stop as Leon drinks it at the end of his conversation with Benny. This is done purposely to emphasise the end and show one of Leon’s traits.
In terms of other colours, pink features in close moments between Mathilda / Leon, but the colour red appears uniformly across the whole film – probably echoing the idea of blood and Mathilda’s memory of her murdered family – up until the very last shot which has no red. The milk cartons Leon always drinks from are red too – reflecting the hitman has no escape from blood red, it is part of his routine.
It became clear that yellow is the main colour – through scenery and lighting, not just the colour grading. Either with links to the idea of “cleaning” – like yellow dusters, fire – or more likely, the foreboding yellow police tape.
Colour directly associated with Stansfield. Supposed to be an officer of the law, he is corrupt, and so yellow seems a good contrast to the expected Police-ness of blue. Scenes get progressively more yellow when Stansfield is around, and dominant.
Thus, as a contrast, blue is extremely scarce in Mathilda – only hints of it are scattered around the film, and seems to link to a sense of freedom and safety.
(https://lizziefijanimation.tumblr.com/post/173094573952/leon-the-professional-colour-visuals)
(https://jasmediablog.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/leon-the-professional-analysis/)
The Big Blue:
Scenes are shot in many fast sequences, quick insights into relevant moments – keeps the viewers attention, meant to say it all in a small space of time.
The music is partly responsible for the movies’s public success. -Eric Serra
Some scenes are filmed like music videos
(https://issuu.com/beaimagerie/docs/jbea_essay_worddoc)
Nikita:
Right after Joséphine realises she has been set up for her final task to what she has previously thought was a genuine meal treated by her mentor, this wave of very slow and downhearted sound kicks in. It signifies sadness, and it is even effective when combined with the look of a broken heart on Joséphine’s face. But shortly after the sad music kicks in, it is replaced with heavy bass like drums banging, and this creates the feeling of a suspense building up, it signals something happening. It also is made more suspenseful as the beat becomes louder over time, transforming itself into gun shots instead of drums banging and it matches with the image of Joséphine taking the guns out of the case and hiding them in her bra, as if foreshadowing that real gun shots will be fired.
As Joséphine fires her gun shots, the music stops, and it is replaced by the screams of the people in the restaurant. But shortly after the suspenseful music comes back in.
Being involved in a gun fight, Joséphine finds that her guns aren’t loaded anymore, she is scared for her life, but tries to pull herself together. This is shown by having her breathing replace the music, and the breathing is loud. It’s a diegetic sound that signals that she’s losing sanity, but it could also mean that she is inhaling and exhaling to regain calm and focus.
Safe and sound, having jumped out of a trash chute and landed on trash, Nikita is relieved. And soft, calming, piano-ish music kicks in, telling that the danger is over as she slowly gets up and leaves.
(https://nathananimates.wordpress.com/2017/12/12/la-femme-nikita-1990-sound-analysis/)
The film opens with a tracking shot of black pavement followed by extreme low-angle shots of a street gang dragging a body. Accompanied by hard punk-rock music, this opening segment imitates the aesthetics of an underground music video.
A high-angle long shot of the prison maze fixes our vision of Nikita as caged creature. This animalistic representation of Nikita is reinforced by her leopard vest, disheveled hair, dirtiness, stench of her body odor, and the physicality of her violence. In opening scenes, Nikita’s body is vilified as dangerous, deviant, and potentially castrating.
Les amants de Pont Neuf:
The film’s famously extravagant set — a nearly full-scale replica of Paris’s Pont Neuf and its surrounding area reproduced in the South of France — is central to the film’s meaning: it suggests a union of two worlds, the bourgeois Right Bank, which Michele (Juliette Binoche) is fleeing, and the bohemian Left Bank, home to Alex (Denis Lavant), an alcoholic drifter who occasionally raises a few francs as a fire-eater.
But the bridge is also the thin tissue that separates the sky from the river, the heat and light of elevated romantic emotion from the darkness and coldness of death. Mr. Carax makes brilliant formal use of the opposition, playing the fire imagery associated with Alex against the water imagery associated with Michele — most spectacularly in a sequence set on the night of the 1989 Bicentennial, when the lovers hijack a police speedboat and go water-skiing on the Seine as fountains of fireworks erupt above them.
The rushing camera, thundering sound and exploding colors create one of the great Wagnerian moments in cinema, an experiment in sensual overload that revels in its own too-muchness.
(https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/27/movies/film-a-hymn-to-extravagance-in-love-and-in-filmmaking.html )
–1 In Les Amants there is a concern for vision and an anxiety about losing it
Carax announces his two characters not by means of a direct shot, but by their being reflected in the rear-view and side mirrors of the car that swerves to avoid them in two separate manoeuvres, the same car – a taxi, appropriately – which has been both the viewer’s and the camera’s vehicle into the filmed space. This tentative relation between camera and characters establishes a world at a remove, which one cannot immediately and directly access.
(https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1013/7/Leos_Carax_Chapter_2.pdf)