Gosford Park

Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, is a period piece set in the 1930s at an English estate. It is part murder mystery and part exploration of the dynamics of social class hierarchies. This movie is based off of  Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939). In comparison, (I've seen Rules of the Game), Gosford Park's filming and shots are less interesting and dynamic. The suspense built steadily and slowly in Rules of the Game because of the emotionally powerfully hunting scene in particular, and also the various wide interior shots with multiple depths of people moving around, working or partying, coming together or missing each other. Gosford Park in general featured less inventive and interesting shots to convey meaning. Maybe a big difference here is that Rules of the Game was shot in black and white and Gosford Park is richly colorful. There was more pronounced emotional rawness in Rules of the Game. Much of the time I noticed the differences in the set design, clothing and accents of upstairs vs. downstairs. It is possible that these features both added to the believability of the movie's scenario and detracted from its commentary on social class and power dynamics between the workers and the employees. 

The medium and wide shots throughout the film gave me nearly no sense of the characters' inner lives, their psychologies. In scenes of upstairs dinners and other gatherings, the camera would turn to a group of guests after their conversation had started, so we do not immediately understand what they are talking about. We have to do a lot of piecing together of their stories and connections ourselves, because the movie does not fully tell them to us. 

Gosford Park is also part comedy so there are many scenes of guests or the downstairs laborers using medium shots of the people in the space, then close ups of the humerous interaction, the small changes in facial expression to clarify that something subtly funny, in a British way, just happened. This movie was not exploring the philosophies about vision, time, and memory we've read in Film 1. The film medium itself was not penetrating these characters' feelings or identities -the actors and the script did that.