'Crash' Film Analysis

I think the ‘Crash’ was an extremely interesting and thrilling film. There were parts of the story that intrigued me into wanting to watch more of it. The films narrative is non linear. This means that the plot was not told from the beginning through to the end. The story was told in a random order, whereby for example the crash occurred at the beginning of the film. There are not many films that have this structure to it, making the film extremely interesting. It is easy, with the non linear structure, for a watcher to get confused and lost in the plot, luckily when watching this film I didn’t.

A lot of close up shots are used throughout the film which are used to zoom into and highlight the emotions on the people’s faces. This was significant because many of the characters were going through hard situations so by emphasising the emotion on their face it showed intrigued the audience in. A shot that stood out to me was when shop owner Fred was holding onto the gun he was to the right hand side of the shot, and behind him was a black door with a red sign on top of it. This was effective because the red and black behind Fred could have connoted his inner demons, whereby the red displayed the danger and trouble he could get himself into. In another light, I think it could display that because red and black both connote a sense of danger and problem, with those colours behind him it could show the difficulties are approaching him and ready to swallow him up. Again with the subjects of the colour, a lot of the film was shot at night which I think suggests that there is always darkness in the air whereby all the characters in the film experience problems out of the blue that affect them. The tension of these arising problems was helped by the audio codes. The non diegetic music that was constantly going in the background set the scene and allowed tension because of the slow and eerie sound. Also the music kept creeping up like the problems did which I found significant.

In terms of representation, black, white and other races were seen in a negative light. Antony and Peter were 2 black characters, who held 2 car owners at gunpoint I an attempt to steal their cars. The stereotype of black people is that they are violent and dangerous so by Antony and Peter being shown in this way, it negatively represented black people. Officer John Ryan was a white police officer, in the film he pulled over a black couple and was strip searching the woman, however he was seen to touch her inappropriately and unnecessarily, displaying him as a nasty and manipulating person. I think it is quite significant that all the races were displayed in a negative way, because even those who were instigating the problems were negatively shown too.

The fact this film has a non-linear structure made it really interesting and also showed the cyclic cycle of not only the story but also the everyday problems people encounter.