Author(s): Ezra Stein
Mentor(s): Nicole Dib, Kyle Bishop
Institution SUU
The films of director Michael Mann most often fit into the crime genre, following characters who operate on either side of the law and are often required to commit acts of violence as part of their profession. Scholars have agreed that Mann’s protagonists are usually people who do not verbally give the audience clues as to their interior lives. In this presentation, I will argue that Michael Mann uses the camera as a means of conveying the interiority of his characters. One way Mann accomplishes this is through a particular type of shot that appears several times across his filmography. This shot features the protagonist of the film holding a gun and pointing it out of the frame. Mann composes the shot in such a way that the barrel of the gun is in sharp focus in the foreground of the shot and the character pointing it is rendered out of focus in the background. My presentation proposes that this shot is Michael Mann’s way of conveying his characters’ emotional response to the acts of violence they are about to commit. I will analyze how the shot appears in Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), and Blackhat (2015), each time deployed in the third act of the film. Each character spends the first two acts wrestling with the violence their career requires, the gun being used as a symbol for that violence. Placing the gun itself as the only thing in focus, Mann conveys the choice each character has made, situating the characters as secondary to the violence they are about to commit, and showing the loss of their sense of self. Mann uses a similar shot in the films Heat (1995) and Collateral (2004), which follow a cop and a hitman respectively, but composes the shot in these films with the character in focus rather than the gun. My paper will further demonstrate that this choice conveys that the characters acceptance of their role in committing violence, with no loss of self occurring. In the film The Insider (1999), Mann uses the same basic composition to depict a character’s relationship to the threat of violence. The film’s protagonist, a corporate whistleblower, finds a bullet in his mailbox that Mann shoots in full focus, leaving the protagonist out of focus in the background again. Though none of these characters articulate their relationship to violence as it occurs in their respective narratives, Mann uses the techniques of framing and composition to convey their interior emotions.