Media Analysis Assignment: Road Games Movie

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Film Analysis: Road Games.
Road Games is a 1981 thriller film from Australia directed by Richard Franklin and starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Stacy Keach, following the story of a truck driver traveling across Australia where while still on transit, they decide to track down and catch a serial killer, with the help of a hitchhiker. The making of the film involved the director giving the scriptwriter, Everett De Roche, a copy of Rear Window, another film, as an exact reflection of how he wanted the script typed. However, although the story may be similar, how Road Games displays its aspects of subjective involvement of the main character through its shots, and the way it manifests specific formal techniques, is different from that of Rear Window.
Question 1.
* Subjective perspective is the technique of creating an antithesis using visual language and representation of a scene to constitute an emotional impact on the audience by filling the stage with feelings of a specific character. The central role in the film, Road Games, is Patrick Quid and there is scene shot in Point of View (POV), where a character referred to as Smith-Jones by Pat Quid, pulls out a guitar string in a designated way while wearing his gloves, an accessory usually worn by truck drivers, but in this context, the shot denotes that the gloves are used to hide the real identity of the assailant (Hart 71). Still, in the same POV shot, the character flushes the toilet loudly to create a personal and questionable connection with his slow movements while he approaches his victim to engulf the string over her head silently. In this scene, the serial killer's actions of a crime fill the innocent woman with feelings of fear, terror, and despair, as shown in her doe eyes.
* When compared to the voyeuristic nature of subjective POV shots in Rear Window, Road Games does not center its subjective perspective on Pat Quid only. The film reveals the feelings of other characters that only the main characters. In Road Games, Buckmaster states that Patrick Quid is a truck driver in his vehicle with his friend, a female hitchhiker called Pamela Rushworth, where they are always in motion playing games (9). One scene where the film’s subjective perspective is centered on the central character is when he enters the green van to investigate then ends up finding only food and rests his suspicions. One scene where subjective perspective is not centered on the central character is when Pamela is gagged and bound to the van by the serial killer.
* No, the main character’s subjective perspective is not the only one in Road Games. Other subjective perspectives are added to the film are scenes where there is tension, and the viewer is supposed to relate emotionally to the character. The scene where a woman is cleaning the meat facility and is partially brushed by guitar string hanging from the ceiling is shot at an eye-level with a pan camera movement to show the terror she meets when she pulls it and notices a human head (Ross 60).
Question 2.
* In McLuhan’s terms on media states that when it comes to lines of resolution, hot and cold press depends on the amount of information that the audience is supposed to fill into the film for them to understand. Therefore, watching a movie in low resolution makes the film cooler than its original state of media (Mitchell 88). This is because the viewer is forced to participate in the active role of filling additional information to the film to get the whole picture compared to the scenario where one would have watched the original cinematic format.
* Watching one film in two different resolutions amounts to a fundamental change in the viewing experience. This is caused by the varying degrees of participation in the segment where the audience wishes to consume the medium of the film play...