L'illusionniste Essay

L’Illusionniste Essay

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Ottawa University

February 13, 2019

L’Illusionniste Essay

        The movie by French film-maker Sylvain Chomet reveals a tribute of love and passion by producing a classically devised movie.  The animated hand-drawn scenes are based on a script by Jaques Tati, written in 1956 and never produced.  Tati’s manuscript had been kept guarded within his family for more than 50 years.  Chomet pleaded with Tati’s daughter Sophie for permission to adapt the manuscript to a new British setting.  Chomet’s vision gave a whimsical, gentle, and charming life to the manuscript.  The movie has its own language that has little to verbal words spoken.  The film reveals a tender innocence that has an underlying emotional aching (Bradshaw, 2010).  The ability to understand what is being said, since it is mostly a nonverbal film, the HURIER Model (hearing, understanding, remembering, and interpretation can help giver a clearer picture by addressing the interactions (Brownell, 2016).

Hearing

In the HURIER Model, hearing is the first step in helping one to get a better understanding from material that we are trying to gather information from.  To listen to all events, people, and objects around a person will give more information than just hearing words spoken (Brownell, 2016).  From the very beginning of the film, your attention is drawn to quiet, and you strain in wanting to hear all the happenings that are taking place around the stage.  You feel as you are part of the audience, you hear the echo from the microphone, the strain from the curtains trying to open.  You hear people clap and cough, as you wait for the performance to begin.  Then your eyes become drawn to the props that are placed on the wooden floor, and the cards flipping through his hands onto the floor, as the magician brings on them stage.  After the show you feel as you are on the streets in a city as you hear shoes on stone sidewalks, and cars passing along the paved streets, with distant honking.  As the movie progresses the sound of objects and movement stop coming from connection of other objects and become a world of instrumental music.  The power of the brass, strings, and keys begin to tell a story, as you become entranced in trying to hear what the notes are telling you (Chomet, 2010).

Understanding

        The second part of the HURIER Model, is the ability to understand the messages you heard and understand their placement within the story.  This will give a deeper comprehension of the events (Brownell, 2016).  So, when you heard the motors on the curtains grind, and you saw the curtains sway a bit but not move, you can understand that the grind sound was the strain of trying to move the curtains, but they were not working well.  When you heard the clapping, you understand it was from people in the audience, because the sound was muffled and soft.  The sound was not bright and right in front of you, so you understood it was from the crowd.  Then when the heard the creaking and thumping of footsteps walking across the stage, we can understand that the performance is about to start (Chomet, 2010).  

        As the movie progresses, there are a few mumbled words spoken.  When listening to the words, you can hear different accents, even if you don’t understand what is being said.  It gives the viewer the knowledge of different countries.  The jazz music that plays through the movies helps one understand the era that the movie is based off of, 1920’s.  These sounds are helping tell the story of placement of the movie and helps everyone perceive the environment that the film maker is wanting us to see (Brownell, 2016).

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