English Close-Viewing Paragraph

At the beginning of the film Silver Linings Playbook directed by David O. Russel, the director effectively pairs the film technique of Editing with Dialogue. In the first scene, Pat runs down the stairs into the Cafe. As soon as he’s out of his room there are multiple jump shots, —running downstairs, lining up, getting medicine, spitting the pill out and then in the circle in the hospital— these clips are very short and this happens in a short amount of time. We see the two aspects combined firstly when Pat is in the group circle and Danny is talking about his hair, “Yeah, that’s when I had long hair. People say I talk too much about my hair. And it was just the way I wanted it…..” but it sort of dulls out and then his story is cut-off and it jumps to Pat’s turn to talk in the circle. “Once you get in the right frame of mind, I think anything is possible…..” however the dialogue is edited so that the lines of dialogue are overlapped. Then it quickly goes back to all the jump shots —jumping jacks, push-ups, his mum standing over him and getting out of the hospital, in the car park—. Russel edited this to make it feel fast-paced, it gives us little to no time to process each bit of information that is provided. This is done so we can relate to the adjustments that the family faces and how different their life has become in this time frame. It’s all happening a little too fast for the family and it’s tough for them to process. This combination of aspects results in the audience feeling overwhelmed. Which most likely is what all the characters would experience during Pat’s release from the mental hospital (Pat’s Mum & Dad, Pat, Danny and Pat’s friends). All the people in Pat’s life including Pat himself have a lot of particulars to sort out in relation to his new diagnosis of having Bipolar Disorder and it becomes overwhelming. This combination of aspects works well with the aspect of music. When we are in the hospital the loud music behind the dialogue follows the same beat as each jump clip is and it has intermittently high and low tempo, as a result, this makes us feel disoriented.