Se7en Analysis

The opening credits to Se7en are made up of 6 elements which all go towards the overall effect on the audience which in this case is very disorientating and creepy and also makes the audience very tense. Theses elements are mise-en-scene, editing, sound, lighting, performance and cinematography.

It opens with pages of a book being flipped across the screen and then using multiple cross cuts from the main character writing over and over again in blood, peeling skin off his hands with a razor, collecting threads and hairs, cutting newspaper clippings, drawing on pictures and text, sticking in photos of dead people and also in-between each image is a scribbly handwriting of the credits. These images are all very aerie and the fact that the character is never fully seen means that the audience has nothing to relate to, this is also shown through the character crossing out people eyes in photographs because an audience immediately relates to a character through eye contact and doing this makes the audience uncomfortable. The text and pictures show us a bit about the story of the film, each piece of text is slightly odd, we are shown one piece that tells us about pregnancy and intercourse which are the words he is crossing out, each of these short previews give us a clue to the plot of the film

Each image is cut of short which is called a jump cut; there are a lot of these throughout the opening making it a discontinuity piece of film. Other effects and transitions that they’ve used include flashing, flickering, overlay of shots (one shot on top of another shot, playing at the same time), fade and blur, each of these effects bring across a sense of confusion and disorientation.

The background sounds and music is quite tense, the metal equipment noises and the everyday noises for example to turning of a page linked in with the creepy images don’t link together and this creates an uncomfortable strange sensation for the audience as they don’t know what happening or what is going to happen. As well as these sounds the music is quite low and has no lyrics, this is another way of the film not letting the audience relate straight away as lyrics give you a feel of the mood and characters emotions. As the only lyrics at the very end of the opening scene say “You bring me closer to God” this makes us think of death and religion, which also gives us an insight to how the character might believe or have beliefs about.

The only lighting in the scene is red light as it is mostly set in a photography dark room, this creates dark shadows and silhouettes which means we never actually se the characters face or body we only really see there arms and hands. Other light used in the opening scene is flashes between shots and also and old film scratch effect during transitions.

 The character only gives us a very small insight into their personality because we only see their hands, what’s going on within their hands and the room that gives us idea of who this is. We can tell through the actions that they are making some sort of book and the way they are carefully placing each picture and spending time over writing text in their own blood makes us think that there is something very disturbed about the character. As well as the very odd actions we can see that the characters hands are bleeding scratched and covered in plasters making us think that something bad has happened.