The art of framing

As Tony Zhou shows us in his recommendable Facebook page, called "Every Frame a Painting", the framing is a fundamental tool to work the audiovisual narrative. His interesting online essays series about the film forms are an inexhaustible resource to illustrate audiovisual language keys. And a good example would be the explanation of the use of a quadrant system to analyze the narrative style of such an innovative film as Drive.

In this way, as proposed by Zhou analysis, the Nicolas Winding Refn's film come to life when choosing scenes and divide them into quadrants. Thereby, this would demonstrate how extraordinarily Refn uses what, in other cases, it would be a conventional storytelling tool.


A good example would be the explanation of the use of a quadrant system to analyze the narrative style of such an innovative film as Drive.

Consequently, the fragments that divide the actors, from left to right, help telling two different stories at the same time in a single plane. While the split levels, from top to bottom, would show their inner feelings and concerns in a way that neither their faces nor dialogs could. And, thus, these narrative effects provide Drive with the vitality of a film that it may be predictable and unpredictable at the same time.


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