Week 25.39 - Socials Roundup
22 Sept - 29 Sept 2025: 12 Angry Men, Malcolm X, Raw, Taskmaster, Dickinson
Week 25.39 posts include shots from 12 Angry Men (1957); Malcolm X (1992); Raw (2016); Taskmaster (2015-current); and Dickinson (2019-2021).
Malcolm X
If you missed our post about Malcolm X’s strong use of color theory last week, you can catch up to it now.
But sometimes you just want to appreciate a beautiful, perfect shot of Delroy Lindo and a smoke ring.
Dickinson
Speaking of perfect frames!
This shot from 2.01 "Before I got my eye put out" doesn’t just position Sue (Ella Hunt) within a gilded mirror frame-within-a-frame, it reflects two candles to make four, and lines up those candle’s flames to draw our eyes to Sue’s eyes.
Raw
The opening sequence of Raw effectively uses contrast between shots to create a big impact.
A wide, quiet shot; a tiny figure runs on the side of an empty road.
A wide, quiet shot; a small car drives towards camera.
A return to the first shot, then suddenly! almost simultaneously! the car comes into frame, the figure jumps out from behind a tree, the car swerves, a loud noise, a medium shot of a car careening, a medium shot just as the car smashes into a tree with a loud bang . . .
The shot holds as the car stills.
A return to the first quiet wide, with the car and figure in shot. Sloooooowly, the figure stands, dusts off, and walks towards the car.
The sudden change to rapid action is startling, then in the return to stillness we’re left to wonder what just happened!?
A fantastic, wordless way to open a film and hook an audience, in under 90 seconds.
12 Angry Men
Where do you look in this photo? What draws your eye?
Much of shot composition is directing the audience to look in a particular place or at a particular person, but here part of the point is that there isn’t one place to look; there are a dozen places.
To accomplish this intentional discordance, everyone is scattered around the room left to right as well as foreground and background; the lighting is broad; the dark furniture is running every-which-way and the bright white lights / papers / shirts break up the room up at irregular intervals everyone is looking different directions, so our eyes too bounce all over the place.
The overall effect is confusion, because the director wants to capture the discordance of the jury room drama where everyone is confused and at odds with each other.
Taskmaster
Taskmaster Series 15 Ep 8 “100% Bosco” gives us this nice little establisher of Jenny folding up her task, before cutting to a delightful inside-the-barrel shot just in time for her to drop it down upon us.