The Color Purple Scene Analysis #6

The scene begins with a sudden long pan left to right.

Albert enters the scene by throwing a suitcase of Nettie's and it's content off his front porch. The camera quickly follows his movement until he reaches Nettie and Cecile, whose arms are locked around each other desperately trying to stay together. The way he abruptly enters the scene adds a sense of surprise that the two girls may have felt when they discovered what Albert intended to do. The pan leads to the joint Cecile and Nettie as Albert forcefully tries to split the two.

A long shot of all three characters on the porch is reduced to just a medium closeup 3/4 frontal on a negative angle to show the emotion in the two girls. This shot allows for the audience to see their embrace as well as their anxiety and anguish. The next scene is another wide shot with a long pan that follows Albert dragging Nettie out of his house. They fall in a small pool of mud at the end of the porch's steps in the process.

They are covered in mud as they land and Nettie tries to escape Albert's grip but is once again caught. As he continues to throw her out, he drags her through the mud and I'm reminded of the saying that suggest speaking unfavorably of a person. In this scene he embodies behaving unfavorably towards someone. The next shot is an extreme wide shot that use the branch tree house in the foreground as the background is occupied by the background for a while, then the girls dash from the background to the foreground as the camera pans into another frontal 3/4.

Like the children in the scene that follow all the commotion, the pan allows the audience to become a part of the scene as they watch how each moment unfolds. Then there is a medium close up of Albert as his forces Nettie's hands of the side of the tree house. We follow him down as he pounds her hands off the tree post. This gives way to his cruel calculate behavior that cause him to go to unimaginable measure to rid his life of the innocent Nettie. Albert finally accomplishes putting Nettie out.

The scene that shows him pushing her out of his gate is shot at a low angle and then as Nettie hits the grown, the camera follows until it locks on a close-up of Nettie in the dirt. The Series of pans that brought us to this point seem like the opener for how mean Albert is. Nettie leaving was the turning point in Cecile's life, and her being thrown out in such a matter creates a uneasiness in the audience's view of Albert. The last couple of scenes show Nettie leaving Albert's property for good.

It starts off with a medium close-up facing Albert holding Cecile back and pushing Nettie away. Then it transitions to a 3/4 positive shot of Albert pushing Nettie away, to an over the shot facing Nettie who has given up trying to get to her sister again. Albert holds us a strong fist that causes Nettie to give up her fight. This shows a power in Albert. This power is made more evident with another low angle shot behind Nettie that makes Albert the subject of the shot, gives them authority and demeans Nettie standing before. Him The lighting seemed merely natural sunlight from an overcast day. The characters live on a farm and I think the dull lighting goes well with the location. When the scenes are on the white porch, the light seems to be a tad bit brighter. As the scene moves onto the dirt road where low angle shots reveal a purplish pinkish sky that covers the sun with clouds, the scene has a orangish darken feel to it. This change in scenry and light concludes the sad segment of the movie well. The purple tone in the sky that's shown from Albert's high angle shots is a nice little additive. The color purple has be theorized as being "represent the future, the imagination and dreams, while spiritually calming the emotions" (Empower yourself with color psychology, "The Color Purple and The Color Violent") but in this scene, doesn't correlate at all with this idea. This irony made this scene stand out to me and thus, I did it for my assignment!