How do the elements of the mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing

and sound, and the structure of the narrative create meaning and
generate audience response in the sequence?

’12:43’; the perpetual progression of time is met with social paralysis, the
motionless camera shot: Hubert, Vinz and Said sat stooped and silent; an
unnatural regression into a cheerless children’s park, a futile claim to a
phantom innocence lost to a state in decay; snubbed and shamed by the
suffering of despairing youth.

A strained half minute camera shot is dedicated entirely to the stillness of

the three protagonists; the silence as no dialogue is uttered between them.
The wasting boredom consuming the youth is suddenly incredibly tangible to
the audience in the lack of motion and drooped heads staring blankly down
at the ground; a hard, substantial ground more palpable than looking forward
to any ghost of a future.

The mise-en-scene of this part of the scene is dulled by a lack of vibrancy; a

greyness that overwhelms the three figures crouched in the dust of the
deadened park. Their clothes are drab, the houses that look down into the
park are generic and reflective of the large, dismal housing estates built at
the time. Hubert is physically inside the mouth of the slide, a giant hippo,
creating a terrible feeling of foreboding in the audience as if he is about to
be swallowed into a world caught in a wasted revolution; ‘the price paid for
happiness tomorrow: injustice oppression and misery today’.

As the camera, subsequently zooms out, the frame is filled with the
reduction of the boys in the physical demotion of the park from the rest of
the street, their lack of power, surrounded by bars as in a prison or a zoo;
‘thiory’. The three teenagers are directionless, trapped in their lives as they
are caged into the park; a wretched exhibition to be viewed by a
disinterested world.

A very deliberate piece of editing then suddenly arouses Hubert, Vinz and
Said from their desolate lethargy when the scene is cut and the camera
immediately zooms in to capture the first fragment of speech. An
employment of a sound effect mimicking a fast forward after a great period
of time has elapsed occurs simultaneously implying, to the audience, the
vast and tedious periods of boredom and monotony experienced by the
three boys.
As a news crew drive forward in the back of the frame, the shot captures two
binary opposites: static and motion. The dreadful juxtaposition of the
luxurious mobility of the news crew with the hopeless stasis of Hubert, Vinz
and Said. As the news crew reverses back to film the boys, the camera shots
switch, in quick succession, from the boys’ point of view to the point of view
of the news crew portrayed in the shot being framed by the outline of a
camera lens.

An overlapping of dialogue then ensues; the aggression of the boys, manifest

in their shouting, begins to sound like an awful imitation of apes at a zoo.
The camera zooms in on the three boys as they pack together as though
cornered. This disorder of sound and shot impresses a sense of confusion
upon the audience; they do not wish to criminalise the youths but seen, from
the point of perception of the news crew, they are just animals, jumping up
and down and throwing stones. They shout ironically ‘Do we look like
thugs?’. It is an incredibly distressing scene as unbeknowingly the boys are
fulfilling an appalling social perception of themselves however unlike ‘thugs’
the boys act more like animals, hindered with that same viscerality, not
inertly debauched or wicked, just responding to human provocation. Even at
the opening of the scene the physical posture and position assumed by the
boys is animal: Hubert sits ape-like on the slide, clapping his hands together
at the outbreak of a crude joke as Said talks about a girl he ‘screwed like an
animal’.

As the camera zooms out and the news crew drive hastily away Hubert
shouts ‘Does this look like Thiory?’, a drive-in safari park, and it is apparent
to the audience that youth have become a sub-culture, to be gaped at by the
rest of society, blamed for its failings and to live in a permanent state of
pejoration.

The boys then walk away from the camera and the empty park ready to
rejoin a society they don’t belong to.
Sophie Campaigne