6. Picnic at Hanging Rock
This 1975 film not only launched the career of future The Truman Show and Master and Commander director Peter Weir. It’s been credited with revolutionizing Australian cinema and effectively making films from down under an international force to be reckoned with.
Little wonder that it was sufficiently beloved to be remade in 2018 as a TV series.
What helps hook Picnic at Hanging Rock is its seeming normalcy. It begins with the class of a finishing school in Adelaide of 1900 going on a day out. While they’re there, four of the girls vanish. Subsequent search parties can’t find a trace. One man tries going it alone, and goes blind.
Hanging Rock refuses to even hint what caused the women to vanish or what made the subsequent investigation have such odd occurrences. Then one of the women returns, but she can’t remember anything that happened to her around Hanging Rock.’
7. The Matrix
Oh, were you expecting this list to only include arthouse/cult movies? No way, commercial success is no barrier to effective technique.
While surely many others have commented to death on its use of Hero’s Journey structure, color, etc. in 2017 vlogger Patrick Willems shared with the internet a novel observation. It was a simple but highly effective method that the Wachowskis used for keeping the audience unsure: Sound mixing during scene transitions.
For example, during the scene where protagonist Neo is interrogated by the villainous Agent Smith and a cybernetic tracking device modelled after a crayfish is put in his navel as Neo screams, the same sort of scream Neo makes as he wakes up in bed.
This match of edit and sound mixing mimics an earlier scene where Trinity introduces Neo to the idea of entering a new world at a club, and immediately after he wakes up. But on the sound mix the musical score shifts in rhythm and pitch to resemble the buzzing of an alarm clock before transitioning in bed to the next scene, helping to sell the notion that the previous scene was a dream through connected sound and establishing a pattern in the movie.
It’s a perfect illustration of how movies need to set up rules and frameworks if change in the flow of events is going to have an mean something to audiences and how even the subtlest filmmaking methods can be important.
