French Dispatch Artistic Anaylsis
Hannah Quinton
11/1/2021
English 157 French Dispatch essay
In the 2021 motion picture by Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch is an allusion to the New Yorker and follows the story of a publishing company based in Liberty, Kansas where the editor Arthur Howitzer and his team of journalists meet to come up with ideas for their up-coming issue. The issue includes three stories. The first is the Cycling Reporter, which is simply about a man named Herbsaint Sazerac who travels on his bike around southwest France and describes the places and residents and describes how the story will be told in the cinematography and symbolism of the colors. The Second story we are told is called The Concrete Masterpiece follows a man named Moses- who has been locked up in jail and is serving a life sentence because he committed two homicides. Moses, however, is a genius artist where he paints his prison guard naked, a woman named Simone who is also his muse. While he is in prison though another prisoner, Julian Cadazio buys Moses’s artwork and takes it out to showings outside of the prison and makes Moses famous because of his talent with a brush. The third story is called Revisions to a Manifesto follows Zeffirelli, played by Timothee Chalamet who is a young rebellious kid in a group of activists and we follow him in his love life. For our last story, The private dining room of the police commissioner” we watch the story of a talk show host talks about his experience of a chef and police officer who cooks whenever he is in the station however it soon turns into a story about his son getting kidnapped and the talk show host and police officer going on a mission to save his son. Every single one of these stories portrayed by Anderson has a very similar way of using cinematography to explain to the viewers what's going on, for example the use of color. This is also very similar to many of the texts we are reading in the English 157 class, Comics and History, which is taught by William Nericcio. Some of the readings we do in this class also use the artwork to portray feelings and emotions.
To start off, Anderson is known for his gift of explaining a story through cinematography. Throughout this film it was more like reading a book rather than watching a movie because of the lack of camera movement. Every scene was typically in one frame and the camera stayed in the same place unlike traditional movies where the camera will follow the actors or just move around in general, instead Anderson kept the cameras still, which made the movie seem almost like a comic or a picture book. Of course this makes sense because Anderson is telling the story of a newspaper article so Andersons way of directing the scenes perfectly captures the idea of a comic strip in a newspaper. In the book Epiletic by David B. also does a great job of capturing signature moments like this when David B. describes the mental illness. They both use forms of artwork to describe what the story is about. We can also relate Frida Kahlo's illustrations to the Concrete Masterpiece where we watch Moses- the genius artist illustrates his love in an untraditional way of art that often confuses people with a traditional eye for art. Kahlo also uses an untraditional way to express her feelings in her artwork- when she first started painting it was unusual to hear about woman artists especially with nude artwork of herself with such deep meaning so when watching Moses started painting his love for Simone by using ‘modern art’ they both showed similarities in terms that they changed the idea of art.
Another important factor that lies within both the readings throughout the class and the stories told by Anderson is the use of color. During the Anderson stories in The French Dispatch most of the stories were told in black and white. It was only when in present time that it was in color, or when things in the stories had significant meaning. For example, the first showing of Moses’s art was in color, but after it was in black and white. In the first story, The Cyclicing Reporter he demonstrates that the past will be in black and white and the future will be in color and that outlines how the story will be shown with color. During the reading of the Parable of the Sower color is often used to visually show us Laurens hyper-empthay. Most of Parable of the Sower uses cooler tones and not much color except when Laurens abilities are shown. Color is a very important part of storytelling because of that and shows what the inner-meaning of a story can be, for example Laurens empathy is a prime example of how racism can affect people even if it isn't directly physical. The color in the French Dispatch is used to invoke the viewers of a classic 1920’s film so the viewer truly feels almost a part of a movie as if we were watching it in the 1920’s.
Another comparison you can point out is in the Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner and Ghost worlds are the comic strips they both used. In the film Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner they had a scene where the cop were chasing down the kidnapper of the son, the art style changed from black and white to a colored comic cartoon that looked like comic strips in a newspaper article. It was also very similar to the art style that David Clowes illistruates in the novel Ghost worlds. Anderson illustrated that this way because he wanted it to resemble the comic strip in the New Yorker as much as possible, and the comic strips of EIGHTBALL which is where the original Ghost World can be found. Comic strips were very common back in the day for being one of the only types of entertainment to be colorized, so for Anderson to use the color technique to make everything seem older except for the animated part is quite observant of him.
In Conclusion we can see that Wes Anderson used many artistic techniques in his films that authors use in their writing and illustrations. For example he used the art of color and his cinematography to really portray how a book or an article would be filmed. Many books such as Parable of the Sower have many similarities throughout the stories that Wes Anderson used.