An Occurance of Aesthetics.

An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge. Admittedly, this is the first black and white movie that I’ve ever watched – aside from the half-colored half-black-and-white Wizard of Oz in Laser Disc form when I was 5. It was certainly different in a lot of ways. As this is the first essay for this course, it isn’t technical or critical; instead it is supposed to be opinionated – and I am all for opinion.

The very first thing that I noticed was the quality of the picture. It might’ve been in black and white, but I realized that the picture was rather clear, almost in high definition at some points. I was quite impressed. I literally raised my eyebrows upon the first movement of the camera from the image that shows the warning sign to the trees and the environment.

And so the story began. I was sitting up straight with my hands on my chin at the start of the movie because I was very interested and curious to know what the story was about. From the very beginning I already knew that someone was going to be hanged, but I didn’t know what was going to happen; hence I sat up straight from the start until the moment he managed to escaped the soldiers. At that point, I already figured that he was going to be running and running so I laid back because I wasn’t as curious of what was going to happen as compared to the start of the movie. However, I did find it rather strange that Peyton Farquhar managed to keep such a straight face at the beginning knowing that he was going to die. It isn’t significant enough to note but it is what came into my mind when I saw the scene, and since this essay is supposed to be opinion based…

So he ran and ran and ran. I was laying  back on my chair as comfortably as ever. I wasn’t “intrigued” by the movie at that point. When he was running in a straight line with the trees all nicely arraged as if it was a pathway made for him to run,  I actually thought of Forest Gump. It looked very similar to when Tom Hanks was running and running and running in one direction. I thought “maybe that’s where they got the idea”.

After an enormous amount of running, he finally stopped at a gate – in which it magically opened itself for him – this is where I got up again with my hands on my chin. I tend to do this when I am expecting or waiting for something to happen. So I sat that way until the moment he saw the girl. I found that scene hilarious. It was almost as if the director ran out of film so he had to reuse the same scenes time and again to make the movie longer. Just when I was about to lay back on my chair – because I thought I already knew how the story was going to end – my eyes opened wide and my eyebrows felt as if they were pushed upwards by Yoda’s force. The ending was sensational. I say this because it was completely unpredictable and it was done in such a way that it left people – or me – in shock; and I found that “awesome”. It’s safe to say that that particular scene, that sudden change of aesthetics was what made my entire opinion of this movie.