Sin City and Multimodality

For me, it is much easier to see the ways in which Sin City relates to new media than doing the same for As Tears Go By, as the unconventional filming techniques of Sin City were highly publicized during its release; having been a fan of the graphic novels, I was paying close attention to the trailer and promotional materials for the film in months leading up to its release.

As I understand, Sin City is revolutionary in that it is the first film to be shot entirely in front of a green screen, with all the background digitally added. Additionally, the film is mainly in black and white, with occasional color added to an object to emphasize its importance; I have only seen this technique utilized previously in Schindler's List, and not to the same degree as it is used in Sin City. The visual mode of representation used in the film communicates the particular style of the graphic novels: stark black and white provide high contrast, giving it a different feel than black-and-white films where the majority of the colors turn out as shades of gray. I find this technique particularly interesting in the scenes of extreme violence, where the majority of blood spilled is represented as solid white. It aids in stylizing violent scenes that may otherwise have been perceived as much more graphic. For example, the images of Marv covered in red blood and red blood splattered on Miho's face stand out vividly in my mind, despite many other scenes containing much more onscreen violence. However, I noticed the multimodality of the film as a text most strongly in relation to these scenes; despite the use of the white blood making the depictions of violence less realistic, the movement of the actors' bodies and sound of their voices still suggest pain and suffering, rendering these scenes in the film more disturbing than their graphic novel counterparts, which rely solely on visual representation and written language. I found myself cringing quite frequently during the film (even on this, my fifth viewing), while I rarely found myself reacting so viscerally to the same sequences in the graphic novels.

Despite the film's problematic representations of violence and gender roles, I still enjoy watching it, mainly for the pleasure of seeing such an aesthetically distinct, two-dimensional world replicated so faithfully in a three-dimensional sense. The incorporation of digital effects into films can at times call attention to the film's constructed nature (break the fourth wall), but Sin City demonstrates that these techniques can also bring to life in a believable manner a world which visually differs so drastically from that which we experience and consider to be natural.