Breakdown of Wes Anderson’s Postmodernist Approach to Cinema

Known for his peculiar style and meticulously crafted cinematic worlds, several elements of the craft drive Wes Anderson’s films. His distinct approach to filmmaking allows him to manipulate the medium, making every frame of his recognizable.

A Wes Anderson film is most importantly, true to life. A majority of them focus on themes like dysfunctional families, friendship, grief, and lack of substance in personal relationships. Anderson visibly uses camera work to establish different relationships by making the camera move along with his characters. By using close-ups and long takes, he deliberately guides our gaze through the frame, almost like telling us where to look while adding a comedic effect.

Ubiquitous symmetry and tableau-style composition in The Grand Budapest Hotel

One of the key elements that define his films is the perfect symmetry of the shots. Films such as The Darjeeling Limited, Rushmore, and Moonrise Kingdom emphasize post-modernist aesthetics over realism. His use of centered composition creates an aesthetically pleasing balance in each frame, giving the sense that each scene is like a stage setting. Almost like a play. Every single frame has been well thought out and speaks volumes about the characters, themes, and plot.

He is also able to create a distance between the viewers and the film, by stylizing the set itself. Because it looks so symmetrical, and beautiful, we’re able to keep in mind, that, this, after all, is a film. Anderson’s signature style is to maintain coherent and meaningful color schemes throughout the film. The colour scheme serves the characters by giving them specific hues so that the audience can subsequently track their arcs.

In Darjeeling Limited, we see how white is used in contrast with black, magnifying the difference between what we see on screen and the action that is happening. When the brothers walk past the funeral of a young Indian boy, the usage of white and gold depict the blank and empty feelings in a setting devoid of joy.

Alternatively, in the scene when the brothers are driving to their father’s funeral, black is overpowering along with the slight use of red. The color of the car seats is red. They take a detour to pick up their father’s ‘red’ car from the repair shop. Generally red represents violence or power in films. However, Anderson’s films associate it with deep pain. The juxtaposition of these two scenes not only conveys the cultural differences between the East and the West but also presents two different ideas on how to view death.

Although Anderson tends to give more thought to his visuals than sounds, he uses ambient sound techniques to create an illusion of reality by not adding music when people are talking. Instead, he creates moments of tension, confusion, and dramatic atmosphere through sounds, like a marching band in “Rushmore”, water running in the background in “Hotel Chevalier” or the noise of people using cutlery in “The Darjeeling Limited.”

Being one of the most modern prolific directors, Anderson might not have traditional blockbuster hits like Christopher Nolan, but his movies have been critically acclaimed and managed to gain their own cult following. The hallmarks he has created for his films corroborate that no one replicates his work like Anderson himself.