Monarch of the Glen Re-Write

As a representational issue Age is portrayed in many different ways such as camera, mise-en-scene, editing and sound. In this essay I will talk about how they are portrayed within each factor in this extract.

Camera plays a very important part in highlighting the issue of age. In one scene we can identify that if you are older you have a higher position of authority. This is represented through camera in one particular scene. In this scene we see the young girl ‘Amy arguing with her elder guardian. The reason we can identify that this issue is when Amy is talking the camera angle is always facing downward and when it turns to the elder man the camera is always angled up. This is representing that because Amy is younger than the man she is thought to be lower than him.

   Another moment regarding camera is when Amy crashes her fame and then her family come running to her. The camera is always positioned so it shows the elder ones to be more forward. This highlights that because the elders are more upfront and because the younger ones are sort of behind, to me it suggests because the guardians are older they will face their problems rather than hiding like the younger ones do.

Moving on to mise-en-scene there are many moments within the extract where this is used to represent age. One of the main parts that I picked out was the characters that where in the background of this shot whilst everyone was working. This stuck out to me as a good use of mise-en-scene to represent this issue. In the background of the shot you can see that the younger workers are working with heavier objects and working alone, whereas the elder workers were struggling and having to work together. To me personally this is trying to portray that younger generations of workers can handle more physically challenging tasks compared with the older generation which I personally think creates a negative stereotype to people older than myself.

Another part of mise-en-scene that I picked up upon was some of the props and colours in Amy’s bedroom in the scene where Amy runs away from home we see props such as a lot of teddy bears and quite bold colours such as red an yellow. I think this represents what some people think 16 year olds and this generation is. By the use of mise-en scene I think it is trying to demonstrate that our generation is very bold and outgoing (by use of the colours) but we can also we quite immature (by use of the props)

Editing also helps with highlight a representational issue. In the majority of the scene I noticed that a lot more screen time was given to the older main characters rather than the younger ones. I believe this is trying to show that the older you get the more you have to say and this is shown by the editing because they are giving more screen time to the older actors in turn I guess giving them more dialogue.