华尔街之狼 观后感 英文

Wolf of Wall Street Cinematography

The wolf of Wall Street movie is a controversial motion picture based on a bestselling novel about the rise of a Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort. Leonardo Di Caprio, who delves into the life of drugs, women, money laundering and securities fraud plays the main character. Together with his friends, they are able to build a multi-million company that defrauds people by selling them penny stocks.

Wolf of Wall Street movie may be classified as a narrative type of movie and is directed by Martin Scorsese. The cinematographer shot the interesting movie in film mode. Scorsese chose this approach as he saw the images shot by his cinematographer having richer skin tones and possessing more color nuance as compared to digital shots during preproduction testing runs. Most parts of the movie were therefore shot on film, and for night scenes, Alexa was used as well as green screen visual effects.

A major challenge on the film’s director was on deciding how to depict the various phases of the main character’s(Belfort) life. In conjunction with the films cinematographer, Scorsese decided to differentiate scenes of Jordan’s life where he seemed lost or uncertain from the scenes he would appear to have found clarity in his life and some sense of right course. This was successfully achieve from the use of diverse optics, color schemes, and lighting styles. Being guided by Belfort’s mental state and thoughts, the cinematographer alternated between various lenses for example v-lite, Hawk V, V-plus lenses, among others to get various degrees of depth, clarity, and perspective (Barsam & Dave p.238). Moreover, to enhance the contrast, in the different mental states, the director mixed in several diffusion filters, with ambient smoke being used sometimes and pushing the negative. As Rodrigo Prieto, the movies cinematographer explains, at the start of the film, it has a softer and slightly murky look, as Jordan has not yet

found himself. He seems confused and somehow awestruck by the busy Wall Street. During this phase of Belfort’s career, the director used a more narrow depth of field together with some slight alteration of anamorphic lenses (Barsam & Dave p. 240).

Jordan at first works at the firm LF Rothschild before starting his own business. The set at the investment firm is dominated by a color scheme of green and gold light that imply an old vintage look. The director claimed a photo he had seen of a brokerage firm in the 1980’s inspired this idea. In making wide shots, the cinematographer captured the office space using short range V-lite lenses that were able to curve the frames ends a bit, creating a sense of uncertainty. The picture of LF Rothschild is not as crisp clear as the outlook of Jordan’s subsequent firm, which had more of the color white. This helps show a different ambience and timeline of the two firms.

After the crash of 1987, LF Rothschild falls and is shut down. Belfort loses his job and desperately searches for anywhere he can find employment. Eventually, he starts to work as a regular employee at an investment center, an occupation he dislikes. This set was only lit through big windows from one side bringing out a feeling of sort of being in a cave. This part of his life the idea was to show the decline of Belfort’s life an d he falls into darkness. After some time Jordan establishes his own brokerage firm and gains massive success. When he knows how to make a lot of money, and is successful, the film has a crisper, pristine look. The cinematographer changed to spherical Master Primes and did not use diffusion for this part.

When he is under investigation, the director, and cinematographer create a sort of paranoia look. They changed back to Hawk anamorphic, with lengthier focal lengths to depict a feeling of being investigated. In some scenes, they also added some smoke to make the background faintly milky and have a shallow depth of field. The cinematographer did also push the film stock for the scenes and stop to improve grain and contrast.