Cinematography in Goodfellas

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In this essay I will write about the American gangster film GoodFellas (1990), directed by Martin Scorsese. In GoodFellas, Martin Scorsese explores the life of former mobster and FBI informant Henry Hill. GoodFellas is the true-life account story about a half-Irish, half-Sicilian kid growing up in New York, idolizing and working for the local mobsters and eventually becoming one of them and rising up in the ranks as he grows older. In the following essay, I will explain how the editing and cinematography was used to influence the audience’s perception of the film. Throughout the whole film, almost every location the mob occupied or visited was always dully lit to dismiss any beauty of the location. This was used to ‘deglamorize’ the mobster life and give it a very dirty look and feel to parallel the story the film was based off of. The film opens with a Pontiac car, a very American car which tells us that the movie is an American gangster film because around the time, Pontiac cars where only sold in North America and it would have been very unlikely that you find one in any other country. The screen then turns and a white text appears that reads “New York, 1970” which establishes that this as an American gangster film because of the association people make with gangsters and large cities such as New York or Chicago. The scene is dark where they are driving, expressing to us that they are bad guys because we associate the night with crime or evil. Finally we see three sharply dressed characters in a car who finally speak with very strong American-Italian accents, helping us confirm that this is indeed an American gangster film because of the stereotypical idea of an American gangster: Italians dressed in expensive suits. By the end of the scene the three open up their car trunk to exemplify their toughness by stabbing at the body that’s there multiple

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