Film Analysis- Forrest Gump

When the movie first starts you see what seems to be a pure white feather gently start to float down from a dark grey sky which is raining. The feather gives you a very bittersweet feeling, some sort of innocent and sweet feeling mixed with a bit of sadness. The way that the feather does this is innocence is often related to pureness, which in turn is usually portrayed as pure white. And the light and gentleness of the feather makes you think of a gentle soul, which wouldn’t harm anyone, and has little darkness in the heart. The dark grey sky, which usually gives off a sad effect, and gives of a feeling like you, the audience should be mourning for something sad that has happened, adds to the bittersweet feeling of the feather. The rain too, gives off a sad feeling and piles on to all that.

When you first see the feather, you notice that it’s being pushed and tossed from side to side by the wind. The way the wind seems harsh sounding and how it seems to knock the feather this way and that way, sort of knocking the feather off course. The way that the wind does this to the pure white feather, make you think of an innocent being tossed and turned on life’s course, or a gentle person in the middle of a bustling street of inconsiderate people who don’t give a second thought before pushing and shoving someone. Going back to the grey sky, it makes you feel like the feather is an innocent life, which is filled by sadness.

Also the way that they start off with a pure white feather in the middle of nothing but grey sky makes you concentrate on the feather. And as the camera tracks the feather, you feel you are right there, watching the feather fall as it descends or floats up a bit, sometimes getting close to you and then floating away, increasing your curiosity in the feather. But as the feather floats down and the camera goes into a birds eye, your curiosity for the feather grows, but you start to notice what seems to be a little suburban town as well.

As the feather descends, the sky starts to turn to a light greyish blue, the wind dies down, and the raining stops making the feather float more gently down. The way it does this, makes you think of that innocent life you thought of before, not just filled with sadness, but hope and a little happiness too.

Through all this the background music helps to emphasize every little notion and action towards the feather. The music starts off bittersweet like the scene and gets more high pitched as the feather goes up and but slowly becomes more plainly sweet and happy. Though on the whole the music sounds slightly romantic, so the beginning maybe hinting at it being a part romantic film.

Slowly as the camera tracks the feather, you get this wide view of the town, and the feather heads towards a street, and you start to get the notion that the feather really does relate to the soul and life of some person. From this you get the feeling that the feather’s course down is probably similar to Forrest Gump’s life, which we may assume because that is the name of the movie.

On the feather’s descent, the feather comes to briefly resting on a busy man’s shoulder. What this may represent is hope touching down on this man, in which could be the way Forrest Gump leads his life, occasionally putting a bit of hope and happiness into the people that he meets.

The feather then finally comes to fully rest against the dirty shoe of a man sitting on a bench. The camera too finally rests its view on the feather and the shoe in a Dutch shot, after it had slowly been zooming in. The way that the camera had been tracking the feather and how the gaze rested on the man’s shoes makes you feel like you had been following the feather yourself, and had stopped when you noticed it on another person’s shoes. Your attention switches like it would have if you were really following the feather, and you now start to forget a bit more of the feather and concentrate on the man. Despite the contrast you get a pretty clear message that the feather is connected to the man and he’s probably Forrest Gump. In this case the feather seems to represent a pretty pure soul, and the shoes represent the physical hardship the man had to overcome.

When the picks up the feather you can now see that it isn’t pure white, but has grey lines on it like repeated arrows, as if to indicate to keep going forwards. It also symbolizes that the feather is not perfectly pure white, and neither is the soul in which it represents. The man then takes out a children’s book and places the feather inside. The book can give clue to the man. It hints that he is either waiting for a child, the book is very sentimental to him or he is very childlike which relates to the innocent feeling, as innocence is usually found in children.

As the bus arrives a nurse gets off the bus and sits down on the bench near the man. Despite her opening her magazine and show no signs of wanting to have a conversation, the man promptly introduces himself as Forrest Gump and offers her a chocolate, in which the nurse hardly looks up and says nothing, but Forrest just continues to talk as if he hadn’t noticed. This shows that Forrest Gump is very straight forward and friendly to even strangers. His accent and the way he speaks indicates that he may have a bit of trouble physically saying what he thinks and shows he may be a little mentally slow. But the way he talks also makes you think he speaks honestly and truthfully, but also hardly ever talks badly about anything. He then talks about how his mama told him “life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” From this you can relate back to the feather in the wind and how it often moved unpredictably. Also Forrest refers to another saying by his mother “there’s an awful lot you can tell ‘bout the person by their shoes; where they’re going, where they been.’ From this we can tell that the directors purposefully made Forrest’s shoes dirty to show that he has led a hard life and confirms what we thought about him having physical, and maybe mental hardship too.

So from analyzing the first five minutes of the film we can already tell who is Forrest Gump; the type of life he led, and the type of person he is now. Also we can tell the genre of the movie is most likely a romantic drama with a bit of comedy. After analyzing the first five minutes of the film you come to realize a lot of analyzing came from the feather, which most people would be intrigued by but ignore. Though many of the things we analyzed from the feather we confirmed by watching Forrest Gump for just a couple of minutes. As film makers and cinematographers in the making we need to stay aware that everything in a film’s mise en scene is on purpose.