Film Viewing Practice Essay "Agent Carter"

The camera work in this clip of Agent Carter focuses on the dialogue mostly of the characters. Specifically, the eye-level shots and over-shoulder shots really help engage the audience in the conversation between the two characters in the scenes. Specifically, the over-shoulder shot created an uncomfortable and unsolicited sense of sexual tension of Agent Flinn with Agent Carter. Along with this, misogyny in the workplace. Aside from the conversational aspect in this clip, the camera work also contributes to a lot of the anticipation in this film. For example, when Agent Carter is walking toward the warehouse, it gives her a sense of power and anticipation that she is going to “take care of business.” Anticipation of Steve Roger’s death is also established with a wide, action shot as the land comes closer to his crashing plane. There is also contribution of establishing shots in New York City. This grounds the audience into the new setting of the story. 

The editing in this film is pretty standard with its main transitional form of cuts between shots. This is mostly because it is a conversationally based show, so that is a typical choice for a show like this. It does differ from this traditional form of transition a few times, however. This is seen in the transition between the past and present year scene with the fade away shot. Both of these types of shots have significance on the interpretation of the audience and their emotions. The cut away shot gives a sense of action, purpose, and movement. This was typically seen in the conversational and action aspect of the film. So basically, the majority of the film. The fade away shot provides a sense of emotional transition and drama in a scene, as seen in the death scene of Agent Rogers.   

From the very beginning of this film, we as the viewer, are provided with a beautiful, Non-Diegetic score from the film music composer. This use of scoring the film establishes a clearer sense of enhanced emotion from the film. This is exemplified in many regions of the movie. We get a very dramatic and heart wrenching musical theme between Agent Carter and Rogers to establish her sense of retrospective loss. Later, we get a very mysterious and triumphant score which meant as a personification of the agents in the office. The rest of the score is meant to depict the mode with what film scorers call “Audio-Visual Counterpoint.” The rests of the sounds are in accordance with what is occurring in the film, also known as diegetic sound. 

The setting is established in a couple creative ways through mise-en-scene. First, we can see the costumes and outfits that the actors are wearing are from post-World War Two. This is also established by the music that is playing on the radio which is very “old timey.” The acting also gives the reader a sense of the times. The misogyny and patriarchy of the office space that Agent Carter is in also demonstrates to the viewer the time period that Agent Carter is in.