Eternal+Sunshine

The theme of the movie is that people can erase someone from their mind, but getting someone out of their heart is another story. The movie is uniquely edited in that it does not just flow in the time sequence. It actually starts with Joel and Clem first meet in the train and fall in love, and then shows their past, in which Clem and Joel used to be the lovers, but they don’t remember each other now because they decided to erase each other’s memory. According to the past, Joel and Clem cannot be the lovers again because they got tired of each other and determined to erase each other from their own memory. However, the first scene of the movie illustrates them as a new couple attracting to each other. This kind of editing shows how they fall in love again since they had not gotten each other out of their hearts. Moreover, the director purposely used bright lighting and pastel color when Joel reminisces back his ‘nice’ memory with Clem to evoke dreamy tone. Joel wants to erase his memory of Clem at first, but as he goes through the memory, he finds himself not want to lose any memory related to Clem. It is because he misses the time he spent with Clem. In order to portray the beautiful memory that cannot be returned and that will be vanished like a dream, the director used a lot of natural sunlight to create dreamy tone. Moreover, the director also used spot lighting to create confusion in the movie. Every time Joel, in his dream, finds out that his memory with Clem is going to be erased and tries to escape with Clem, the spotlight is used to create hopeless tone. In certain scenes, the center part of the screen is lighted, and the other parts are covered with black. This lighting reflects his status because just like the majority of the screen is covered by black, majority of his memory is erased. Most of his memory has been already erased, no matter if it was by his will or not. This lighting illustrate that he cannot stop himself from his memory being erased because his memory is already in the process of being erased. Furthermore, the movement of camera added reality to the movie. As one can clearly see, most of the movie was taken by hand, which caused shaking on the screen. This might interrupt the movie, but the director well utilized this kind of cinematography. The hand-filmed movie adds actions, which makes the audience feel closer to the characters and think the characters are real. Lastly, the director utilized mise-en-scène to show that Joel is in his own memory. The memory parts are the series o<range type="comment" id="384373252_9">f mise-en-scène</range id="384373252_9">. For instance, Joel walks from the library to his home immediately. This creates the boundary between Joel’s memory of the past and his presence.

example of mise-en-scène

spot light