A Beautiful Mind, written by Ron Howard, it tells the story of a brilliant mathematician named John Nash who eventually discovers he had an ill mind when he is seeing people who aren’t real. As John goes through college at Princeton and the rest of his complex career we watch him battle his own mind. The director uses several different film techniques to walk the viewers through the life of having a crazy but beautiful mind.
One film techniques that was used to represent how John was feeling was rate; Howard used this to allow the viewers to understand what it felt like for Nash when he had a moment of brilliance or disappointment. John was asked the by Pentagon to try and decode something for the government. When he arrived there and saw…
Quite often the angle of the camera was showing John above the person he was speaking too, both people were in the shot but it frequently showed Nash above his acquaintances to symbolize that he is at a higher intellectual and intelligence level than most people. However, this exact technique was used later on in the movie to show that Johns mind had become very ill therefore crippling him below others. There is a scene in the movie where the director shows John on the ground and the Psychiatrist towering over him, the whole point of this shot was to show that when Johns mind got sick it was causing him to finally be below someone else in that social chain. Finally, camera angles were used in a very unique way to symbolize what was happening between him and his wife. A scene in the movie contained a shot that showed Alicia in the refrigerator and Nash at the table, a wall dividing them but kept them both in the shot. The wall was meant to show what his illness was doing to their marriage; the wall itself was representing schizophrenia but also shows the wedge it’s driving between them.
In addition, these are three of the many film techniques that Ron Howard used to give the viewers a better understanding of what John Nash was perceived as during both the good and bad times. They also allowed the viewers get the clear message to what the director…
