Film Analysis Of Vincent Gallos Buffalo 66 - 1083 Words

â€Å"All my life I’ve been a lonely boy.† Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 is a peculiar, surreal film to analyze. As a semi-autobiographical work, Buffalo 66 greatly exaggerates the events in the film and makes the viewers suspend disbelief on more than one occasion. Yet despite this, the main focus of this film is a broken Billy Brown’s emotionally raw journey seeking revenge but instead finding unconditional love through Layla in the end, and the formalist film techniques used here enhance this. Through the deliberate use of photography, staging, and movement, Buffalo 66 works as a formalistic classicism film, a predominantly classicism film with strong elements of formalism, on the style continuum. Gallo’s use of cinematography, even though his†¦show more content†¦The camerawork emphasizes the sense of detachment between the characters, and Billy’s inability with connecting with others. In addition, the film has a contrasty, bleak look to it, like a faded photograph. Gallo shot the movie on reversal film stock to capture that contrast and grain, in attempt to reproduce the same look of football games from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Buffalo 66’s staging conveys many themes. One memorable use of staging is the dinner table scene with Billy, Layla, and Billy’s mother and father. To exaggerate the emotional emptiness of the scene, the scene is framed in a medium long shot; however, the viewers see only three sides of the dinner table at any given moment, like a stage. The characters in the scene range from a personal to social distance. A most prominent detail in this scene, aside from the empty space, is the Buffalo memorabilia present in both the background and foreground. All conversations are either three way or two way, with one person constantly disappearing. The viewer has no way to identify with any particular character; thus, the viewers feel alienated from the dysfunctional family much like how Billy feels with his parents. As mentioned previously in the car scene, Billy is a character who has difficulty connecting with others. Towards the end of the second act of the film, there is a scene when Billy and Layla lie on a motel bed, attempting to be more intimate with