Paper Moon Illusions

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Paper Moon(Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) tells a story that a conman Moses Pray and an orphan girl Addie Loggins develops a friendship on their journey to San Jose. In the film, the director constantly uses paper moon motif and deep space composition to imply a dichotomy between reality and illusion. The contrast between reality and illusion is emphasized at the ending of the film(shot1-5). First, we see a close up of the front portion of the the car. The film cuts to a medium shot of Moze driving and shifting gears. Then we cut to a long shot of the car pulling over. Moze lights a cigarette and starts smoking. Looking around, he finds the photo of Addie with the paper moon. With eye-matching editing, we cut to the close up the the photo and Moze’s tapping finger next to it. On the photo, it says from Addie, to Moze. The photo of paper moon and Addie is an illusion. Paper and photo both lead to false beliefs. Objects on the paper or…show more content…
People usually perceive those media and the message on as unreal and fake. Here, the fake photo distinguish from the real friendship between Moze and Addie. The significance of the paper moon motif is that it contrasts the concept of Paper Moon being fake to the plot which character’s reality contradicts with the illusion.The motif is not limited to the form of photos or paper. The song Paper Moon, as a part of the paper moon motif, is used to remind audience the fact that paper moon is an illusion.At the beginning of the clip, there is no music, and all we can hear is the sound of the engine of that rusty truck. The soundtrack of Paper Moon starts playing when Moze and Addie gets on the car. As the song goes,” It’s only a paper Moon/ sailing over a card board sea/ but it wouldn’t be make believe/ if you believed in me.”, spectators are cued to think about the

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