There Will Be Blood

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In the film, There Will Be Blood, it seems that all cinematographic elements compel the viewer to put into contrast the representation of nature and that of humans. Indeed, whether it be through by using a haunting soundtrack, a varying visual setting or extreme lighting, Jonny Greenwood and Robert Elswit managed to truly portray the role of oil in the mental development protagonists. Commodities such as oil are often thought of as masks to social relations of productions, they are treated as if they contained an predefined value and the human labor put into their production is ignored. It is argued by Karl Marx and other economists that if this causes workers to be disconnected from they own labor making them apathetic to what they yield.…show more content…
The opening scene, the construction of the church next to the derrick as well as many other notable sequences with all their cinematographic elements serve to underline the position of the protagonists in regards to nature and oil. The first ten minutes of the film, containing little to no speech, confirm it : Daniel Plainview is a lost animal in the desert who would rather use this arms, hands and nails than his capacity to speak. This long sequence, stressed to the beat of the man's breathlessness, the noise of…show more content…
Any film that covers the conquest of the subsoil by pioneers naturally gives birth to a visual opposition between verticality, the derricks, and horizontality, the landscape.The cinematographer translates in every frame the opposition between the aridity of the decor and the extravagance of the will and destiny of the central figure. Paul Thomas Anderson does not limit himself to this simple geometrical evidence, he depicts tiny men trying to appropriate for themselves. the Earth and Sky. Indeed, the desire of elevation of Daniel Plainview is rivaled by the grounds of religion, next to the derrick, we see shots of the construction of Eli Sunday's church. Both Sunday's and Plainview's extreme desire for grandiosity represented in various sequences show that they are never satisfied with what they have achieved, they always need more as if it were a way to survive. It could be argued that this is an animalistic instinct that is more than natural however, in a commodity-society based scenario we would expect the protagonists to behave in quite the opposite manner : being far less involved in the production of oil for they have become disconnected to their own

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