bretts research on 'About A Girl'

Section 2- Semiotic Analysis

About a Girl


For my Semiotic analysis I have chosen the film ‘About a Girl’. This film explores the idea of social realism and what a young teenage girl encounters in their life. It is a open ended narrative, leaving the audience in shock of what the protagonist has just done. Short films have a reputation of been weird and entering darks areas within society and this is no exception. It explores the idea of underage pregnancy and family issues therefore it would be useful to show teenagers to teach about social realism.

The film is set in Manchester’s deprived areas; it shows the dark, industrial side of the city and from the clothes and her accent., it suggests she is from a working class background.
The girl explains how she wants to be a pop star, at this point, a cutaway showing her and her friends on the back of a bus singing a ‘Britney Spears’ song. The audience at this point of the film believes she is a normal 13-year-old girl who is just ranting about her issues like her family and her dreams. She does drop little hints of what is to come such as when she says ‘I’m good at hiding things’ and ‘dog went in the canal’.

The camera work is professionally done but yet the quality of the camera seems quite low but this is done deliberately to make it more realistic and effective, the use of a crane to do a high angle pan of place where she stops and drops the ominous bag into the canal. Then it switches to a underwater low angle to show the clear water turning red and the baby tumbling out of the bag. As the protagonist walks along the canal the camera is hand-held, this technique makes it look realistic. At the start of the film there is a low angle shot of the evening sky, with the young girl silhouetted, dancing and singing. This shot is a very good opener because it shows a scenic view and it suggests what the film may be about yet it is sill quite mysterious.

Editing is an important technique in this film because a lot of cutaways have been used to show the audience what she is ranting about, especially a clip of her and her father in the cafe. From this the audience can see how little connection the have. The use of sound is minimal, this gives it a sense of reality so the girl has the audiences full attention. The opening credits are the films titles in the sound of a phone beeps. Which could suggest that the new generation of teenagers have become materialistic and losing the traditional family views for a girl to become a mother, which this film shows very effectively.

The theme of this film is loneliness because she feels lonely with her parents not showing much appreciation and love. Another theme is deception because the result of the film is the baby in the river, which no one seems to know about, even her family. Also dreams plays a big part in this film because after all, it’s about her dream of becoming a pop star and having a baby would all most certainly destroy any hopes of doing so.