Paris, Texas

This was originally written for my cinema class in college.

Classical Hollywood films are economic and use as minimal stylistic detail as possible in a scene to establish the meaning it really wants to give to the audience. Every detail should have a purpose and play an efficient role in terms of achieving the intended meaning in the scene. The opening scene of the Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas is a good example for this way of capturing the intended meaning. It creates a mise-en-scène with as little detail as possible but tells us a lot about the movie's main character Travis Henderson. In that mise-en-scène; the appearance of Travis and the idea of a man wandering on his own in a huge landscape shot establish the main character and give a good direction to the audience for the rest of the film.

The appearance of Travis is pretty wrecked in the opening mise-en-scène. His clothes are very dirty. His beard and hair are long and untidy. His eyes look so sad and tired. This look of Travis symbolizes that our main character is also wrecked at the beginning of the film. We, as audience, get the feeling that he has not changed his clothes, got a chance to shave his beard and hair and got a good night sleep for a long time; meaning that he has not been to a proper place or a place he can call home for a long time. He has currently no one to take care of him and does not seem aware of his wrecked situation. With all these interpretations, he gives the impression of a man that has been an outcast for a long time and lost in time, space and his own being.

There are many extreme long shots in the opening mise-en-scène that shows Travis as a man wandering on his own in a huge land. Travis seems so little and the world around him seems so huge that this exaggerates his unimportance for this world. Also, there is almost nothing around him in the landscape which shows his loss of the people that once were around him. He almost lost everything and is not aware of his own state and we start to wonder what circumstances brought him to this state. This is a direction that tells us there is a mystery to be solved and the film is going to be an odyssey both for Travis and us that has to be taken to solve that mystery. Travis is going to be like a typical bildungsroman character and try to solve his conflicts with his own life and the world around him since he is now an apprentice to life and his mission is to master it. We are going to try to learn and understand what events caused Travis to end up in this empty land alone as a lost being.