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Joe Parise Coms 356 2/18/10 Static and Dynamic Composition In the film Turtles Can Fly we are introduced to a girl named Agrin. She is with a small child around the age of three named Riga. We see throughout the film that Agrin has a strange hatred for the child and wants to rid him from her life. As a viewer we are left to assume that the three-year ???old Riga is Agrin’s son, a product of rape when her village was invaded. Ghobadi, the film’s director, uses one scene that really stood out.
Agrin takes Riga and carries him, in what we can only assume from the dim lighting to be early morning, through a foggy field. She enters from the right side of the frame with Riga on her back and continues walking off deeper into the distance towards the left side of the screen. This static composition can be viewed in its traditional sense of movement within the frame depicting danger and oncoming tension. In this particular shot the girl and her child are the only thing in the frame that draws any attention.
The background is blocked by the dense fog and the only other object mise-en-scene is a large rock on the left side. This may have been placed there to show that she was walking towards the desert away from the camp. Throughout the video the children are forced to grow up and act like adults way beyond their maturity. The theme of the film seems to be that although children can act older than they really are, when a dramatic event occurs they are still just children.
Agrin was raped and forced to raise a child she was not ready for. She was forced to make a decision to leave Riga, as she tried to make this choice to better Riga’s life and leave the horror from her past. The static scene told of the oncoming tragedy which was the end to both Agirn and Riga’s lives. We see when a child is pushed to their limits and have no one to turn to, they brake down and act irrationally as any child would.