Communication: Concluding Thoughts

I genuinely learned a lot from this assignment—I’ve seen Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York many times over (as one has to in order to truly grasp its meaning), but I haven’t once thought to look up what the word “synecdoche” meant.  After that, I’ve been seeing it everywhere, especially in my literature courses.  Faulkner uses tons of literary synecdoche in his short story “Barn Burning,” for example.  Lighting has always been a subconscious thing for me until this point—I didn’t realize how much of an impact a films lighting can have on the aura the film gives off.  In Requiem for a Dream, for instance, I’ve realized that the lighting has a whole lot to do with the film’s feel.  And while I’ve known what a metaphor was for a while, it actually took me a bit of thinking to get my head wrapped around the depiction of a metaphor in visual format.  The notion of “visual metaphor” is now in my visual interpretation toolkit; hopefully I can spot more of them in the films I’ll see in the future.