Intertextuality

Intertextuality is a term to describe the visual referencing between films. Quite literally films "borrow" from each other but it is very different to plagiarism as they do not really copy anything so nothing is infringed.

We started off in our lessons by watching an iconic scene from the movie "Psycho" then determined which scenes were borrowed from it on three other clips. What lies beneath, Fatal attraction & The stepfather. In what lies beneath a man is holding a woman in his arms and walks up a flight of stairs and then takes her and puts her into a bath tub: the scene borrows from psycho, the scene is remeniscent of the almost identical scene in psycho when the man takes his mother up the stairs, even the same camera angle is used. In fatal attraction a man and a woman are fighting all over a house and then she comes at him with a knife; this scene is borrowed from psycho also because it looks similar to when a shadowy figure stabs the woman in the tub. And in the stepfather a man does an everyday thing like shaving and washing his hands that put the audience in a false sense of security, the psycho homage is the camera angles that are very well captured.