Milk presentation part 3

   The film itself directly coincides with the narrative which is a recreation of Harvey Milk's recorded will. The narrative is based on time sequence as well as plot because it is a recounting of Milk's experiences. The narrative helps to build the story especially in the introduction as it quickly establishes the mood, ending, and beginning of the film all in the same instant, while showing actual news footage from the faithful day of Harvey Milks death.

      In Milk much of the mood and climactic events of the film are either intensified or set up by small things such as lighting or camera angles. For example, when his boyfriend Jack hangs himself, the scene begins with Sean Penn running up a stair well looking at all the papers and fliers in the hallway. There is a lot of quick cutting as he runs up the stairs and looks throughout the house for Jack, this adds a lot of tension as we know something tragic has just occurred and out of suspense we wait to see what that is exactly. We can assume that something has happened to Jack though, as he portrayed as shy, nervous, and overbearing, we can assume that because Milk was late he must have done damage to something, most likely himself.

          Another shot that I really enjoyed watching, eventhough it was set in a very bleak and depressing scene, is in the first 20 minutes of the movie when Milk is explaining how the system they developed within the gay community to use whistles, as a cry for help. In the scene, a young gay boy is being zipped up in a body bag, clearly he had just been murdered and Milk and a police officer are talking to eachother about the incident. The interesting part of the scene is that it is all filmed in a relection of the actual scene taking place. This reflection is viewed in the side of the whistle of the deceased boy, which is clear because it is lying in the street and covered in blood, as the boy was. This is interesting because the whistle makes it more unclear when looking at it because it is simply a reflection of the actual scene but with all the dialogue included, and because this is taking place at night, it makes the scene seem even more bleak and hopeless for Harvey Milk's movement.
         In addition to lighting and angles, emotions are extremely well incorporated into the movie and are done so well as to make the audience feel them. A prime example would be after Harvey Milk's big birthday party; keeping in mind that we know Dan White kills Harvey Milk because of the establishing shots in the movie.

After the party we see Dan White, drunk, come up to Harvey Milk, and this is soon after Harvey Milk had shut down the proposal for pay raises for those in office, proposed by Dan White. Drunk, White begins talking to Milk and leaving off ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in a negative way. Such as White's yelling about his personal "problem" that he has, and telling Milk that he, "has something for him" that he'd been wanting to give him, which we also never see. Sean Penn then portrays his discomfort by trying to avoid White and this seems like a prime murder scene, causing the audience to go into hysteria due to tension.

   These are just some of the numerous manipulations of emotion and the audience through the use of characters acting skills and different cinematographic methods of tension build up.