Analysis of No Country for Old Men.

We also watched this film in our media class, but this clip was poignant to me because the man in the shop who is the killer has previously just murdered a lot of people, yet he appears unfazed by this, and has a calm, collected appearance.
This famous representation of the killer is extremely effective as you do not visibly see all of the murders. For example there is one particular scene where he is just about to kill a man in the shower, however he closes the shower curtain before shooting the man. This shows that the audience doesn't necessarily need to see all of the gory details of the murder to have a vivid picture in their heads of the violence, as other details such as the mise-en-scene and music contribute to the whole effect.

The editing of this clip is relatively simple, the camera uses two-shots, over the shoulder shots, reverse angles and medium shots which are all commonly used when filming a conversation where the dialogue is key to the film.

In the scene above, it shows the superiority of the killer, and how naive the shop assistant is because he doesn't know just how dangerous the man is he's serving, as he just presumes that he's just arrogant and rude. This gives the whole scene a tense atmosphere because the audience have already seen the man commit brutal murders so they know what he's capable of but the shop assistant is un-aware of this which adds to the intensity.
The killers superiority is shown further as he asks general questions about the closing time of the shop, and once the answer is given he has the audacity to tell him he's wrong. This creates a certain awkwardness in the conversation taking place between the two characters and this friction is portrayed via these lines, and puts the audience on edge as to whats going to happen next.

'No Country for Old Men' is quite similar to 'Psycho'in the way that some of the murderous scenes aren't shown explicitly, this is done purposefully for effect because it creates mystery and manipulates the audience into believing something violent and brutal has taken place.