Dances with wolves

14 Pages 3473 Words

ns and the female lead by Mary McDonnell. Authenticity was something Costner was aiming for in the film, and the lack of well known faces in the film in fact helped him to achieve this. South Dakota, still looking as it must have done in the 1800's when the film is set, was Costner's choice of location, making use of a privately owned herd of buffalo for one of the film's most dramatic scenes, the buffalo hunt. What Costner has ended up with is a film of majestic proportions whose success is partly due to Costner's personal appeal but also the result of the authenticity he was seeking - the audience become caught up in the lives of the Indians and can easily believe that what they are seeing on the screen could have happened - while its success has sparked off a rash of the genre, with Robert Redford working on Dark Wind , Robert De Niro on Thunderheart and the TV company ABC producing a mini-series, Son of the Morning Star.

A good example of the classic narrative structure, Dances With Wolves leaves its audience with a "satisfied" feeling at the end. The opening sequence poses a number of enigmas for the audience which set the whole narrative in motion. The camera is positioned so that we get a limited viewpoint of the scene, but we know where we are: we see the blood-soaked swabs of the surgeons and the instruments they use; we know the figure on the table, from whose viewpoint and level we see the opening shots of the hospital tent, is going to be important; we hear the conversation of the surgeons, which the figure on the table is also hearing, but we don't see their faces while they discuss taking his leg off, a matter of routine for them; the shots of pieces of army uniform, particularly of the pile of boots discarded at the side also help us understand the situation and the setting of the film. By the time we see the face of the man on the table we know that he is going to be important and what happens to him will feature larg...