American Graffiti Film Techniques

American Graffiti is set in 1962 in small town U.S.A and is filmed almost exclusively at night. It is aurally accompanied by a late 1950s and early 1960s rock ‘n’ roll sound montage and also the bizarre verbal ramblings of radio Disc Jockey Wolfman Jack. The text follows the fragmented quests[3] of four male youths at the tail end of this 1950s style youth culture before the advent of America’s full involvement in the Vietnam War, the rise of new left radicalism and spread of the Hippie movement. The small town, or “neon wasteland,”[4] could be an impressionistic remake of Lucas’s own home town of Modesto. Although, as James M. Curtis notes, we do not know for certain where the narrative actually takes place only when and the setting is a sort …show more content…
The inclusion of these improvised performances in the final assemblage of the text leads to a few less than perfect verbal pronunciations in the actor’s performances.[13] For example, there is a scene where Debbie’s character waits in the cat as Toad goes into the drug store to try and by some liquor without an identity card. As Toad walks toward the cat she says “did you get it?”[14] a number of times and on the final part of the utterance she makes an obvious mistake with her pronunciation. The inclusion of these imperfect utterances has the effect of lending a certain degree of realism to the narrative and to the simplistic archetypical characters which will be discussed further …show more content…
One reviewer writing just after the film’s release notes that Lucas demonstrates a predilection (or “super cool”) for “marshalling all the hardware”[16] of the era as a means of signifying the period he is representing. These cats used for the street shots and the sites for character’s narratives in the text are all heavily waxed and polished, and appear very well cared for. Although, this could relate to the social status with which the cats are imbued with in the movie’s diegesis, it does also underscore that there is a worth that these vehicles enjoy beyond their own context and immediate use value. The shiny luster of the cats is further amplified by the overhead lighting in the dark streets where a large proportion of the movie is filmed. The automobiles glow luminously against the non-specular backdrops of the drab brick work shops that border the streets of the cruising circuit. Moreover, many of the shots in the film are taken from cameras mounted on the cats themselves or another cat which is driving parallel to it. For the sake of the camera operators who could not obtain sufficient depth of field with the regular street lighting at night there are lights on the floors of the cats which point upwards[17] towards the people inside and subtly, but