Analysis Of The Witness Murder Scene

Witness - 1985, Directed by Peter Weir
Staring Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis and Lukas Haas

A young Amish boy is sole witness to a murder; policeman John Book goes into hiding in Amish country to protect him until the trial.


The first shot a Long shot of a Amish boy - we can tell this by the clothes that he is wearing -  looking up at a large statue and then of a close-up of his face that has a expression of awe. This gives the a sense of scale to the boy and the location, which is a train station, and also the give a sense of the boy's insignificance in the world around him. The large open indoor spaces is also goes against the thriller convention of claustrophobic indoor spaces.   Also his expression indicates that he has not been in this environment before.


 We then see a mid/long shot of the boy and his mother sitting a another room within the station and the boy gets up and asks his mother to go to the toilet and he then pre-seeds to walk off. We then see the Boy in the toilet and also another man washing his face in the sinks, all we can hear during this scene is the sound of the tap running and the footsteps of two more men that walk into the toilet - one of whom is very smartly dressed and has a very confident body language, which suggests a person of power, A policeman in the case of this film. These two men then attack the man that was already in the toilet and then murder him, while this is happening we then get a close-up of the boy looking though the gap in the toilet cubical door at the scene that is taking place before him. This gives us the feel that boy has no power and a sense of helplessness in the current situation. After the men have killed the person they start rummaging though his possessions, as they do this the boy makes a noise that one of the men hear and he starts opening all the cubical doors one by one, slowly getting closer and closer to the cubical that the boy is in - this builds the tension and makes that audience ask what is going to happen next. As he is doing this we then skip to see the boys face with a very scared expression, he this franticly tries to close the lock on the door - this also adds to the tension in the scene but also creates a sense of urgency. As the man gets to the locked door of the cubical he tries to get it open and as he kicks it down the boy gets into the next cubical along that has already been opened. The man then walks out of the toilet past the boy standing in the open cubical, but he doesn't notice the boy standing on the toilet standing perfectly still in fear of the men.


This scene mainly builds tension mainly though the boys fear and insecurity in the current situation that he has never experienced before. Also the scene the toilet keeps to the thriller convention of being filmed in small dirty rooms - this contrasts with the start of the scene being in the grander of the huge areas of the train station. Another thing that contrasts in this scene is that at the start of it the boy is placed as a insignificant person interrelation to the huge statue he was looking at, and at the scene he becomes very important as he is the only one who saw the person that committed the murder.