Easy Rider (1969):

Easy Rider (1969) is a film where “Two counterculture bikers travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of America” or, in other words, about two men who travel through the Southwest of America after selling a large about of cocaine. As a text, it was seen as a great turning point in the way New Hollywood created and shot films – exploring controversial issues and topics of the 1960s society it was made during (discussing things such as the hippie movement, drug use and ‘communal’ way of life).

The meaning behind this clip - reflecting the way that the people in the clip feel during their acid trip - has been constructed via varying camera shot types, angles, lighting techniques and sound. One of these creative devises included in the clip is the use of camera panning up the building, and continuing until the camera faces into the sun creating a giant lens flare, from 0:56 - 1:27. This constructs the representation of the characters slowly losing their senses as the hallucinogenic drug takes effect. This has been encoded so that audience members can gain the preferred reading that the characters have taken LSD (or at the least some drug to that effect). The combining of this panning shot with a low angle shot means that the audience is able to gain this preferred reading through the camera (as it presents them with the point of view of the people within the scene) conveys this view to be their point of view, more specifically the point of view of the two persons on the floor. This panning shot has various other shots cut into it, these cut-away shots show the main four characters in this scene and a woman reciting a biblical passage of some description. The use of encoding these cut-away shots into the narrative of the scene allows the viewer to decode the text with the reading that the LSD the people have taken is slowly taking affect and the thoughts of each member are becoming distorted and broken up.

The use of sound in this clip is used to show the delusional/drug induced mind-set of the characters. Combining and overlaying multiple different soundtracks in post-production means that the audience is unclear as to what sound is actually taking place in the scene and what is fake, allowing them to gain the preferred reading that the characters have taken LSD. At the start of the clip, along with small amount of dialogue there is a clunking/almost train track or factory machine sound. This creates the idea that they are near some kind of railway or possibly industrial area. The noise continues and, when the characters within the scene have taken the drug, snippets of a woman reading a bible verse/prayer are cut in and mixed/interchanged with the factory machine clanking. This gives the audience a reading that there is possibly a funeral going on in the cemetery whilst they are there – giving sense to the man in a business suit who is shown very briefly at 1:37. The preferred reading of the text, being that they have taken LSD a hallucinogenic drug, would mean that the audience decodes some aspects of the scene (the man in the suit, the non-diegetic sound of machinery that is present throughout the scene) are things that have been created by the characters drug induced minds and are in fact not real. The fact that Dennis Hopper’s character says “shut up” when the accompaniment of church preaching and factory machine sound merge together indicated to the viewer that he is struggling to block out the sounds and possibly an inner turmoil – possibly the fact that he sold drugs, linking to the overall narrative of the text.