Essay on "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
            
            
             1: In what ways-- through distortion of time, sound, image, through particular kinds of shots-does the director Robert Enrico let viewers know that Peyton Farquhar's escape from death is not real but fantasy or illusion?
            
             The key element which makes "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" such a deep, emotionally charged story would be the impact that is created from its literary thread of irony. Peyton Franquhar's escape from death, turned out to be nothing more than a complex illusion. The writer, Ambrose Bierce purposely misled the reader into a false sense of security, when the main character finally gets home to his wife.
             Just at the last moment when you believe all is well, snap! You find out that his entire escape was in his head, the last dispirit dream of a condemned man. Robert Enrico tried to recreate this but fell short of the mark. I just can't seem to grasp the concept that this film actually won an Academy Award. I guess it can only be credited to what had to be the ridiculously low standards of directing in those days.
             There are three moments when Robert hints on the idea that Peyton's escape from death is not real but a fantasy or some kind of an illusion. One, through the distortion of time, two, sound, and three, image. I'm going to discuss each of these in depth one at a time, first I'll start with the distortion of time.
             In the scene where Peyton falls into the water he spends an unbelievably, impossibly, long time under. This was an obvious hint that Payton was not experiencing what he believed to be reality. I'm not sure if this was intentional or just simply an accident on the editors part. Either way I don't think the scene worked will, more than anything it just confused me, but in Robert's defense I don't think simplicity was a part of his vocabulary.
             The feeling conveyed in this part of the written work was a feelin...