When watching "Dead Poet's Society" and "Witness", you begin to see similarities between the two. Peter Weir (the director) has used the same kind of camera shots, hidden meanings and characters objectives throughout both movies. Weir shows us that what we want might not always be for the best and that even though you may think what you"re doing for your child is the right thing for you; it might not be what's right for them. .
Both plots loosely fall around people that have seen what they shouldn't have. In "Witness", Samuel is in the wrong place at the wrong time and sees a murder being committed. In "Dead Poet's Society" the boys find Mr Keating's yearbook and find out about Mr Keating's involvement in the Dead Poet Society. Mr Keating teaches his students to act as individuals and in "Witness" Book teaches Rachel that she should be herself and not just an Amish. .
The camera shots in "Dead Poet's Society" are showing either dominance or dramatic intensity. The best shots to show this are when Neil is taken home. The dominant figure is the father, who is standing on the left, all the time. Neil, on the right is seated, then he stands up, and then he sits again, defeated by his father. The woman remains at the back. She stands up at one point, but never gains any dominance in the fighting, over the fathers shoulder shots, also from a Low angle: even when Neil is standing, they can not be equals, and a Close-up of Neal's face just before he died: leads us to experiment his feelings and thoughts more closely; A very dramatic image.
The camera shots showing dominance in "Witness" are when Samuel is looking up at the statue and you see a shot from the statues point of view showing how vulnerable Samuel is, When Samuel thought he saw an Amish man and ran up to him, Weir used a really powerful shot so we could see the man's fury of being disturbed by a young child, and when Rachael's father-in-law gets mad at her about the dancing in the barn with Book and, when yelling, you get a really over the shoulder shot of Rachael looking crushed as if she"d just murdered someone.
