Representation of Location - 'Get Carter'

How is the North represented in Get Carter?

Newcastle is represented as a bleak, sinister landscape and the “mutants” are cautious around Jack Carter as he sees himself of higher class. Jack sees them as lower significance which is even brought up by the group of men at the beginning of the film, by questioning the intimate pictures they see of Northern men and women. The locations in Newcastle that are shown add are often in poor weather and are on the brim of looking black and white as there is a lack of colour, and wherever there is a hint of colour, it would be washed out to express the rot the city is going through. This is distinguishable through most camera shots. When we see most of the landscape shots during ‘Get Carter’ they are mostly static as if to place the audience in the area in order to achieve a better connection. 

At the start of the film during the train journey scene, we see the South as a bright and happy place that’s filled with nature and with each shot starting to show the significant change of location, the closer we get to the North, the darker the shots start and more industrial items start to take up most of the location shots. For example after seeing the nuclear power plant amongst the trees and grass, we get an immediate wide shot of multiple train track apparatus, this shot has been used to contrast the naturalistic trees in the South as well as numerous train tracks in comparison to the bright green grass. Even the non-diegetic music starts to decline in excitement as they start to approach the North, the instruments slowly fade out one after the other until it’s solely the bongos left to play and the rhythmic beat slowly drones out and just becomes unenthusiastic taps. 

In our first encounter at the pub, Our first few shots show us cramped between silhouettes and being close-up on some of the commoner’s faces as Carter enters the room, they look at him in disgust before our tracking shot of Carter being surrounded by the Northerners, this signifies his unimportance and the shot slowly pans out to express the distance between our main character and the atmosphere in which he’s in. Jack approaches the bar and asks for a pint, the camera then closes in on him for a close up shot as he snaps his fingers, demanding for a thin glass. This is a strong signifier of how Jack sees himself as a superior even when he’s not in his home city. The shots we see of the civilians mostly have inhospitable expressions towards his request, we then see Jack peer at the man next to him who we see has six fingers when picking up his drink, this states that Carter's point of view of the Northerners is that they are genetically inferior, also known as inbred.