This scene depicts the thematic shift in the film from denial to anger. Playing to the crowd’s fears and prejudices through powerful charisma, Paneloux rallys the working class and breaks her people out of denial into a false new reality.
An establishing shot of the City of Oran, this image serves to contextualise subsequent scenes by introducing the inciting incident and the alternate world in which the story takes place. Intended to set an ominous tone, the wild waves herald an incoming storm.
This scene depicts the story ’s protagonist and antagonist in the film’s first appearance of symptoms of the plague. The image serves to visually demonstrate the two opposing philosophical stances each will take in how they react to the coming epidemic.
The fourth scene depicts the excruciating death of Paneloux ’s daughter after she is given an experimental cure for the plague and serves to thematically shift the film from bargaining to depression.
Master of Design
This project aimed to explore visual media's potential for meaningful allegory by pre-visualising a film adaptation of Albert Camus' 1947 book The Plague. The intention was to understand the use of allegory in visual art, through the lens of mid-twentieth-century existentialist philosophy, and then incorporate these techniques into a practical framework for designing key scene illustrations and conceptual design work.
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