Making the Family in Monsoon Wedding
Essay - 8 pages - Film studies
Many a novice viewer of Bollywood movies has offered the comment that “they are all the same.” Such comments, of course, may be the result of an othering Gaze that, by paying attention to stylized ritual and ceremony, does not perceive subtle but important differences. On the...
Unexpected Messengers: Cinematic Portrayals of Text in The Joyless Street
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
A significant yet easily overlooked element of G.W. Pabst's film The Joyless Street is the cinematic representation of text. In the film various crucial developments in the narrative are determined by characters' reactions to information conveyed by text. In each case text becomes...
Wall Street
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
In “Wall Street,” the one of the most valuable resources is information. It is also a scarce thing to come by because stockbrokers are reluctant to share what they know, it's difficult and sometimes illegal to acquire information about a firm, and there's a tacit understanding overall...
The Mothers of Martyrdom: Women in Early 20th Century Irish Drama
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
In the early quarter of the 20th century men of Ireland struggled for freedom; forming leagues and brotherhoods and secret organizations of resistance, unionizing labor and creating a more cohesive political resistance, arming themselves and training for armed conflict, eventually fighting the...
The Lost Worlds: Born Out of the TV Show Lost
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
ABC's Lost, just as any other show, works to make you feel connected to its characters. From its beginning it has connected you with the characters and their experiences on the island, and has given you significant development of the characters through flashbacks and eventual flash...
"Kids" and Adolescent Sexuality Love Sex and Relationships
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
The film “kids” is a raw account of an urban adolescence focusing on experimentation with sex, drugs, liquor, and violence. The account examines these issues at their absolute worst. One of the issues that the film focuses on is adolescent sexuality. The opening scene depicts a thirteen...
Erwin Piscator: Father Of Political Theater
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Throughout history, both theatrical and otherwise, there are figures that stand out prominently in the collective memory. There are the giants, those triumphant individuals whose work has made an indelible impression on society. And then there are those who stand behind the giants, their...
Ibsen's A Doll House An Analysis
Essay - 9 pages - Film studies
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House is a play about a woman who comes to understand that she doesn't necessarily understand anything at all. Or, more specific to Ibsen's plot, it is a play about a woman who is forced to reveal a very precious secret and in doing so discovers that the life she is leading...
Spiders or Virgins: Portrayals of Women in the Noir Films Laura, Out of the Past, and Double Indemnity
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
In her article “Women in Film Noir” Janey Place states that women characters in noir films are divided into two archetypes: “the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction” and “the virgin, the mother, the innocent, the...
Effectiveness of movies: The example of "Kids" by Larry Clark
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Ever since the creation of the first motion picture, there have been numerous debates over the “effectiveness” of a vast multitude of movies. The term effectiveness is a very broad expression and can be used to cover a huge variety of areas. On a generic basis, did it make the viewer...
12 Angry Men: Analyzing the Jurors
Case study - 2 pages - Film studies
The movie 12 Angry Men systematically altered the views of the jurors by eliminating the bias, ignorance, and fallacies. Many of these men held predetermined points of view in which there minds were made up before analyzing the defendant. Through the process of reviewing factual information and...
The Americanization of High Fidelity
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Many feel that a film adaptation needs to be completely faithful to it original written format. “When viewing the film version of a novel or play they know, they want to find in the film what they valued in the literary work, without asking whether this is the sort of thing film can...
Stage vs. Screen
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Films are often adapted from plays, and at times they are nearly identical. At other times they have almost nothing to do with one another. In films you can do things that are not feasible and at times not possible on stage. This is not to suggest that the film Crimes of...
DVD: Downright Video Dominance
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Film studies
In 1997, a product was released that would do what nothing (not Betamax, Laserdisc, nor various projector systems) seemed to be capable of: conquering the VCR/VHS system. This product was the DVD (Digital Video or Digital Versatile Disc). As soon as it hit stores in the United...
What Do You Expect?
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Tony Kuschner's play Angel in America is full of contrasts, disparities, and opposite views. Many things are shown at completely opposite ends of the spectrum. There are many differing opinions and complete disagreements that not a large number of things that are constant and...
Short Forms in Film
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917) is a slapstick comedy that also addresses social issues. The film has a simple plot with four main characters, one of them Charlie Chaplin. He plays a penniless foreigner who wins money from playing cards on a ship to America. He then...
True West: Identity
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
One acquires his own identity through his inner self and his milieu. His interpretation of his own needs and desires plays a big role in whether he decides to abide by society's norms or to completely disregard his ego by complying to the inner beast (or what psychologists refer to one's ID). Sam...
Avoiding Disaster: The Day the Earth Stood Still
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Disaster movies are often associated solely with cheap thrills; nothing more than vehicles for big explosions and even bigger budgets. The modern perception of this film genre (as well as its subgenres) seems to be nothing more than that of a means for movie studios to spend a lot...
David Lynch
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Storytelling, since the dawn of time, has served as an invaluable means in which human beings are able to create, sustain, and relay emotion, identity, and ideology. The stories people tell allow them to simultaneously connect to, and differentiate themselves from one another. Arguably more...
The Blame Game
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
In modern times, and namely in Western culture, identity has become a wholly introverted principle. People strive to define themselves solely as individuals; identity is thought of as exclusively self-contained. American culture, for example, celebrates above all else the “individual;”...
The Wicker Man: Challenging the Audience, Transcending the Genre
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
A horror movie does not work unless it is frightening. A meek horror film is as ineffective as an unfunny comedy or an uninteresting drama. If a horror film succeeds at being scary, then, by definition, the filmmakers behind it have accomplished what they set out to make. The difference between a...
Controversy Within
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
In the last century alone, the United States of America has witnessed dozens of “equal rights” movements. Some of the most significant rights Americans currently enjoy have come out of great struggle and controversy. Whenever a group of citizens protest the way their society views them,...
Stranger Than Paradise: Meaningful Minimalism
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
The term “independent film” is extremely malleable in the realm of American cinema. A film may be considered “independent” if it is financed and/or distributed outside of a Hollywood studio, or if it bends and/or breaks the conventions of mainstream American movies. There are...
Home Movies
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Nothing can create nostalgia like a movie camera. There is something about the moving image that can trigger emotions like few other mediums can. It is easy to get lost in a film; they have the awesome ability of capturing and recreating the past. The nostalgic value of the cinema is immense, but...
Subverting the Mainstream: The Postmodern World of David Lynch
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
During the first half of the twentieth-century, a movement known as “classical Hollywood cinema” thrived; this was the dawn of truly “mainstream” films. The movies created during this time operated largely within metanarratives; all-embracing laws which governed human...
Fellini's Otto e mezzo
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
Since the dawn of cinema, there have been numerous film directors who have garnered the reputation of innovator, auteur, even genius of the medium. Only three directors, however, have created such unmistakably identifiable styles as to warrant film terminologies based on their very names. Alfred...
They Live: Underestimating Camp
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Distinguishing a film as “campy” is, arguably, as difficult as determining whether or not a film is “good.” The definition of “camp” is utterly malleable and, moreover, exists almost purely in the eyes of the beholder. Similarly, a film is rarely definably solely as...
Robert Frank's America: "Political Rally - Chicago"
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
The United States of America is often referred as “the great melting pot”; a place where people of all ethnicities, backgrounds, and plights exist under a single title “American”. The title is simple; those living in The United States are, by definition, American. And yet,...
Georges Melies: Movie Magic
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
As is the case with many art forms, the exact origin of Cinema is tainted with controversy. While numerous innovators played important roles in the dawn of the medium, the Lumière brothers (Louis and Auguste) of France are most directly accredited with creating the first...
Danger at a Distance
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
The nomenclature of “disaster movie” is as difficult a classification to place upon a film as any; for its definition is extremely malleable. Many movies incorporate a disaster, or even numerous disasters, and are still not known as “disaster movies”; the definition is not...
