Cinema is about illusion and therefore what is missing from the screen is ‘present’ in some ways in the viewer’s mind. This applies particularly to character and gender depiction within film text. o Examine the characters represented in the film you are studying. Can you identify their class, gender, colour, ethnicity, ideology? Are there any patterns to these aspects of the characters?
In the analysis, examples will be drawn from a range of sources to contrast the inferential requirements of portrayals in each medium. There is a focus on two film adaptations in particular, Apocalypse Now and Trainspotting. The former, according to Stam (2005) would more intertextual in adaptation than faithful to Conrad’s novel. It uses a range of strategies to convey the text’s themes in an alternate context which illustrate the choices the director makes in order to balance the depiction and assertion of the narrative. The second adaptation employs highly visual depictions of mental processes which challenge the notion that viewers can only infer mental activity.
As Cohen, Salazar, and Barkat state, there is an inherent difficulty in categorising documentaries “stiffly”, as each will tend to employ aspects of Nichols’ six groups (2009, 288, 292). However, Forbidden Lie$ can be categorised most accurately into the expository and reflexive models, with attributes of two others. The film shares traits with performative documentary film making, such as “employing the dramatisation and reconstruction of events and personal experiences” (Cohen, Salazar, and Barkat 2009, 300). As Martin describes the reenactment scenes, Broinowski uses “‘dramatic reconstruction’ of Dalia’s tale, [which is] delivered in the juiciest and most sensationalist TV style” (2009). ‘Sensationalist’ is the operative word, as it describes each of the reenactment scenes of Dalia’s murder by her family perfectly.
Spike Lee’s films, deal with different aspects of the black experience, they are innovative and controversial even within the black community. Spike Lee refuses to be satisfied with presenting blacks in their acceptable stereotypes. His characters are three-dimensional and often vulnerable to moral criticism. Lee’s collection of films with the theme racism, stood out for me because he is more interested in subverting the status quo of black history, so it isn’t just typical films which show racism. I also liked Lee’s intimate describing of his experience, and how some of his films had interesting elements to them because he was part of the black society.
Leaving himself without much to work with, he has numerous misconceptions about his past. In the course of analyzing our history, we observe through this movie that having as much of the pieces as possible will allow us to generate a more complete picture of our past. As we later observe, it becomes obvious that Lenny appears to have been manipulating his perception of reality through his selective interpretation of his pictures, notes and tattoo system. This raises a second issue with regards to how purposeful manipulation of ones knowledge of the facts can result in an entirely different reading of a particular situation. The movie Rain Man shows us how having all the facts may not be the entire solution to solving the mysteries of our past.
Many composers represent conflict, even though you may not recognize it. Whether it’s a song about a breakup, a kid’s movie about princesses or a news article about last nights footy game.Conflict in the film freedom writers and the song pumped up kicks is shown by different techniques like camera shots, flashback, repetition and point of view. Freedom writers is heavily reliant on conflict as a theme, but to help put it into perspective uses a lot of techniques. One of these techniques is camera shots.In the film, camera shots are used to help the audience to understand the film better and make it interesting. You have to admit, a movie would be pretty boring if it only used one type of camera shot or angle the whole movie, right?One of the shots used in the film was the panning shot, used to show the conflict during the school fight, in one of Mrs. Gruwell’s first days.
Film Theory debates the essence of cinematic value and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding a film’s relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. In order to successfully approach film criticism it is important to examine several theories. It is important to keep in mind that, “no critical approach can tell us everything about a film but, rather, different approaches can teach us different things about a film” (Luhr, Lehman 80). First and foremost, films are perceived in terms of their narrative structure. When discussing a film, audiences will recall its story line or characters to exemplify what the film was about.
I am going to look at if a film portrayal can be a truthful representation of a historical period in time using Pride And Prejudice as an example. When looking at the text in comparison to the 1995 mini series by the BBC it is apparent that the 2005 film has taken a very different approach and represents the lifestyles and environments extremely differently. I am going to attempt to prove or disprove that a film can or cannot give an accurate historical representation of the period and form some sort of conclusion from it. I firstly began by looking closely at the opening scenes of each of the films and the differences in the representations. Reviewing the opening sequence of Pride And Prejudice (BBC 1995) we begin with a ‘misted’ camera shot panning over elegant embroidery and refined materials to a classic piano soundtrack, connoting elegance and class as the camera slowly pans through an array of pinks and creams, the materials are lavish and very expensive looking, again connoting class and elegance and establishing ideals for the opening scene.
INTRODUCTION Studying mass media effects on the audience is, perhaps, one area that has frequently attracted the attention of mass communication scholars because of the media’s potentiality to exert certain patterns of behaviour on individual member of the audience. This is buttressed by Donald (1996), as cited in Daramola (2002), saying, “The concept of impact of mass media messages has been and probably, still is, regarded as central and fundamental to social psychology.” Consequently, several mass communication scholars have carried out different but related studies aimed at ascertaining the actual influence of media messages, received through such channels as motion pictures, on the behavioural patterns of the audience and how such patterns of behaviour promote or degenerate acceptable standard of actions, especially among the younger generation in a given society. Motion pictures were, from the early days, presumed to have major impact on children, especially those in their formative years. However, the need to establish the actual kind of effect movies have on children has, therefore, become a great concern to researchers, who, through their works, have tried to investigate the kind of impact
This article seeks to specifically investigate the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on film theory. Its development will be traced in two articles through classic film theory, the role of Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, the contributions of semiotics, the debates surrounding apparatus theory and the gaze, and finally the input of feminism. While this type of broad overview has been attempted in many general introductions to film theory, it is hoped here to provide a rough sketch of its formative stages of development, while filling in the detail on a number of significant issues that highlight Lacan’s influence. Classic Film Theory It was not until after the First World War that it became possible to identify two particular groups within film criticism. Spearheading the first of these groups was the figure of Sergei Eisenstein, whose film-making and theoretical essays in the 1920’s established a conception of the role of the cinema as a primarily aesthetic one.