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 of money, and...
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 “films”....
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...
Tragi-comedy in British committed cinema
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Tragicomedy refers to fictional works that blends the genres of tragedy and comedy into an entity that has its own character. It is a way to deal with tragedy as it is a difficult subject to be dealt with alone and the intensity can be cut by the distance set in by humor. Topics such as...
Drug and oil networks: two marginals networks in Traffic and Syriana
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
According to the Longman dictionary, a network is ?a large system of lines, tubes, wires etc that cross one another or are connected with one another'. Traffic and Syriana are (dealing with networks) large systems of characters, institutions and interests that cross one another or are...
Lies the Television Told Us
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
The media exists for the sole purpose of entertainment, and the easiest way to bring this entertainment to the people is through television. This being said, it can be understood why the media functions the way it does; entertainment needs to be entertaining. Isn't it only expected that writers...
The Lickerish Quartet
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
The play between high and low culture has become an important subject in film studies and criticism. In particular, the subject has proved a relevant context for the exploration of exploitation films, and vice versa. In looking at exploitation film, critics and theorists have paid much...
Doris Wishman
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
In 1959, after the unexpected death of her husband, Doris Wishman decided to begin making films. With a background in distribution, she became aware of the genre of “nudist camp” films through an acquaintance with Walter Bibo, producer of Garden of Eden (1954), a groundbreaking film in...
Thirteen Days (2000)
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
Good evening my fellow citizens…This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet Military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on...
'Weaving a Myth': Magnolia and the Psychology of Religion in Film
Essay - 8 pages - Film studies
Imagination is fundamental to human life. Indeed, all the ‘humanities' are manifestations of the creative instinct that finds its origin in imagination. One creative imagination communicates its images to another in an attempt to bridge the perceived space between two minds. Hillman suggests...
Fishing, Spirituality, and the Simple Life: A River Runs Through It
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
In Robert Redford's beautiful adaptation of A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, Norman and Paul Maclean seek to find the purpose for their lives growing up under the guidance of their Scottish- Presbyterian Minister father, in a Montana setting that could be described as no less than...
The Corleone Family: Portrait of an American Dream
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola's trilogy of organized crime masterpieces, collectively known as The Godfather trilogy, have impacted America unlike any movie since. Rather than filling the movies with hours of bloodshed and unnecessary gore like so many mafia-oriented movies, Puzo and...
American Psycho: An analysis using the techniques of MacCabe and Macherey
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
The meaning of the film American Psycho has been much debated since its release. Is it a glorification of violence? a satire of the yuppie lifestyle of the eighties? a disturbing trip through psychosis? Based on the controversial novel by Bret Easton Ellis, it is most often considered a black...
Modern Times (1936), directed by Charlie Chaplin
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
First, I will talk about the historical context of the film. Chaplin goes around the world during sixteen months. When he comes back to Hollywood, in 1932, he observes the economic and social results of the Great Depression, which made, in two years, seven million unemployed in the US. Indeed,...
Movie review: Trainspotting
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
Many films deal with drugs. Among those, there are - Scarface, The Godfather, Revolver and so on. This theme is popular in Anglo-Saxon cinema. Trainspotting directed by Danny Boyle is a film which deals with drugs in a blunt way. A group of friends, in the nineties, in Edinburgh, are only...
Essay about sin city (Franck Miller & Robert Rodriguez)
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
I am going to talk about Sin city, an action, detective and all in all fantastic film released in 2005, directed by Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino (but only for the sequence in Dwight's car, in which he talks with the policeman Jackie, while he (Jackie) is dead). Sin city...
A pychoanalytic study of Hitchcok's Spellbound
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Alfred Hitchcock has often been cited as a film-maker who used the Freudian and Lacanian theories of psychoanalysis and applied them to the narrative of his films. Spellbound is a film which uses psychoanalysis as a plot device; psychoanalytical elements are found both in the characters, like in...
Hollywood film genres: Melodrama
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
“Something else besides a mother” this was Stella Dallas' excuse to her daughter in order to alienate her bond with her daughter and secure the latter's marriage into the upper class society. Discussing the key-scenes of the film that reveal the two contradictory roles Stella...
The Western hero
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
One of the best and most accurate descriptions of the Western hero was given by Robert Warshow in his 1954 article "The Westerner". This paper discusses the main characteristics or personality traits of the westerner (as defined by Warshow). It presents the westerner as the embodiment of the myth...
American Psycho's Killer Gaze
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Jacques Lacan's description of the Other is that which gazes on you or exerts power on you, yet does not truly exist; the Other is an imagined gaze that is constantly looking over you (Willemen, 216). In the film American Psycho (2000), screenwriter and director Mary Harron personifies the...
