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...
Analysis of do the right thing, spike lee (1989)
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Do the Right Thing was released in May 1989 in Cannes. Spike Lee directed, produced and wrote the screenplay for the film. It tackles the subject of race relations by depicting the ethnic communities of the Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where Spike Lee grew up. Spike Lee plays the...
Rear Window as an example of Panopticism - publié le 10/05/2007
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Panopticism is a concept that stems from the work of an eighteenth century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. He was trying to figure out how to build a prison in which the guards could see the prisoners in such a way that the prisoners could never come to know they were being watched upon. Although...
France's Lost Jewel
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Unlike Great Britain, France's colonial wars tended to involve a great deal of violence on the part of the colonizers. Britain generally extricated itself from its colonies with relatively little immediate violence involving British soldiers. The differing ways in which the two countries...
Heavenly Creatures - publié le 02/05/2007
Worksheets - 2 pages - Film studies
Heavenly Creatures is a film that dates back to the year 1994 and was set in the 1950s which revolves around the story of a relationship between two young school girls. The film was an example of postmodernism and will be analysed in depth showing how this film can be defined as a pastiche.
Film review : 'The Devil wears Prada'
Worksheets - 2 pages - Film studies
The Devil wears Prada is a refreshing provocative fairytale. This screen adaptation of Lauren's Weisberger's 2003 novel, which happens to be a best-seller worldwide, is produced by Wendy Finerman, directed by David Frankel and distributed by 20th Century Fox. This Award-nominated 2006...
The African-American cinema: Between protest and integration
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
The invention of cinema happened at the very same time as the establishment of the segregation in the South. This social and political system, which advocated prejudices and inequality of races, is definitely going to stigmatize the nature of the relationships between the American cinema and the...
The Distribution of French Cinema to the United States
Essay - 68 pages - Film studies
In regard to the past of French Cinema and the global Cinema Market, is it possible for French Cinema to distribute profitably to the American Market? French cinema sees itself as being the great innovator in style, treating movies like a cultural heritage. The United States has always considered...
Sound in two Hollywood films: 'singin' in the rain' and Thelma & Louise
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
Singin' in the Rain is a musical created in 1951 by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Thelma & Louise a road movie created in 1991 by Ridley Scott. These two works could sound different; nevertheless they have a common point, which is the important role of sound, and especially music, within the...
Representations of gender and sexuality in films
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
‘The street's getting worse everyday here. The whores were bad enough but the drags are wiping us out. I can't stand the drags. (…). They confuse transvestism with a circus. Worse, with mime'. In All About My Mother (Almodovar; 1999), the character Agrado stresses the importance of...
The X-files (1993-2002) - A cult text
Essay - 8 pages - Film studies
The X-Files (1993-2002), about two government agents investigating unsolved cases relating to paranormal activities, was a quality drama which became a cult hit with audiences and subsequently an international cultural phenomenon, generating vast amounts of secondary texts including merchandise...
Choderlos de Laclos's : Les Liaisons Dangereuses - publié le 22/01/2007
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been the object of four main cinematic adaptations, all very different from one another or from the source text itself. These films are Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (1959) by Roger Vadim, Dangerous Liaisons (1988) by Stephen Frears,...
Film studies: signs and postmodernism
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
‘L.I.E: Long Island Expressway. You got the lanes going east; you got the lane going west. You also got the lanes going straight to hell...' Thus opens L.I.E., a film about a fifteen-year-old boy who becomes involved in an unusual relationship with a much older man. Here, the first words of...
The representation of American teenagers in films during the 1950s and 1990s
Essay - 15 pages - Film studies
The ‘teen film', ‘teen flick' or ‘teenpic' has changed since the 1950s when it started to define itself through Juvenile delinquency films. As was recently commented, ‘the teen flick has lost its shiny innocence and become a cynical brute' (Maher; 2006: 13). Over the course of...
Postmodernism and cinema
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
‘It's about flights of fantasy, and the nightmare of reality, terrorist bombings, and late night shopping, true love, and creative plumbing.' (Gilliam; 1985). This tagline for the film Brazil highlights most of the concepts present in postmodernist criticism of cinema and television. Indeed,...
Blue sky studios
Worksheets - 4 pages - Film studies
Blue Sky is an international studio providing visual effects and digital animation services. Their contribution has been seen in pictures such as Mousehunt, Home Alone and so on. Towards the end of the nineties, Blue Sky studios had absorbed new projects. The main projects revolved around...
Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliette
Essay - 8 pages - Film studies
Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge are two movies directed by the eccentric Baz Luhrmann. In these love stories, Baz Luhrmann especially stake on the visual and the abundance: the abundance of decorations, the abundance of colourful visuals (Moulin Rouge « uses the colourful musical setting of the...
From China with Love: Hong Kong Movies
Dissertation - 35 pages - Film studies
Dianying' is the Chinese translation for movies. It literally means 'Electric shadows'. To me, this term is particularly meaningful and suggests that movies are the shadows of real life and offer a clear reflection of a society or a culture. My topic here is Hong Kong cinema, the...
Essay on Brazil (Terry Gilliam)
Worksheets - 4 pages - Film studies
“1984 is about 1948. I made a film about today.” told Terry Gilliam to the Cahiers du cinéma in April 1984. Concerning two films which were nearly made the same year and which both seemed to talk about the same thing (oppression in society), it is indeed very interesting to make a...
