Distinctive pleasures offered by independent features
Thesis - 8 pages - Film studies
The definition of what makes a film “independent” has been difficult to clarify with polarized opinion on whether independent status depends on finance or alternatively Andy Warhol's nihilistic perception of “independent” as meaning opposition to the dominant media on several...
No country for old men and evil
Thesis - 6 pages - Film studies
Evil is a term widely used, but rarely definitively defined. It is by definition, bad, and undesirable. But beyond this, every person has a somewhat different perspective about what evil is and to how to define it. It is possible that some evil is inescapable and is simply a part of life. But...
American Beauty: Evaluation
Thesis - 2 pages - Film studies
If you're like me, you really enjoy a good movie. A good movie captivates us, makes us hold our breath and helps us forget the world around us. A bad movie has the audience itching for it to end, or to somehow improve. At the very worst, a bad movie will make us angry that we spent money on...
Film analysis - The dreamers
Thesis - 2 pages - Film studies
Once the protagonists of “The Dreamers,” Matthew, Isabelle, and Theo lose access to the “Cinematheque Francaise,” they become even further cut off from the reality beyond the apartment. In fact, nearly the whole film is shot within the magical rooms and tight corridors of the...
A review of Schindler's List
Thesis - 1 pages - Film studies
The little girl in the red coat was in color because she was made to stand out from the rest of the crowd so that the viewer of the movie would be able to easily recognize her. Having one particular person stand out that was not a main character, gave the viewer a person to follow all the way...
Drunken deconstruction
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Drunken Master (Woo-ping Yuen, 1978) stars legendary martial arts film actor and kung fu master Jackie Chan. Even though it is a comedy and contains nonstop action, and fight scenes, the film does contain some very serious political and historical undertones and has a wide influence culturally on...
Sexual minority film analysis
Thesis - 6 pages - Film studies
The traditional culture of China is one of the world's oldest and most complex cultures. Its intricate system of moral, social, and political philosophy derives from two social values: Confucianism and Taoism. Both worldviews emphasize government rule and social order. Rituals and customs, set as...
Teenage mutant ninja turtles (1990): Highest independent grossing film of all time (Before 1999)
Thesis - 9 pages - Film studies
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent films were often disregarded by moviegoers, but with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that sure wasn't the case. Many fans did not realize that the first live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie was actually an independent film. That may...
"Mother, do you think she's good enough?" Women in 'The Wall'
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
The representation of women in media, from music to movies, has been a source of controversy and debate for as long as anyone can remember, and Rock n' Roll, whether it's Chuck Berry or Rob Thomas, has been no different. But for this paper, the virtuoso rock band Pink Floyd, specifically their...
The evolution of black films (movies)
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Stereotypical and demeaning roles were originally created for Blacks in film, since the emergence of the first full length feature film, Birth of a Nation (1913). Blacks did not have power in the motion picture industry when it was originally formed. Films by Black writers, producers, and...
Conflicts abound in Slumdog Millionaire: A film analysis
Thesis - 2 pages - Film studies
The text, Intercultural Communication in Contexts by Judith M. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama defines culture as “learned patterns of behavior and attitudes shaped by a group of people” (Martin, Nakayama 81).They also stress that culture has held many acceptable definitions due to its...
The famous Steven Spielberg
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Steven Spielberg, one of the most influential film personalities of all time and the highest paid director in modern Hollywood, produced and directed many films about the Holocaust and World War Two. Even though Spielberg was born a few years after World War Two ended, having a strong Jewish...
Oppressive impressions: István Szabó's Sunshine (1999), Jewish assimilation, the Shoah, and historical transition in twentieth-century Hungary
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
István Szabó's 1999 film Sunshine depicts three generations of a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century through the period after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Originally named “Sonnenschein,” the aging patriarch Ignatz becomes a prominent...
The tensions between Claude Chabrol's use of realism and his stylized artificial mise-en-scene
Thesis - 11 pages - Film studies
Jacques Rivette defined mise-en-scene as 'a precise complex of people and decors, a network of relations, a moving architecture of relationships somehow suspended in space' (1954: 44). In the films of Claude Chabrol, the mise-en-scene seems to embrace this definition. On the one hand his...
Science and religion in The Prestige
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Christopher Nolan's The Prestige is a complex film dealing with issues other than magic. The movie touches on life themes such as family, love, and relationships, but it also talks about religious themes such as truth and sacrifice. The movie starts off with the narrator, Cutter, giving an...
Sociological concepts in Forrest Gump
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
The movie Forrest Gump tells the story of a man's life, from his childhood days in Alabama to his later years aboard a shrimp boat. This movie has many sociological ties and presents a limited picture of the culture and society from the 1960's up to the present-day. The movie follows Forrest...
Finding truth in the documentary - an analysis of the form and ethics of born into brothels
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Born into Brothels explores the lives of several children raised in India's notorious red-light district. Directed by photojournalist Zana Briski, the film chronicles the filmmaker's attempts to enroll the children into various boarding schools, all the while depicting their efforts at...
Frankenstein and the problem of visual representation in film
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly is a classic novel that was written nearly two centuries ago. The title of the book is a reference to the scientist in the novel, Victor Frankenstein, who creates this creature that has the likeness of a human, but is larger and stronger, somewhat like a...
Comparison of Pride and Prejudice: The novel and the Bollywood adaptation
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”(Austen 2001: 3). This is the well-known first line of Pride and Prejudice, the acclaimed novel by Jane Austen published in 1813. This line establishes the framework...
Masculinity and clerks
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
In Clerks 2, Director Kevin Smith resumed the lives of two convenience store workers from his 1994 film Clerks. Smith's movies traditionally appear vulgar and devoid of cinematic integrity upon first glimpse. On closer inspection the viewer can derive complex character development and thematic...
The Hours: A cinematic analysis
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
The Hours is the title of a film that was released in 2002. It is also the name of a book by Michael Cunningham released in 1998, on which the film is based, which itself is based on the classic novel once under a working title of the same name, later to become known as “Mrs. Dalloway”...
Be a thinker, not a stinker: How Sylvester Stallone flouted his own dialogue
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Rocky (1976), written by and starring Sylvester Stallone and directed by John G. Avildsen, grossed $225 million worldwide after being shot on a paltry $1.1 million budget. Although film critics and historians, like Peter Biskind, often seem to classify Rocky as a ?post-New Hollywood feel-good...
Juno: What's good for you?
Thesis - 7 pages - Film studies
Sex, sex, sex, and more sex. We're so egotistic in this country. I remember my adolescent issues teacher in high school raising a question to the class that still resonates with me: “Does the media dictate the people in society, or do people in society dictate the media?” Sitting in her...
Edward Cullen and his To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the cinematic gaze in Twilight
Thesis - 6 pages - Film studies
Twilight is the unabashedly melodramatic, vampire-meets-girl love story of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, and despite its clear success it still seems to be strange material for the first huge literary phenomenon of the twenty-first century. The author Stephenie Meyer has a tendency towards the...
Essay about sin city (Franck Miller & Robert Rodriguez) - publié le 14/05/2009
Thesis - 5 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...
The American TV series as an entertainment product (2007) - publié le 11/05/2009
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
In September 2006, the traditional film du dimanche soir was deposed on the first two hertziennes French channels by three TV series. These three TV series are American ones: CSI (Les Experts), Without a Trace (FBI, portés disparus) and ER (Emergency Room, Urgences). After having being seen as a...
The US cinema industry (2005) - publié le 09/05/2009
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
When I try to imagine a typical American family, the first image which comes to mind is that of a perfect family with beautiful (their teeth have to shine) and rich parents and beautiful and healthy children, who live happily in a small house somewhere in the countryside in a small village. A...
Ambivalent London: "Match Point", Woody Allen - publié le 07/05/2009
Thesis - 8 pages - Film studies
Match Point is a movie which was directed by Woody Allen in 2004. It was shot in London. This movie tells the story of Chris, a man looking for a new life. Throughout the movie he seems to find it. As a coach in a private tennis club, he becomes friend with Tom Hewett before going out with his...
National cinema and tropes of horror: Guillermo del Toro's "The Devil's Backbone" - Representing fascism through hauntology
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
Horror films, rich in texture, are capable of interpretatively referencing specific national contexts. Using the supernatural, these stories can aid in understanding national themes by correlating particular social ills or historical periods with the uncanny: the film's meaning-making, acting...
The murderers among us: Post-War German rubble films. The complexities of thematic and visual meaning
Thesis - 9 pages - Film studies
This paper will discuss the first post-world war II film to be made in Germany. The film, entitled The Murderers Among Us (Die Morder sind unter uns, 1946) was directed by Wolfgang Staudte. It is the first in a series of films, which are collectively entitled (Trummerfilme) which means postwar...
