Storytelling and Hitchcock's Psycho
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece Psycho intricately weaves the seven elements of storytelling in a clever and highly stylized fashion. Hitchcock, known for his meticulous attention to detail, elaborately illustrates his character's traits with the use of mise-en-scene subtle mannerisms. The...
Lolita's Prison
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
In Nabokov's book Lolita and in Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name, Lolita's role never sheds light on her character's interiority. Instead, Nabokov and Kubrick use men to convey the suffering of poor Lolita. The book is told from the perspective of the lecherous Humbert, and his conception...
The American Presidents: one of the principal targets of cinematographic censorship
Essay - 8 pages - Film studies
With the prominence of the U.S. president and the presidency, the executive office and its occupant have naturally found their way into numerous film expressions. Since 1903, presidents have been featured in no less than 400 commercial films. Ranging from respectful, biographical presentations to...
The treatment of child sexuality in films
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Childhood is traditionally associated with the idea of innocence and purity. Since it is the age before the development of sexuality, children are seldom portrayed as involved in sexual relationships. The current issue of pedophilia is particularly important and censorship can limit the films...
Ken Loach And The Problems Of The English Society
Essay - 6 pages - Film studies
Ken Loach is a well-known British filmmaker and I chose to study him because he has made a lot of movies in his life which contribute to an understanding of the problems of the society in United Kingdom. Culturally speaking, the films of Ken Loach present a good reflection (even if rather...
The Cinema Representation of futuristic cities
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Urbanization is a contemporary issue. Today, one person out of two lives in a city, and that figure will sharply increase in the next few decades. Many questions about what cities should be like have arisen due to the fast increase of the urbanization process since the 19th century. Urban...
The voyage in the Michael Moore documentary
Essay - 1 pages - Film studies
Michael Moore's documentaries are famous for the problematic issues they deal with, and his movies have won many awards because of their unique style. Michael Moore can be seen as a voyager, i.e., as the Cambridge dictionary states, a 'person who goes on a long and sometimes a dangerous...
The godfather: Francis Ford Coppola's master piece
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
Before adapting Mario Puzzo's roman, the Godfather, to cinema, Francis Ford Coppola had very little legitimacy in Hollywood and had everything to prove. After months of bitter fights against the Studios which produced the film, the Godfather was eventually released in 1972 to an impressed...
Salt of the earth
Essay - 1 pages - Film studies
The upheaval triggered by Salt of the Earth may come as a surprise to the modern viewer. As the New York Times film critic of the time put it: "it is somewhat surprising to find that Salt of the Earth is, in substance, simply a strong pro-labor film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the...
The ballad of Gregorio Cortez
Essay - 1 pages - Film studies
The intrigue of the film ?The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez' may seem casual and unexceptional to the modern viewer, even though it is based on a breathtaking true story. The film was shown in theaters in 1982 and didn't meet with great success, despite a paradigmatic plot of the spirit and...
Ridley Scott, George Lucas and Tim Burton: their visions of architecture in their Sci-fi films
Essay - 2 pages - Film studies
Being allowed to do an essay on three different film-makers is an opportunity not only to analyze their different ways of seeing the city and its architecture, but also of showing it through their movies. I have voluntarily chosen to compare three Anglo-Saxon film-makers who have very different...
Modern Times (1936), directed by Charlie Chaplin - publié le 07/05/2009
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 - publié le 07/05/2009
Essay - 4 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...
Hollywood film genres: Melodrama - publié le 07/05/2009
Essay - 4 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...
"Do the right thing" by Spike Lee: the conflict between Buggin'Out and Sal
Essay - 1 pages - Film studies
The document is a scene taken from the film "Do the right thing" by Spike Lee, released in 1989. This scene takes place in a pizzeria located in Brooklyn. This pizzeria belongs to Sal, an Italian American. Sal has two sons, Pino and Vito, who also work on the pizzeria. The main customer of this...
To what extent the French New Wave may have influenced Canadian direct cinema and cinéma vérité in the 1960's
Essay - 10 pages - Film studies
"In nature, the movement of waves may repeat endlessly with rhythm of seas, but in French cinema, the wave of 1959 remains unique" (Michel Marie: 2). Since February, 1959, a "myth" was created around the French New Wave which progressively became one of the most crucial movement in world cinema...
Homage and plagiarism in cinema
Essay - 8 pages - Film studies
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times was a partial remake of Rene Clair's A nous la liberté (1931), a French comedy which was in turn inspired by Fritz Lang's 1926 science fiction epic, Metropolis. In this document, we try to find answers for the following questions: What did Chaplin borrow...
The Big Heat, Fritz Lang, 1953
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
The Big Heat is a film I had seen in one of my high school English classes and found it quite interesting. After analyzing the movie, I rediscovered it by paying more attention to details in the film, to its meaning and to the true connotation of the story. In the process, I discovered a new way...
The beginning... Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
His full name was Walter Elias Disney. He was born in Chicago in 1901 but was raised with his three brothers and his sister in Marceline, Missouri. He already loved drawing when he was seven. While he was studying at McKinley HighSchool he started to take night courses at the Chicago Art...
How does the 1976 film network accurately reflect ideologies and practices of modern television?
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
The ideologies and practices evident in modern television are succinctly foreshadowed in the 1976 Hollywood classic, Network. This prophetic Oscar-winning film satirically dramatised a series of predictions, most of which were fulfilled in modern television. The film shows that ratings have...
Formulating nationalist conversations: An investigation of the function of West African Cinema
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Traditional African filmmakers, considered themselves part of an emerging third world cinema and used film as a tool of revolution, a means of political education to be used for transforming consciousness, however now there is a new generation of filmmakers that have been supposedly "freed from...
Film Critique: The Asphalt Jungle
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
The first wave of urgency to escape the world of corruption, greed, and immorality inside the shady underground of the urban city ("the jungle"), is brought forth by protagonists Dix Handley and Alonzo Emmerich in two scenes of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. The first scene takes place in...
Spike making Malcolm his own
Essay - 7 pages - Film studies
Despite intentions to stay true to an original source, a director's view will almost undoubtedly change certain elements of the film. This happens in the case of Malcolm X. Spike chose not to tell the story chronologically, as the autobiography mostly does, and this adds to the film in many...
Analysis of do the right thing, spike lee (1989) - publié le 19/01/2009
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...
Contemporary French cinema explores the possibilities for human relations after loss, melancholy and trauma
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
The subject of loss has been widely exploited in the twentieth century cinema by film-makers and actors. It is a classic and a delicate topic. As dealing with the loss is very personal and hardly reproducible on a film stock, the undertaking is risky. It is difficult to find the right...
What makes a popular soap opera? - publié le 16/01/2009
Essay - 6 pages - Film studies
A soap opera is a work of fiction taking the form of a serial, generally televised or radio phonic. They made their appearance with the radio in the Thirties. When the large networks started to develop, naturally these series followed .This designation comes from the fact that the first American...
Comments on "Thank you for smoking" by Jason Reitman in the light of business ethics - publié le 16/01/2009
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
“Thank you For Smoking” is a movie from 2005, about a tobacco industry lobbyist, Nick Naylor. As the negative effects of tobacco on health are no longer easy to deny, the tobacco companies join in the creation of the Academy of Tobacco Studies. The purpose of this academy is to prove...
Shrek - publié le 15/01/2009
Essay - 5 pages - Film studies
Shrek the ugly, antisocial Ogre is happy living by himself in his swamp, frightening away any visitors, until he rescues a non-stop talking donkey and then gets invaded by a host of displaced fairy tale characters, evicted by the evil Lord Farquaad who wants to chase away all different and...
Sound in two Hollywood films: 'singin' in the rain' and Thelma & Louise - publié le 12/01/2009
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...
Olivia Ruiz in concert at the Bataclan on 3 and 10 of April 2006: From "the real TV" to "the real artist performer" - publié le 12/01/2009
Essay - 3 pages - Film studies
In France, the Loft Story TV programme paves the way for the real television. Now, lots of viewers watch “ordinary” people eating, sleeping, and arguing… Overnight these stage actors become famous just having talent to be on television. Andy Warhol was right when he said “In...
