Essays on Film Theory

Shot in different decades of the 20th century, Thelma & Louise by Ridley Scott and Badlands by Terrence Malick are often compared due to the number of similarities concerning the plot of the story. The films made history in their genre, got critical acclaim and numerous nominations and awards. In spite of the fact that they were shot the decades ago, the films are still popular among the contemporary audience and keep on inspiring the contemporary directors. This paper is thus going to contrast and compare Thelma & Louise by Ridley Scott and Badlands by Terrence Malick by identifying the films’ ...

The issue of feminism in the film industry is a common topic for controversial discussions. Many writers are more popular than others because of the ways in which feminism surfaces as the driving force behind their presentations. Feminism can be classified as a social movement that has created an enormous impact on culture of film, the theories of films and the critical reviews of films. A number of films represent the myths that reveal ideas on women and their femininity. In addition, there are films that speak to men and their masculinity. The issues of representation and spectatorship form ...

Disney Princesses

(Continued from the paper provided by the client)

Little Mermaid

Late eighties was a decade of immense transformations. This chunk of the time was a period during which the roles and perception of women in the mainstream society went through sheer changes (Buckland 178). The same mainstream thought of the society is reflected in the role of the princess depicted in Walt Disney’s animated musical fantasy film, “The Little Mermaid”. The character of the princess in the aforesaid fantasy film was played by Ariel, who is a young sixteen years old mermaid. Dissatisfied with her life in the water, she became much curious ...

- Original Concept “Last Man” was inspired by Frederic Brown’s (1948) “Knock”, which Brown based on the three-sentence short-short story written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich and is about the last man on Earth following the Zan’s annihilation of living things in the planet. The “Last Man” follows Isaac as the last man on earth who refuses to forget about his family that was since long gone. Brown’s work was an inspiration because the plot narrative, although brief, offered an opportunity to create a different take of the story. Film, as a medium, works best in the project ...

Structuralism and Semiotics within Film

Abstract Many works of film theory utilise the tools of structuralism and semiotics to imbue a work of art with meaning. Films in this paper will be defined broadly to include matter (celluloid), technique (from camera style, cutting, and editing choices), and final product (the end result which is a movie). Structuralism is the employment conventions, similar to the way language builds meaning in communication, to convey a purpose or meaning. The components of film that can be used in structuralist film theory include, but are certainly not limited to, lighting, cultural references, symbolism, angle and shot duration. Through using these ...

- Psycho (1960) - Alfred Hitchcock The movie is about a couple who meet in a hotel in phoenix Arizona to discuss their marriage plans. They discuss about the scarcity of finances to afford a decent marriage. Upon returning to the offices the lady, Marion, gets a client who brings $40000 to buy an apartment for his daughter. Marion devises a way in which she can elope with the money where she succeeds. The movie director shows how desperate Marion is to get finances. She embarks on a long journey out of town. She has a lot of troubles on the way from suspicion by ...

Introduction to Cinema

Anneke Smelik has regarded that cinema can be considered as a cultural practice wherein there are mythologies regarding women and the female gender; as well as men and male gender, which depicted legends concerning sexual differences that have been created, fabricated and epitomized (Smelik, 1998, p. 7). Smelik has identified the sexual differences as major obstacles that have been defied by women’s rights movements. As a result, several female directors have emerged to create a better understanding on how films and movies strengthens the folklores on sexual difference, and how it was magnified by some film theorists who symbolized women as ...

Film studies

Introduction In the present day films are indentified through movie stars which has been successful in the past, sometimes it comes to certain genres. Singing in the rain, stardom and the famous music would be narrative based on singing. Genres are making a knowing statement about Hollywood and the importance of history and the state in 1950s and shows pros and cons of Hollywood throughout.

Nowadays, the films are based on conventional classification (for example, in the TV listings magazine) "thriller", "westerns" and so on and the genre in modern society, every adult familiar with the TV, so it ...

For André Bazin, the famous film critic and theorist from France, cinemas were a realist medium. This is why majority of film theorists would perhaps argue that that if he got a look at the computer-animated film WALL·E (2008) by Disney/Pixar, he would turn over in his grave. His theories revolved around the notion that there is always a mummy complex underlying the origin of any form of art, including cinema. Bazin’s notion suggests that art struggles to immortalize the mortal, to preserve the physical existence on screen. According to Bazin, the medium that eliminates most of the distance between ...

I) A) What aspect(s) of film theory and practice are highlighted here?

B) What are the author’s central concerns in writing the article?

According to Carlos Berg’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”, the cartoonist and illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada (1857-1913), was a key influence if the early development of Mexican cinema in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries, because the proto-cinematic techniques he used in his drawings at least anticipated those that filmmakers from many countries would use. Among these were the close-up, cinematic-style narrative, flashbacks and foreshadowing, and the use of tilt and angles to create perspective. Berg’s main point is that many of the methods of popular illustrators ...

Dziga Vertov's 1939 avant-garde silent film Man with a Movie Camera is one of the most daring and experimental films ever made, as it eschews most normal attributes of films (story, characters, narrative) to become a visual treatise on the art and importance of filmmaking itself. Like some of its antecedents, such as Koyaanisqatsi, it provides no characters, uses innovative cinematic techniques and heavy use of music to convey a mood, told through images that are manipulated in various ways to achieve various effects. Whereas Koyaanisqatsi is concerned primarily with the interaction of man and his surroundings, Man with a Movie Camera focuses ...