Month: April 2021

     Uncomfortable long takes, jarringly rapid scene changes, nearly incomprehensible and typically improvised dialogue, complex illusionary elements, and limited narrative explanation: these are the stimulating formal aesthetics of a film that conjoin to create discomfort and activity in its audience. Typically, mainstream films tend to stay away from these formal elements, in order to…

Since its inception, cinema as an art form has been a site of struggle. The legacy of female filmmakers, in particular, has been privy to a constant power struggle between legitimizing and validating their works, or being made insignificant by the Hollywood elite. Ida May Park’s directorial legacy, as explored through her film Bread, encapsulates…

Lois Weber’s 1916 silent film, Where Are My Children?, is considered a classic example of a social problem film, one which in this instance “dealt with the taboo subjects of contraceptives (for) and abortion (against).” [1] The narrative content of Weber’s film is a particularly tangled web of conflicted morality, unclear rhetoric, and misleading medical…

The star system and star image was the foundation for Hollywood film making during the time of a vertically integrated Hollywood. Box office returns would determine the economic success for a studio and when a studio had a bankable star, their image was critical to selling a picture to exhibitors as well as audiences. As…

In the beginning of the 20th century, the introduction of cinema radically changed the world of art. During the outset of silent cinema, filmmakers made actualities; short clips that depict a single scene or action. However, not much time had passed before filmmakers started moving towards narrative film. As a result, the idea of structuring…

In the realm of the cinematic world, there are many directors who made their mark in the history books for their tenure in the arts during their country’s revolutionary movements. Many countries during the 1950s and through to the 1980s had evolving relationships with their governments and their citizens, most of which would lead to…

    “Horror films don’t create fear, they release it.” -Wes Craven        Catharsis through entertainment is a uniquely human practice. We are the only species that intentionally create drama as a method of release. Stemming from the Greek word katharsis, it means “purgation” or “cleansing.” This idea was expounded upon by Greek…

  This is Part II of a video essay series on the films of 1999 and how they connect to the era/year in which they were made. Part II focuses on the movie, “Election” (Dir. Alexander Payne) starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Specifically, it focuses on how the character of Tracy Flick and the…

  In creating this video essay, I sought to question the intersection of genre studies and auteur theory. In studying auteur theory, our book mentions Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as the definition of an auteur, however this places several restrictions upon auteurship. With the exception of…

  In this video, the character and narrator, Rue, will be examined in regard to her credibility and reliability as a narrative figure. Audiences typically find reassurance within the narrative, but in this case, the narrator defies the concept of being God-like and takes on a more humanistic approach. The narrator is typically someone the…