An Auteurist Critique of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Essay

The film techniques used in this film changes the entire landscape and changes the mood during the scene. The colour reflects on a charters feelings and the camera angles and

For more than fifty years, Clint Eastwood has been actively defining and redefining cinema as an art form. His experiences as an actor on television and in film have greatly influenced his directing style. Across his films, Eastwood incorporates several issues and techniques that help the audience to identify said films with Eastwood's directorial style. Eastwood's aim in his films is to tell stories of the human experience. Francois Truffaut and Andrew Sarris have aimed to define the qualities that make a director an auteur whose works stand out above the rest. The qualities defined by Truffaut and Sarris can be seen in Eastwood films including Unforgiven (1992), Million Dollar Baby (2004), and Changeling (2008) and help to establish Eastwood as an auteur.

The director is responsible for overseeing creative aspects of a film. They develop the vision for a film and carry the vision out, deciding how the film should look. The director may also be heavily involved in the writing and editing of the film, as well as managing the script into a sequence of shots, coordinating the actors in the film and supervising musical aspects. The Auteur Theory suggests that films contain certain characteristics or ‘signatures’ that reflect the director’s individual style and give a film its personal and unique stamp. Hayao Miyazaki is one such auteur whose entertaining plots, compelling characters

Director, screenwriter, and producer, Stephen Spielberg, has been often described by critics as being one of the trailblazers who paved the way for the new Hollywood era. In fact, one of Spielberg’s earliest films, JAWS, captured the audience’s attentions so vividly that the movie remains to be a cult classic even decades later. The audience sunk its teeth deep into the enticing combination of drama, thrill, science-fiction, and adventure the film obtained. At face value, JAWS appears to be focused on a giant monstrous fish, but with further analyzation of the plot structure, narration, and original music demonstrates the brilliance and complexity of why JAWS is a well deserving Oscar-winning movie.

“How can you buy or sell the sky-the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us? We will decide in our time” (Chief Seattle: 1855). In the Documentary “Flow – for the love of water” it visualizes the global crisis we face on Mother’s Earth as it pertains to the diminishing of fresh water. The Documentary portrays along with the help of experts that this global crises is affecting each and every one of us in today’s society including animals. The film shows us that water is constantly being wasted, polluted, and privatized by big co operations. Prime examples of these greedy companies were mentioned in the film such as Nestle, Thames, Suez,

In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.

The author, Leslie Fiedler writes about the differences in what it means to be normal. She discusses this in a professional manner that opens eyes to what we have disguised and even been ashamed of. “The Tyranny of the Normal,” we learn much about what we perceive as abnormal and what society seems to portray normal as. We discover what we believe is normal and also what has changed through-out the history of this subject. Our minds are opened and exposed to the world of abnormalities and how we see them.

The second attack is on a small boy in the sea at a crowded beach on

Many people may have a specific style in which they like to dress. A woman might have a signature lipstick she enjoys wearing, a man might have a distinct cologne that stands out from the rest. Movies are not too far apart in comparison. Sometimes people find films more enjoyable than others, and often do not realize they come from the same director. The Auteur theory is a that defines the director as the sole author of the entire film, adding his or her own personal style. When it comes to the world of animation, director Hayao Miyazaki is a pioneer in auteur. His specific directorial style is seen in many of his films in which he manages to make films enjoyable to adults of all ages. Kiki's Delivery Service was one of director Miyazaki's

The film, Hell or High Water, is aptly named. The phrase means a strong will to do something, regardless of any difficulties which may lie in the way. This is exactly the mindset of the two brothers in this crime thriller which takes place following the 2008 financial crisis. Through stereotypes, realism, and the struggle over representation, Hell or High Water shows that while people in West Texas may divide each other up by race and class, they are all united against the tyranny of the banks and large institutions.

When you speak about successful auteur directors it is almost impossible to leave out Wes Anderson. He has made his mark in Hollywood creating movies full of quirky humor and one of a kind visual style. His career breakthrough came from third full-length movie The Royal Tenenbaums. This led to movies such as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom and winner of a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy; The Grand Budapest Hotel. These movies have similar thematic elements, plot/character elements, visual/stylistic elements and editing tendencies that show up between one or two or even all of them since Wes Anderson uses the same style throughout his movies. Some thematic elements that come across in his movies

Auteur Theory is based on three premises, the first being technique, the second being personal style, and the third being interior meaning. Furthermore, there is no specific order in which these three aspects must be presented or weighted with regard to a film. An Auteur must give films a distinctive quality thus exerting a personal creative vision and interjecting it into the his or her films.

The genius of the Life Aquatic is that it makes you, the audience member, feel the same loss that Zissou felt when his friend/colleague Esteban was eaten, but towards Ned instead.

Wes Anderson has been recognised as one of the most successful directors in the cinematic world with a distinct authorship towards his work. The auteurs approach of analysing films include the more important elements that makes up a film such as: editing, cinematography, lighten, casting, themes, story line, art direction and aesthetic style (Rosenberg, 2010). Anderson’s films all possess distinct techniques that he was heavily involved in producing. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) featured many of his signature techniques such as using the recurring themes, filming styles, type of music and backdrop to give audiences a better understanding of the film and imprinting a certain tone throughout the film.

The magic of film is that it can tightly control what the viewer sees. A camera’s ability to let directors decide what is explicitly shown and what is merely implied makes it a powerful storytelling tool. The average director wishes to immerse the viewer as much as possible, using lavish special effects and high-tech equipment to hide the artificiality of the film under a thick layer of polish. When a film breaks this immersion it is usually considered to be a technical or creative failure. Other films for various reasons decide to deliberately either break the viewers’ immersion or never immerse them in the first place. A good example of one of these deliberately false films is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou, directed by Wes Anderson in 2004. Without giving much detail it is the story of Steve Zizzou (portrayed by Bill Murray,) a documentarist and oceanographer who vows to avenge a comrade who was allegedly killed by a jaguar shark. However though the course of the film it is revealed that the eponymous character is not the knowledgeable adventurer that he claims to be, in fact being an incompetent hack more concerned with wealth and prestige than anything else. Though Zizzou’s films appear to have adequate production values it is revealed that much of it is inaccurate or even fabricated for the sake of showmanship. Anderson uses broken immersion as a metacommentary or analogy of the fake nature of Zizzou’s documentaries and his phony persona.