Le Mepris Essay

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

This essay analyses how mise-en-scene informs both what is seen and how we are invited to see it, in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006), a dystopian science fiction thriller. The film is set in England in 2027 and humanity has become infertile. Every other society has collapsed due to dwindling populations with many migrating to England a former activist, Theo Faron (Clive Owen), agrees to help, Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), to get Kee a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea. The aim of this essay is to investigate the power of mise-en-scene, specifically in the use of ‘setting’ and ‘staging’ in key scenes that frames the state of affairs in this imaginary society and the use of omnipresent media in the film and how audience is invited to see it by resembling their own reality. Using close textual anlysis of Children of Men, combined with an ideological critique of post 9/11 global, this analysis will demonstrate how Alfonso Cuaron’s uses the techniques of mise-en-scene show the audience a perception of reality in ways which invites them to debate the nature of contemporary society or politics .

To juxtapose Meursault’s acceptance, Albert Camus subtly uses light imagery to tie in the prosecutor’s case against Meursault to finally try and find a cause for the crime. When he is giving his speech about Meursault’s crime being “premeditated,” he says, “’First, in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of this criminal soul” (99). These allusions to light imagery connect the prosecutor’s case to the cause being the

The final scene of Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless (1960) is one of the most memorable scenes of the film. Not only does it portray the conventions of new wave cinema but it also depicts the existentialist themes that are presented throughout. New wave cinema was typically low budget and this is presented in the climactic scene of Breathless. The scene was shot on location and included a lot of jump cuts and disjointed editing. However, despite appearing to be unprofessional and unpolished, Breathless evokes a sense of harsh realism that is present in contemporary relationships. The final scene also symbolises the end of Michel (Jean-Paul Delmondo) and Patricia’s (Jean Seberg) ill-fated partnership and signifies the end of their attempt to find happiness and love within one another.

In the novel The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud weaves a sister story for Albert Camus’s The Stranger, and has a dialogue of sorts with Camus. At times Daoud’s novel is very critical of Camus, standing in opposition to the attitudes and themes in The Stranger. The existence of The Meursault Investigation and the character of Musa is a criticism of the incomplete picture that Camus paints in his story, and the namelessness of “The Arab” that Meursault killed. Daoud gives a name to Meursault’s victim beyond that of “The Arab.” At other times, Daoud’s book parallels a lot of the ideas put forth by Camus. This can be seen as Harun slowly comes to resemble the man who killed his brother after committing a murder

By using nature to describe the way he is feeling, paul is able to convey to the reader a sense of peace, and revitalization. The author also uses nature to create an image of what is occurring in the novel, so the reader can better picture it. When Paul and his comrades return to the lorries after battle, he says “ The rain becomes heavier. We take out waterproof sheets and spread them over our heads. The rain rattles down, and flows off at the sides in streams.” By describing the moment as rainy, the mood is quite dreary and

Photography was an ideal medium with which to explore the payers of the unconscious mind. Modernist photographers experimented with double exposure and unusual new effects similar to those of visionary Surrealist painters and sculptors. A champion of the technique, Raoul Hausmann, called photomontage “the ‘alienation’ of photography”. By this, he implied that photomontage destroyed the role of photography as a medium of recreating physical reality. But the statement also suggests that by its dependence on fragmentation and dislocation, photomontage offered a visually and conceptually new image of the chaos of an age of war and revolution.

Despite evident differences in the compositional elements of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, both utilise a composition with a shallow plane to distort visual perception in their work. This distortion promotes the spectator to revaluate the way they perceive these female prostitute subjects. Picasso’s treatment of paint and use blocked colours in Les Demoiselles creates the sensation of a flat, two-dimensional image, signifying a radical break from traditional modes of representation. The lack of depth in the painting pushes the figures of female prostitutes on top of each other, layering the stark angles and sharp forms that make up their bodies. In addition, this layering on such a large scale (243.9 cm × 233 cm) creates a feeling that the figures are pushing beyond the boundaries of the work and imposing themselves onto the spectator. Furthermore, the stances of the prostitutes, who are dramatically flaunting their bodies with arms raised and torsos presented openly, fills the frame, refusing the spectator to accesses to other areas of the image. Instead the female figures dominate the attention of the viewer, in some ways empowering these figures who previously lacked representation. These formal elements of composition all come together in Les Demoiselles to challenge the spectator’s ways of viewing the females in the work.

Another scene using this filming method is Therese’s outburst after they find the private detective. There is a window frame separate these two in the long shot. However, Carol leans against and comforts her. Their bodies are in the same frame implying they units together to face this difficulty. The most impressive scene utilized this technique is Therese at Bill’s party. In this long shot, the gap between two windows is larger than any scene before, which contains an important implied meaning. At first, Therese seems absent-minded standing with a bunch of men. She occasionally glimpses at a woman in other side of the room. The woman also looks at Therese and then walks to her. The scene cut to the long shot. We see the framing divided by two windows. The left window is only Therese and the woman

Gunning goes on to define the cinema of attraction as “a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Leger celebrated: its ability to show something. Contrasted to the voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema analyzed by Christian Metz, this is an exhibitionist cinema,” (Gunning, 230). It’s a cinema before narrative where the focus lied in testing the boundaries of what was possible with the medium, much like avant-garde today. It’s a cinema where narrative was always second, if even there, to the spectacle of what was possible with the medium. Lumiere’s Demolition of a Wall displays some of the possibilities of the medium quite clearly in its later half when the reel is re-winded to create the effect of the wall rebuilding itself. As Gunning reminds us, we should never forget that “in the earliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction,” (231). Cinema was defined by the machine instead of the films in this period, and thus the simple fact of being able to see moving pictures was itself astounding. Looking at Maxim Gorky’s first accounts of viewing a motion picture in his article The Kingdom of Shadows, he writes the “extraordinary impression it (cinema) creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances,” (Gorky 7). The people of the

The French New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague, is among the most revolutionary film eras in the history of cinema. Spurred as a result of major shifts in economic, social and technological norms within post-WW11 France, the New Wave conceived a renewed mode of expression across various creative industries. Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) are two films, which despite major disparities, would go on to exemplify integral characteristics of the movement in the following years. Perhaps, the best way to truly appreciate the fervor of New Wave cinema is to examine the context of its inception. Both the stylistic and thematic qualities of French New Wave works directly reflect the implicit values, virtues and vices possessed by the emerging youth culture of the late 1950s, which consequently posed a fundamental challenge to the institutions, ideas and attitudes of the past.

The word ‘meme’ derived from a Greek word miméma which means “imitated”. Memes are very popular amongst Millennial and are used on daily basis. Memes helps to express our feelings on certain matters or situations that can be relatable with our daily life’s events. Meme is one of the most important units of todays cultural that symbolically transmit the idea from one person to another with the help of writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked form. Everyone nowadays is so familiar with memes. Memes are the interesting item of pictures or videos that spreads widely online especially through social media and called viral.

The French Revolution last from 1789 to 1799. This war had many causes that began the revolution. Its causes ranged from the American Revolution, the economic crisis in France, social injustices to the immediate causes like the fall of Bastille, the Convening of he Estate-General, and the Great Fear. As a result of this revolution there many effects , immediate and long term. The immediate effects were the declaration of rights of man, abolishing of olds reign, execution of king and queen, the reign of terror, and war and forming of the citizen-army. The long term effects were the rise of Napoleon, spread of revolutionary ideas, growth of nationalism, and the conservative reaction.

At the turn of the century Paris was one of the capitals of culture and art to the outside world. However, the truth of the matter was that this taboo-ridden society was being run by an aristocracy that was repressing the arts. Naturally, when World War 1 broke out, the suppressed French society finally had a release and a rebellion against order arose. WWI specifically affected the theatre of French and it’s aftermath. From the ashes of war the avant-garde theatre grew and styles such as Dadaism and Surrealism were born. It was both the climate of culture before the war and the devastation of the war that lead to the outbreak of avant-garde theatre in France.

Naomi Greene once said that, “Pier Paolo Pasolini was the more protean figure than anyone else in the world of film.” This means that Pasolini was a versatile film director because he simplified cinema into the simplest way possible, while still visually embodying an important message to his cinematic viewers. Because of his encounter with Italy’s social changes, it influenced the writing and films he chose to write. His aspirations regarding his written work “Cinema of Poetry” explains how a writer usage of words and a filmmaker’s choice of images are linked to how cinema can be a poetry of language. He characterizes cinema as irrational and his approach on free indirect point of view is used to achieve a particular effect in his body of work. His claims made in the Cinema of Poetry illustrate why he stylized his films in the manner he did, such as Mamma Roma through the images he portrayed on screen. By examining Pasolini’s approach to poetic communication in the Cinema of Poetry, we can see that these cinematic attributes about reality and authenticity depicted in Mamma Roma are utilized to question cinematic viewer’s effortless identification of cinema with life. This is important to illustrate because Pasolini wants to motivate viewers to have an interpretative rather than a passionate relationship with the screen.