Cultural Significance Of A Hard Day's Night

The creation and consumption of films are a common favorite pastime for many people and have been for hundreds of years, but while some films can seem deceptively simple, many elements go into creating a scene, much less an entire movie. Directors use these elements which include, but are not limited to style, mood, composition and special effects to create a product that we often don’t acknowledge without looking deeper into the film. These components together are called Mise en Scène (Ebert). Of course, film can be enjoyed leisurely but there are so many more aspects of film to be explored and analyzed such as the composition of camera movement, lighting, color, sounds and music. In this case, I chose to analyze the “Redrum” scene from the renowned film, The Shining directed by Stanley Kubrick. In this scene, Danny Torrence, a five year old boy wanders around his mother’s room with a knife in hand, muttering the word “Redrum” over and over again before scrawling it across the door. I feel that a lot of this scene’s mood and style relies heavily on the camera work of the scene, the lighting and colors, and the music incorporated into the segment.

Throughout the term I have begun experiencing movies in a different way. The class has taken ideas of cinematography, theory, and film history and practically applied it to physically watching movies. By breaking down scenes and movies as a whole, the way I look at films in general has developed. A reflection on two of the films from this term, Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) and North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959) will carry the bulk of the essay. Though, I will also be discussing how this class changed the way I saw a movie just a few weeks ago. Casablanca’s script and acting are of particular caliber, and North by Northwest unfortunately does not deliver with the dialogue and casting of lead actor Cary Grant. Though, overall, they both

As they tell their story, we, the viewers, traverse the boundary between Self and Other as we watch the Angulo brothers share their more than unconventional experiences growing up in New York City and their love for film with the camera. Like us, the Angulo brothers have watched movies all their lives. Unlike us, the Angulo brothers have seen around ten thousand movies and meticulously recreated some of their favorites, all from the confines of their sixteenth story apartment. Michael Atkinson, a reviewer for Sight and Sound, a London journal, recognizes these themes and writes, “the Angulos' developmental Otherness, terribly odd to us and yet immersed in the pop culture we all know just as well, is the film's primary allure” (Atkinson 2015). Their interaction with cultures of the world (not just America) through film allows different cultural norms to permeate their

MGM brought Hollywood into the Rock 'n' Roll era with Blackboard Jungle. In search of the kind of music teens like the film's

“All my life I’ve been a lonely boy.” Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 is a peculiar, surreal film to analyze. As a semi-autobiographical work, Buffalo 66 greatly exaggerates the events in the film and makes the viewers suspend disbelief on more than one occasion. Yet despite this, the main focus of this film is a broken Billy Brown’s emotionally raw journey seeking revenge but instead finding unconditional love through Layla in the end, and the formalist film techniques used here enhance this. Through the deliberate use of photography, staging, and movement, Buffalo 66 works as a formalistic classicism film, a predominantly classicism film with strong elements of formalism, on the style continuum.

Hollywood cinema is primarily subjected to telling stories. The inclination of Hollywood narratives comes not just from good chronicles but from good story telling. The following essay will discuss Hollywood’s commercial aesthetic as applied to storytelling, expand on the characteristics of the “principles of classical film narration” and evaluate alternative modes of narration and other deviations from the classical mode.

Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film production of the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange, is a truly unforgettable film.  It is narrated by one of the most vicious characters ever put on screen, Alex DeLarge.  The promotional poster for the film advertised it as "The adventures of a young man whose principle interests are rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven" (Dirks 1).  Needless to say, music plays a very important role in A Clockwork Orange.  The expressive use of music in this film gives the viewer a look into the psyche of the vicious Alex, a psyche that equates violence with art.  By doing so, the film shows us the complexity and duality of the human mind through a character who loves both

Night effectively showed what happened in first person view during the holocaust. It told it better because Elie wrote an entire book about. Being able to write a book to effectively show something because Elie can go into deep detail. He was able to explain what was happening when the little kid didn’t die right away after being hanged and that his tongue was still red. Another reason was that he made us picture what was going on during the book. For example, when

This paper will discuss various elements of mise-en-scene, specifically; character development, lighting, performance, costume, makeup in the film "Casablanca".(Michael Curtiz,1942) The setting of the story sets the tone for the entire film. Shots of tanks and planes show the violence of war that coincides with the cutthroat city that is Casablanca. From there, those sentiments are reinforced when a man is shot in the street while another man pick pockets someone whom is distracted. The mood of the movie stays on the dark side of things when we enter Rick's Café, where we meet our protagonist played by Humphrey Bogart. In this scene we are treated to the jaded portrayal of night club owner. We see his utter disregard for a French woman

Most of these observations are based on my knowledge, which is shallow, and observation from the mini-series Son of Morning Star. There is a few things to be said about some of the filming making techniques that many in my background call the dark days of 90’s melodrama. That being commented on, for me this paper will not be as integrated as I would like. The subject matter is slightly disjointed for me.

The Boogie Nights by Paul Thomas Anderson is a movie that came out in the seventies. “It revolves around a group of people involved in the porn industry. The film maker decides to bring in a new boy named Eddie to star in some of his movies. It shows Eddie’s life as he becomes a famous adult film star, the movie also shows the changes and lives of the other people that he works with. The movie shows the ups and downs of the porn industry from the money and fame to the drugs and jobless moments. But in the end it shows how everyone ends up together again happily making more porn (Boogie Night 1997)”.

Although this movie does not showcase the time period using clothing or unique hairstyles, it reflects the 60s through the different music that Adrian includes in his radio station. Adrian plays songs from James Brown, the Beach Boys, and references icons of the time such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The rebellious nature of the music reflects not only Adrian’s attitude, but also the rebellion against the war that took off

This film analysis will delineate the diverse directorial decisions of The French New Wave cinema movement, and how they have been utilised and developed to challenge and subvert the typical Hollywood filmmaking conventions and techniques of the 1950s and 60s Hollywood cinema, in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Hollywood produced films of the time used a very limited variation in film techniques such as camera, acting, mise-en-scene, editing and sound. This can be mainly attributed to the low innovative thought of creative and expressive camera movements, angles, etc… due to technological hindrances. In particular, this film analysis will de-construct the filmmaking elements of the revelatory French New Wave movement in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows ending scene (01:34:42 – 01:39:32) portraying the main character Antoine Doinel’s escape from juvie and trek to the bespoken beach.

To fully comprehend why and how this cinematic motion took place, it is valuable here to establish the wider social climate of France at the time, and the active forces which heavily shaped New Wave cinema. Between the years of 1945 and 1975, France would undergo “thirty glorious years” of economic growth, urbanization, and a considerable baby boom, all of which came to expand and radically alter the parameters of French culture (Haine 33). Beneath the surface affluence however, France was in a state of deep self-evaluation and consciousness. Following WW11, the

Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov are among the most identifiable names in early Soviet film. Their contributions to film, in the areas of montage and documentary film respectively, have helped to structure film, as we know it today. However, apart from their theoretical contributions to the field, both directors played an imperative role in Soviet film during the 1920s and 1930s. This paper examines historical revisionism within their film, how their theories of montage influenced the revisionism, and how they were persistent in the use montage throughout their careers as filmmakers to assert themselves as artists.