Fassbinder's Suicide

Another aspect I would like to brush on is how the conventional and expected “male gaze” is possibly challenged (challenging anything orthodox equals to counter cinema) towards the end of the film.

The star-studded romantic comedy Midnight in Paris is one of Woody Allen’s most recent films which he did both, wrote and directed. It is a film about a man named Gil (Owen Wilson) who travels to Paris with his fiancée’s parents in order to expand his imagination and he ends up embarking on a journey to the 1920s while walking the streets of Paris at night. Not only is this film engaging and witty, but it also manages to provide both, overt and covert examples of postmodernism in film. By analyzing Woody Allen’s 2011film Midnight in Paris, we can identify the presence of many underlying motifs in both the narrative and the characterization of the film when using some of Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard’s concepts on postmodernism.

Both Laura Mulvey and bell hooks describe the idea of the “gaze” in film. In both of the theories presented by Mulvey and hooks, the “gaze” is the way in which viewers are subjected to a particular perspective because of their social standing. In Mulvey’s case, she argues that the “gaze” in which the audience is forced into is that of the “male gaze” while hooks argues a more nuanced “gaze” including the “oppositional gaze”. While some of Mulvey’s argument is accurate, hooks argues that it leaves out important other factors, in particular, race. Both arguments have many similarities and differences, and can be seen exemplified in many films, such as Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.

In Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” they put forward the central argument that film is a commercial product in the capitalist system and therefore also the unconscious instrument of the dominant ideology which produces it. In opposition to the classic film theory that applauds camera as an impartial device to reproduce reality, they argue that what the camera reproduces is merely a refraction of the prevailing ideology. Therefore, the primary and political task for filmmakers is to disrupt this replication of the world as self-evident and the function of film criticism is to identify and evaluate that politics. Comolli and Narboni then suggest seven categories of films confronting ideology in different ways, among which the second category resists the prevailing ideology on two levels. Films of this group not only overtly deal with political contents in order to “attack their ideological assimilation” (Comolli and Narboni 483), but also achieve their goal through breaking down the conventional way of depicting reality.

This essay is about the movie Inglourious Basterds (2009) written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The significant elements of mise-en-scene in the film will be discussed, along with the film’s elements of cinematography in the opening scene. Film often uses editing techniques in its storytelling that infer meaning, subtle though they may be. These techniques will be identified and discussed, and the meanings explained. Set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, the film follows a group of Jewish US soldiers as they plan to assassinate the leaders of the Third Reich in a movie theater. Led by Allied officer Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, the “Basterds’” plan coincides with the theater owner’s vengeful plans for the same thing.

Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most revolutionary and certainly most controversial filmmakers of the early twentieth century. The lasting influence of her innovative filmmaking techniques on twentieth century cinema is undisputed by scholars throughout history, but the exact nature of her work is surrounded by ongoing controversy. Riefenstahl’s production of the feature films “Triumph of the Will” (Source 3) and “Olympia” (Source 1) have left a lasting imprint on history; these films established Riefenstahl’s influential career as a film director under the years of the Nazi regime. Although these films are attributed by scholars and critics to be Riefenstahl’s greatest achievements they are also considered to be her greatest fault, for

On Friday, two men were stabbed and another man was left injured after intervening in an attack against two women regarding anti-Islamic sentiment. Today, officials announced that the victims of the stabbing were identified as Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, and Ricky John Best.

The theories of Laura Mulvey and Bell Hooks share their views on how individuals who attend the cinema have the opportunity to gaze and interrupt the messages that are being portrayed. Based upon their views, spectators can have their own beliefs and views of life and not have to focus on societal practices of racism and sexism. The article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” critiqued by Mulvey, focused on how sexism and voyeurism were the main theme in terms of how males dominated society and how woman were subservient to males due to castration. In the article “In Black Looks: Race and Representation” Chapter 7, The Oppositional Gaze, Hooks mainly focused on black woman’s identity and touches on both sexism and male/white female dominance over them. Both Mulvey and Hooks help to focus ones attention on how the white male sexist and black racial domination is portrayed by Hollywood in cinema. An example of this portrayal is represented by the movie “The Help”, produced in 2011 and directed by Tate Taylor.

This article discusses Jean Renoir’s career life and the contexts of production of his major works, including La Grande Illusion and La Règle du jeu. It also highly praises Renoir’s significant contributions to the development of world film. In addition, by exemplifying Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the article analyzes the connection between this film and the movement of the Popular Front.

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

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

Beyond Fassbinder’s own understanding, the significance of women for Fassbinder and his representation of women was widely recognized in the international film world. The English translation of Für mich gab's nur noch Fassbinder (2000)—one of the most influential documentary films on Fassbinder—was Fassbinder’s Women. Rather than constructing Fassbinder as the father, the director Rosa von Praunheim followed Fassbinder to present the entire society as the Father, and gave recognition to the woman living inside Fassbinder himself.

Instead, Fassbinder both identified and distanced himself from the social minorities he represented. Rather than an accidently attitude—as Elsaesser argues—this non-identity for Fassbinder is a self-reflective strategy, having been consciously developed and consistently carried out through his career as a filmmaker, and was reflected in his films at different periods.

By analyzing the historical contexts of these specific movements, we take a deeper look at society's social, religious, economic, and political conditions that existed during a certain time and place. These relevant factors profuse mass influence into a filmmakers decisions while in the production process of a film. Additionally, these components have the role of establishing distinct trends in the film industry. Each movement has its own purpose for creating each film in regards to a stylistic standpoint.

Within the revolution everything, against it , nothing.? One of the early directors speaks of how everything was nice. Films depicted nice people in nice houses. By the 1970?s the things shown were unreal and filmmakers searches the past to evade the present. Films were created that illustrated times of slavery (?The Last Supper?), colonialism and the Hundred Years Struggle. One director said, ?It?s easy to portray the past. The past is dead. It?s much harder to speak of the contradictions generated by the revolution.?