Film Analysis : Moonlight

The film Moonlight was released October 21, 2016. Moonlight is all African American cast, and was awarded over 25 awards including the Academy Award for best picture. This film is a coming of age story that follows the dramatic ups and downs of the life of Chiron, a young Africa American man growing up in Miami. The plot begins from the time he is in elementary school to the time he reaches adulthood. The plot is structured in three stages of the life of Chiron and touches on the topics of the struggle of dysfunctional households via socialization, sexuality and sexual identity, physical and emotion abuse, and the process of accepting ones self.

This is a criticism of Moonlight, a film directed by Barry Jenkins. It is a coming-of-age story, telling the journey of a young gay black man named Chiron. Through linear character development the film follows a young Chiron from adolescence into adulthood while growing up with alpha males in Miamis black ghettos. The Story is told in three parts, with a different actor playing the lead role in each section: a young Chiron named “Little”, as a teen named “Chiron”, and an adult named “Black”. Despite a compelling lead performance by Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, and its great soundtrack, Moonlight falls flat and never gets out of the shadow of its typical cliche plot, all the while, the film continued to never overcome the obstacle of

The movie Before Night Falls directed by Julian Schnabel offers viewers a glimpse of how the homosexual community in Cuba was being mistreated under Fidel Castro’s regime. The true story is told in the eyes of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. The film depicts Arenas life in Cuba and all of the awful experiences that he had to deal with as a homosexual. Eventually he was arrested for false accusations of being a molester, however, he was actually under arrest for being a homosexual. Between the 1930s and 1990s, the Communist Cuba was abusive to the LGBT community as shown in their actions of harassment towards homosexuals, imprisoning the homosexuals, or sending them to re-education camps.

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight depicts the coming-of-age of a young black boy as he struggles with and endures abuse for his sexuality, causing him to hide his internal conflicts. The life of the protagonist, Chiron, is split into his three main stages of life, with each part focusing on the physical and emotional abuse he endures due to his homosexual orientation. When the viewer first meets Chiron, he is running from bullies. As he ages, the bullying follows him, causing him to harden and avoid vulnerability in his adult life. Jenkins uses climactic scenes in Chiron’s life to portray how prejudice against black sexuality forces him to conceal his true identity. In Moonlight, Jenkins’ cinematic style illustrates Chiron’s public and private

The articles by Roderick Ferguson (2004) in his book literally highlights the regulation that established sociological schools of thought impose upon the ‘queer people of color,’ or anyone who is different in terms of sexual orientation and non-white. In the very early part of the book, Ferguson depicts the imagery of a black drag-queen prostitute from Marlon Riggs’ ‘Tongues Untied.’ He goes on to describe the way capitalism, in general, and the American system in particular has conveniently excluded many like her – people of alternative sexual preferences with both African American culture and Leftist Liberal thought rooted in the heterogeneity. (Ferguson, 2004, p. 3). It is at this point that through the work of Chandan Reddy, Ferguson reminds the reader that the core of Leftist-Liberal Marxist thought revolves around the abolishment of race, gender and sexuality.

Sixteen candles was written by John Hughes, this movie was his first 1980s teen movies. Hughes was inspired by Molly Ringwald, to write the screenplay. As, he was finishing up writing the screenplay for Mr. Mom and National Lampoon’s Vacation, Hughes' agents at ICM gave him a stack of photos of young actors. When he was going through the stack he noticed Molly Ringwald, then began write the screenplay for the Sixteen Candles. John Hughes finished the script over a single Fourth of July weekend. Hughes also was so impressed with Anthony Michael Hall's performance in National Lampoon's Vacation that he created the role of Ted “The Geek” just for him. Michael Schoeffling got the role of Jake Ryan, as the leading male because of his good

Through the depiction of Chiron and his struggle in the film Moonlight Jenkins shows that the system one lives in and the internal self results in domination against oneself. Chiron the protagonist of the film is considered weak and fragile in comparison to his classmates and the people in his community and thus Chiron is targeted by his peers and even within his own household. In Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks it is argued that the black man plays a part in their own domination by constantly viewing themselves as less than the white men.

bell hooks, renowned black feminist and cultural critic criticizes the lack of racial awareness in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination (1992). ‘bell hooks’ is written in lower case to convey that the substance of her work reigns more important than the writer. From a marginalized perspective, hooks argues that sites of dominance, not otherness is problematic and critiques the lack of attention that white scholars pay to the representation of whiteness in the black imagination. Critical feminist scholars Peggy McIntosh and Ruth Frankenberg identify their own whiteness as a dominant discourse, but share a critical departure from hooks with the notion of whiteness as terror. hooks aim is not to reverse racism, but discuss her position to authentically inform readers about how she experiences racism. Furthermore, systems of oppression are manufactured by human thought and thus the site of the Other is always produced as a site of difference. Gender, race, sex, class, disability, and geography are situated differently in social structure, but dominant groups assume they share the same reality though they cannot experience it. In consequence, the Other cannot hold a singularized identity of their own and the binary structure succeeds in containing racialized bodies in place. What happens to those bodies when they cross boundaries of the binary? hooks recounts being routinely disciplined back into place when crossing the border; however, dominant white

In the article “All’s Not Well In The Land Of “‘The Lion King’”, Lazarus discusses how the movie: “The Lion King” negatively portrays a society to children by using racism, homophobia, and social inequality. In American culture, racism and homophobia are both very common and controversial. Discrimination in today’s society is not primarily associated This essay is not completely effective because children do not yet understand social concepts and she did not have enough reasons to back up some of her statements.

“The most exciting moment is the moment when I add the sound… At this moment, I tremble.” (Akira Kurosawa) Sound is arguably the most important concept in cinema studies, being there ever since the beginnings. It can radically change the way a motion picture is looked at and it can render what the director may sometimes find hard to depict using only his camera. Looking upon silent cinema one discovers an era which wasn’t at all silent, but rich in sound of different forms, from the simple narration of the images shown on screen, accompanied by a piano, to the complex score later composed specifically for that film. An example of that complex score is shown in Sunrise, a film by F.W. Murnau, which lies at the border between silent cinema and sound cinema. Considered to be one of the first films with an actual score, Sunrise is a great example of the multitude of dimensions and effects sound can have.

Masculinity is presented throughout this film in a manner that forces Chiron to become isolated from his peers. As it is shown in opening of the “i. Little” chapter, he is instantly being ridiculed and severely bullied for being weaker than the rest of the boys in his class. It is stated in “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class” that, “Images of men are neither domesticated nor ‘sensitized.” This statement forms a parallel

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a masterful queer coming-of-age story told in three parts - Two years after Richard Linklater’s masterpiece Boyhood composed a unique passage of time portraying realistic preciousness of a young man on the journey to manhood, Jenkins continues the coming-of-age instrument further from Linklater. Diving into the brutal conditions of Miami streets, Moonlight shatters the dated template of masculinity with a potent story of closeted homosexuality among black men. The film rises above the wrongful stereotypes associated with sexual orientation and urban environments.

Film noirs describe pessimistic films associated with black and white visual styles, crime fiction, and dark themes. Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 film noir directed by Billy Wilder. Sunset Boulevard presents many themes that are common with the genre film noir, but also introduces some differences from the typical movie in that genre.

Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).

Moonlight is an American drama film that chronicles the life of African-American male Chiron, who is being raised by a careless mother in a harsh Miami neighbourhood. Its most prominent themes are love, stereotypes and identity. The filmmakers create meaning from these through combining different elements of aesthetics (the style or look of a motion picture). Aesthetic effect refers to the practise of using different elements of a film (mise-en-scene, sound, cinematography and editing) to generate film form.