Let There Be Light

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.

So, in order to understand this film and the possible inspiration for it, it is crucial to first understand the surrealist movement. Surrealism grew out of Dadaism, which was all about satire and stirring up controversy. Some sources have erroneously cited Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel as pioneers of the Dada movement. This is understandable, seeing as the two movements overlapped in time, and had some of the same

"I'm only trying to make sense of this war inside my head." This quote relates to the characters in All The Light We Cannot See because everyone is battling with love, truth, or identity while battling the war in Europe. Marie-Laure is living in Saint-Malo with her crazy great uncle while the war is raging on outside the city. Werner was accepted into the Hitler Youth School and was sent out into the war to track resistance radio signals. Sergeant von Rumpel is also on the search for the Sea of Flames diamonds, and what Marie-Laure doesn't know about her father can greatly hurt her. In this novel, three of the characters are searching for either truth, love, or identity.

The influential career of Leni Riefenstahl has been a point of great contention amongst scholars and filmmakers over the last few decades. The legacy Riefenstahl leaves behind are her achievements and failures of her

The radio that is presented from the book “All the Light We Cannot See” is a metaphor for the hope and the many untold stories in World War II. The characters Marie-Laure and Werner were trapped in a seemingly hopeless situation during the German occupation in Normandy during World War II. The radio that was found, and restored, by Werner gave them a sense of hope when they would listen to stories and lessons from voices around the world. Although the children could not do anything about the war that was raging outside and their possible inevitable fate, the radio gave them a brief mental break from their troubles. The radio is important in the story because the radio admits soundwaves that we cannot see in the same way we cannot see light.

In the book "All the light we cannot see" By: Anthony Doerr tells the story of a young girl named Marie and her struggles of being blind yet also tells the story of a young boy named Werner and his struggles of being fored into work in a coal mine. As a young reader I would say that this book is very engaging and interesting. Although the book starts out slightly confussing as soon as you understand what is going on it is easy to follow. Marie and her father have to quest from thier hometown in Paris where Marie has lived her whole life to delvier this precios diamond to a musseum. This is the part of the story where I got realy engaged and was eaver to read more. As all of this is happening Werner is tring to find out how he can get out of

The documentaries “Night and Fog”, and “Capturing the Friedmans”, both were created to move their audience in a way to get desired reactions. Nevertheless, while they both were created to move their audience, the motivation behind the two are quite different. “Night and Fog was created to serve as a warning for people about the dangers of cruelty, while “Capturing the Friedmans was made in a way to have viewers question the guilt of the two Friedmans convicted of sexuals assault.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, is a book about a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and a German boy, Werner Pfennig, whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Anthony Doerr, an award winning author, does a great job bringing these 2 perspectives into play but still keeping some of the overarching themes the same, making All The Light We Cannot See such a beautifully written book.

In All the Light we Cannot see, Anthony Doerr tells a coming of age story of a blind teenage girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc and a German orphan named Werner Pfennig during the time of World War Two. In the exposition Marie-Laure is living with her father Daniel in Paris, her father works as a locksmith at a museum and is entrusted to protect a valuable diamond named the Sea of Flames. Werner is living as an orphan in Germany with his sister Jutta where he finds his passion for mathematics and working on radios.

The movie M depicts a society where everyone is in fear of something, and everyone is doubting others; the central idea of this movie is that no one is safe and everyone is “isolated.” The movie M shows the influence of German Expressionism movement by incorporating many ideas from it. This movie incorporated many shadows which was a very significant part of German Expressionism; the audience relies on the serial killer’s shadow to know his presence in many scenes. The first half of the movie is slow-paced, and the shadow of the serial killer is huge (exaggeration). Techniques such as Mise-en-scene is utilized in this movie, for example, when the serial killer kidnaps, Elsie, audiences don’t see him killing

An individual detailed analysis on the style, editing techniques Mise-en-scene and cinematography in the film "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind". Michael Gondry’s Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004) is not your typical Hollywood rom-com. Its cinematic style is very original and by far out of the ordinary for its

I enjoyed reading your post this week. I think that Maya Deren’s avant-garde film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), is subjective realism. In fact, I enjoyed the challenge of watching this film because after the fourth time, I realized the editing that distorted the time sequence. After trying to keep up with the film through jump cuts, and trying to understand what the repeated images of the key, knife, and the flower; I realized and understood that this is a dream-like film with no direct patterns. Overall, my interpretation of the film is a personal struggle of a woman regretting her decision of death from a life where being a female with all of the restrictions back in the 1940’s became too much for her to bare.

Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love has a spectacle of visuals, depicting sensuality through music,

I love love love documentaries. For my money, there’s nothing more engrossing than a well-crafted film about a true-to-life tale. The documentary genre is as rich as it is varied, encompassing everything from breathtaking nature docs to soul-searching personal narratives. And it’s all true! (to a point).

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