My Table Conflict

When Norma asserts her self-worth, she does so surrounded by images of herself. “I am big,” she proclaims, with a thousand Norma Desmonds staring back at the camera from photographs, posters, and artistic renditions of the once famous face. “It’s the pictures that got small.” This convolution of reality, a reversal that gives Desmond the illusion of both control and continued adoration by nonexistent fans, provides the foundation for all her more severe misperceptions. As long as it is the cinema itself that has lost its appeal and not the former silent film star, a change of fates or Desmond’s own gracious compromise have the potential to restore her former glory. As she ultimately confesses, Norma feels that she left the spotlight (not the other way around) and that it has been waiting for her ever since. A belief that her seclusion is voluntary allows Desmond to avoid the finality of her fall from grace.

Furthermore, both authors explore the theme of isolation throughout their texts. In Jasper Jones, Laura constantly feels isolated from her community, and seeks refuge from this isolation in a relationship with Jasper. The isolation is represented through the characterisation of Laura. Towards the end of the novel, it is revealed that her father had been sexually assaulting her. The isolation she was experiencing due to this assault comes to a head at the climax of the novel, where we read Laura’s suicide note. She reveals that although she is now dead, she has been “dead inside long before this” and that her “life was disappearing”. This is a clear example of the isolation manifesting within her to the extent that she feels suicide is her only option. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, we are introduced to the isolation and anxiety Holly feels through dialogue. In one particular scene, Holly explains to Paul how she is experiencing the “Mean reds”, which is when you are afraid of something, but you do not know what

The camera follows the elders of the block, Da’ Mayor and Mother Sister, as they talk in her bedroom. For a rare moment in the film Da’ Mayor’s and Mother Sister’s eyes are at exactly the same level, showing that as different as the two may have seemed, they are very much the same. Then the camera slowly pulls out as the two stand and sluggishly walk down a hallway toward a window. Now, where a director would typically have to cut and setup a new shot, Lee pulls the camera straight out of the window as Mother Sister and Da’ Mayor survey the block. The audience would expect to see next exactly what Da’ Mayor and Mother Sister are looking at, but instead Lee quickly pans over in the opposite direction to reveal Mookie standing in the street bellow. By doing this Lee makes a connection that both the elders and Mookie are, in the words of Mother Sister, “still standing.” The shot is not particularly tight but still has a cramped feel due to the clutter of things in the background, the heavy shadowing, and the red tint on the lighting. The red lighting gives sense of volatility to the shot, which is contrasted by the slow camera and character movements. These slow movements are analogous to the block as, regardless of how slowly, it too will go on and life will continue. This shot is in the tradition of mise en scene advocates like Bazin in that,

To support this idea, Bordwell illustrates how art cinema motivates its narratives differently, through two principles: realism and authorial expressivity. Firstly he proposes the notion that art films reflect realism in their characters, space, and time. Psychologically complex characters are present in real worlds dealing with true-to-life situations. Art cinema is concerned with the characters ‘reaction’ to these situations, rather than their ‘action’. Thus it bares an element of psychological subjectivity as the characters survey the world they are in, which aids the realisation of the distress of

1985 (Figure 2) first appeared in 1985 plastered on billboards around New York City. The piece is illustrated in monochrome colours so to not distract viewers from the meaning of the poster. The harsh contrast in colours between the black writing and white background make the piece stand out and draw the attention of bypassers. Written on the artwork is a list of well-known museums in New York City and beside them is a score of how many women artists have had one-person exhibits there in the past year. The results showed that the Guggenheim, Metropolitan and Whitney museums each had zero, whilst the Modern museum had one. These results are supposed to shock the audience and make gallery curators feel a sense of guilt, that it’s clear the art world don’t appreciate women artists like they do men. Whist they are confronting the public with that truth they are also providing another critical message with this piece. The Guerrilla Girls identified these museums by first name, not out of convenience, but to make a statement, that the only museums to allow women artist some form of respect like male artist do was the ‘modern’ museum. Emphasising the fact that gender discrimination and bias nature in the art world should be in the past, and the only museum that realises and recognises this is the modern one. The poster’s main message challenges the patriarchal world of art and confronts art galleries

The windows show the outside world, showing you what lies beyond the four walls which you are stuck between. Many cases throughout the book result in a woman’s character being trapped and not being able to leave the house they are in. The women then result in looking out the windows only to dream about leaving. “She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (11). The main character’s grandmother was trapped in her own house, her husband had stripped her of her freedom and was enable to leave. Windows are tricky, they are sweet like honey showing you the outside world, but in the book the character, then realizes they cannot venture past them so they

The other camera movement that I want to talk about is the shot which shows the frame within the frame. At the scene when Gustave tries to escape from the prison with his prison mates, they slide down through the steam vent and open the wood-paneled door on the ground. At this moment, the camera shows them who are staring down a hole in the wood frame and shows the guards who are playing the card game in the wood frame. Through using this shot, this film allows audiences to feel that they are looking at the painting just like seeing one page of a fairy-tale book. On the one hand, Wes Anderson’s frame within a frame shows the internal psychology and memory of the characters in the film (MCCAUSLAND). The last camera movement that I figure out is employing a symmetrical shot which is perfectly balanced in the left, right, upper, and lower side. This symmetry makes audiences recognize psychologically that they are watching fictional dreamlike world. Because of this balance, on the one hand, audiences can easily understand what they are seeing in each scene, and the symmetry aesthetically amuses people’s

She has been confined to the former nursery in her family's colonial mansion to cure her of hysterical tendencies, a medical condition she was diagnosed with after the birth of her son (Gilman 1997: 1f.). The woman confides in her secret journal how her contact with the outside world has become strictly limited on account of her Doctor's recommendations, and how the treatment forces her to spend her days in a barely furnished room with only her own mind and the objects around her as companions (Gilman 1997: 1f.). One of the main objects she actively engages with during this period of isolation, other than the nailed down bed and her secret journal, is the old yellow wallpaper covering the walls around her (Gilman 1997: 1f.). While the woman's condition worsens gradually over the course of the entries she makes in her secret journal, her growing isolation and inactivity make her start to see movement in the patterns and holes of the old wallpaper (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997: 1f.). The character becomes absorbed by what she thinks she sees, and begins to directly interact with the things she sees in the paper, until she rips the paper to shreds, and violently frees what she sees, and subsequently, also herself from captivity (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997:

It would be true to say that our window is the physical screen and the film is the “window on the world”, as Elsaesser puts it (13). Yet we perceive the screen as a portal that brings us into the world of the film.  Given the nature of human perception, the two-dimensional screen becomes a three-dimensional world for viewers in a movie theatre.  This construct is what makes the cinema of the window so powerful with regard concept of the screen as the window and the audience as the people looking through it.  The metaphor has a cumulative richness of meaning that far exceeds the two simple, standalone principles that bring it to life.  The window the cinema provides us is one that can transport people to realm that would not exist or that they would not have access to. While lost within the film, an audience is able to experience a wide range of emotions and connections that result from this entertaining departure, and these emotions often bear no correlation to their emotional reality in everyday life outside the theatre. This same concept applies to Jefferies in Rear Window. His perception is arrested by outside actions that he can observe, but not get involved in.  The courtyard offers mental and emotional escape as he copes with a difficult period in his recovery. Jeffries fascinates himself with events other than what is actually going on in his life, as these events become a vital escape from his immediate physical

Ever since I can remember I have loved theatre. It’s been a constant presence, and an important touchstone, in my life. However, for as long as I’ve loved theatre, I have also been ridiculed for my enjoyment of it. As a child, my interest was tolerated as something precious, something I was bound to grow out of. My parents and teachers would sit in the audience, clapping and cheering me on, all the while thinking to themselves “I bet she’ll make a great lawyer one day.” They thought, like most of society, theatre was an unnecessary luxury; a pastime for the rich and powerful, for those who didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table, or clothes on their children’s backs. Certainly not

She originally thinks her prison room is "The most beautiful place!" and the bars on the windows are "for little children" (231); however, two weeks later, she thinks the room is "atrocious" (232). Her mental state deteriorates rapidly: soon she believes there is a figure in the wallpaper. The narrator later identifies this figure as a woman trapped behind the pattern of the wallpaper. Ironically, her husband believes his treatment is helping her; however, when he enters the narrator's room at the end of the story, he sees that she has lost nearly all of her sanity: she has torn the wallpaper off the wall to free the imaginary woman trapped behind it. The narrator identifies with her imaginary woman and declares, "I've got out at last in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (242). The final mental state of the narrator in itself is shocking, but it is even more shocking that her husband would lock her inside a room with no human contact and with nothing to do. Most of today's readers are shocked that such a treatment would ever be accepted and implemented, especially by the narrator's own husband.

The first instance of window imagery is deceivingly small and easy to pass over, but upon reflection it creates a certain symmetry by subtly foreshadowing the final window scene. In the very opening section of the book, Clarissa’s departure from the house dredges up memories of her time at Bourton, of scenes with Peter Walsh that took place in front of an open window. This memory, brought about by the impact of the early morning air, also reminds her of the “solemn” feeling this incident gave her “standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen.” Though fleeting and lightly discussed, this emotion placed so close to the beginning of the novel seems to indicate the dangerous nature of an open window, which anticipates both Septimus’ death and Clarissa’s later musings in front of a window.

“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” This poem was called Last Fragment by Raymond Carver it portrayed self-actualization to seek or need something and having the affirmation of it. The movie Birdman (2014) touches this but mainly with the issues of seeking relevance and the need to have their own self-image. In this essay, I claim that Birdman (2014) gives an image on how narcissistic and obsessed people can become when it comes to being relevant and staying relevant in the world every day and how the thirst of self-image can take over your mindset. I will be using mise-en-scene, editing, cinematography and sound to verify this

Janet Maslin of The New York Times commended the "thoughtfulness of [Boaz] Yakin's direction" and wrote that he "doesn't include many violent episodes in this film, but the ones he stages are made so meaningful that their impact is brutalizingly intense. She also complimented Adam Holender's cinematography and commented that he makes the film "extraordinarily handsome, with a sharply sunlit look that brings out the hard edges in its urban landscapes.

The romantic idea of the auteur is described by film theoretician, André Bazin, observing the film form as an idealistic phenomenon. Through the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard reference, Bazin primarily refers to an essential literary and romantic conception of the artist as central. He considers the relationship between film aesthetics and reality more important than the director itself and places cinema above paintings. He described paintings as a similar ethical creation to film stating a director ‘can be valued according to its measurements and the celebrity of the signature, the objective quality of the work itself was formerly held in much higher esteem.’ (Bazin, 1967: 250). Bazin contemplates the historical and social aspects that indeed hinder a director’s retribution to their own personalised film, thus en-companying their own ideological judgement upon the world ‘more so in cinema where the sociological and historical cross-currents are countless.’ (Bazin, 1967: 256)