Sight Gags and Charlie Chaplin Essay

Even though Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb screened in the midst of the sobering Cold War, critics were keen on praising the film for its mastery of humor applied to such a sensitive matter. The film is exceedingly loaded with metaphors, innuendos, and allusions that nothing can be left undissected or taken for face value; the resulting effect is understood to be part of Kubrick’s multifarious theme. Kubrick has stated that what began as a “the basis for a serious film about accidental war ” eventually birthed an absurd and farcical classic comedy. The director fuses together irony, satire, and black humor to create a waggish piece but most of all the situation of the times and its

In the 1931 film “City Lights”, Charlie Chaplin “opens our eyes”, so to speak, about how society values trivial elements of people over the deeper person by using blindness. In this film, Chaplin brilliantly mixes lighthearted comedy with deep and complex ideas about problems with society. Chaplin uses music, gags, and a genuine love connection to portray this point in multiple ways throughout the movie. Chaplin also took the bold step of not making a talking movie, even though they were available at the time, making the details in the pictures and sounds he was creating that much more important. What makes “City Lights” so special, and different from other comedies, is Chaplin’s natural blend of comedic scenes with tense and serious scenes. Chaplin weaved together a masterpiece that culminates in the end with the lady seeing who she fell in love with, which is also the moment Chaplin slaps the viewer in the face with the realization that the priorities in society are misguided and that the important things cannot be seen with the eye.

This imagery is used metaphorically to illustrate what a blind man would like to know in order to get a full vision of what is exactly going on.

Charlie Chaplin’s (1931) City Lights, is one of the last silent films to be released in America, that was successful, as the age of the ‘talkie’ was beginning. He was one of the few great silent film stars to successfully continue his career. Chaplin uses a lot of symbolism of life in this film, using flowers, blindness, money and of course the Tramp.

The speaker makes it seem as if the effect of the glasses is humorous by using very blunt syntax in the first few stanzas. The effect is that the reader is thrown off and led to believe that the glasses are a novelty and a worthy focus of the theme.

The husband in the story can not express what he means because of his one of the five senses is off as he sarcastically comments to his wife “maybe I could take him bowling” (Carver 212) in a comical way. This shows you how insensitive he was to others disabilities. He hides behind a glass of liquor in most of the story. Which brings this story to the figurative blindness.

Our performance was effective because of how clear and straight forward it was, even though it was mime. The audience where aware of the setting and it being around a dinner table due to the two chairs being opposite each other with a ‘table’ in the middle, the audience where aware of which characters were which as we characterised the roles very well. For example, Anna was very giggly and hyper, contrasting Catherine’s formal demeanour and John and Maureen were a typical married couple. We used physical theatre for the oven and the stairs, which was stylistic and different for the audience to see, this fit in with the overall style of the lay as most of the stage directions involve physical theatre as in ‘The Brussels Sprouts Scene’ “the whole of this scene is performed stylistically with people frantically changing roles, playing scenery, properties and characters”. The use of thought tracking helped the audience to figure out which character is which. The use of gestures was also used, Maureen slapped Anna’s hand instantly giving away her very paternal and motherly role as Maureen. Our scene was effective also because the crackers being pulled apart in itself is representing the family being pulled apart for many reasons not just the economy, but the toll Catherine’s anorexia takes on the whole Dunbar family in different ways. Looking at Bleu’s group I could definitely see how they marked the moment: the tempo

The speaker makes it seem as if the effect of the glasses is humorous by using very blunt syntax in the first few stanzas. This is primarily seen in the way that the speaker abruptly addresses the listener. The effect is that the reader is thrown off and led to believe that the glasses are a novelty and a worthy focus of the theme.

Explain the how the concept is relevant to explaining the rhetorical function of the parody.

In the animated TV series The Simpsons, season 2 episode 3, “Treehouse of Horrors”, Matt Groening takes an egocentric approach to this satire to show the some of the faults the human race has. Some of these that are shown are being gullible, being non trusting, and being quick to judge others. Groening uses several different satirical devices to show some of the faults of humans. For example, After Bart tells the story about the haunted mansion he pulls out a box with a severed finger. Instead of being scared, Maggie takes her pacifier out of her mouth and proceeds to suck on the severed finger (Bart’s finger in the box). This satirical device is called incongruity. In addition to Groening using incongruity, he also used a lot of sarcasm. One

In Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he denotes a “deficit is an impairment or incapacity of neurological function; such as loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision loss of dexterity, or loss of identity” (Sacks, 1985). The specific neurological disorder that is highlighted in chapter one is Visual Agnosia, which is a deficit associated with poor primary visual processing that affects shape perception, figures, object, face and letter recognition (Serino, et al., 2014). Other subtypes of visual agnosia that also seemed to fit the descriptions that Sacks shared is prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize human faces (Shah, 2016), and pantomime agnosia, characterized as the inability to understand gestures (Gonzalez, Mack, & Heilman, K., 1986).

Cinema of Attractions is concerned with the ability to display. Attractions wanted to show the ‘here and now’, interacting with its spectator with the aim of satisfying the audience’s curiosity quickly (Gunning, 2004: 44). It displays current events, scenes form everyday life, composed scenes, vaudeville performances and also camera tricks (as pioneered by George Méliès). Cinema of Attractions aims to astonish its audience (Strauven, 1999: 50). through displaying, rather than amusing its audience through narrative content. This is seen in films such as G. Méliès’ ‘ L'homme-orchestre (One Man Band)’ (1900), or his ‘L'homme à la tête de caoutchouc (The Man With The Rubber Head)’ (1901) where the actor(s) constantly address the camera/spectator and the audience is

The story “Cathedral” demonstrates that lack of sight does not necessarily prevent one from perceiving things as they are, or live their life to the fullest. In the story, a middle-age blind man, who is a friend to the narrator’s wife, and used to be her boss at one point, visits the narrator and his wife. The narrator has never interacted with blind people before, and all he knew about blind people was what he had seen on television. Blind people are stereotypically portrayed on television as slow moving, dull people, who never laugh. Based on this perception, the narrator was reluctant to meet the blind man and doubted whether they were going to connect. This is evident when the narrator states, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver 1).

Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Tramp character is often someone to laugh with, or laugh at, but not necessarily someone you learn from. The Tramp character is impulsive and reckless, hardly the standard for model behavior. Despite this characterization, the Tramp’s role differs significantly in Easy Street. He is the hero that the titular street desperately needs, a place where the depraved and deprived struggle to survive. The use of social issues in Easy Street is not merely to use them for the jokes, but to lighten the burden surrounding the subjects, and in doing so providing a more hopeful perspective: one where these issues are not overwhelming and the solutions don’t seem Herculean, but instead are presented as being within the audience’s begging grasp. The film provides relief by portraying issues a general public can be dealing with, and not treating them as these daunting things to be intimidated by, but to laugh at, since they can be solved, as the Tramp demonstrates, through religion and labor.

My example that I will be using is Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin. Modern times is a film developed after the industrial revolution. It serves the purpose of critiquing capitalism and the social world. Modern Times begin with a factory worker who starts developing anxiety through the lack of breaks and repetitive work. When the Worker is on break, his boss is always keeping an eye on him and demands him to go back to work due to the loss of production. Soon after, the factory worker goes on lunch break, but is again distracted by his boss due to the desire to try out a new lunch contraption. At first, the new technology seems to work since the factory Worker was being fed. But, after a few seconds the contraption goes haywire and starts hurting the worker. The factory Worker goes back to work, but suddenly starts to mess up. He goes around ruining all his co-workers’ work and even get himself in prison. However, he ends up saving all the cops from the inmates’ revolution and is released early from jail. He does not want to leave since he is treated properly in jail and will be homeless in the outside world. He tries to get himself in prison again, but meets a beautiful woman Gamin who is also homeless and workless. They run off together and commit burglaries to feed themselves, but is soon discovered by the police. They manage to escape and run off to live in a small house by themselves. The factory Worker and the Gamin decides to have lunch together, but finds out that a