Sonnenallee Film Essay

What were Edwin S. Porter's significant contributions to the development of early narrative film? In what sense did Porter build upon the innovations of contemporaneous filmmakers, and for what purposes?

In “A Century of Cinema”, Susan Sontag explains how cinema was cherished by those who enjoyed what cinema offered. Cinema was unlike anything else, it was entertainment that had the audience feeling apart of the film. However, as the years went by, the special feeling regarding cinema went away as those who admired cinema wanted to help expand the experience.

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.

The film Pleasantville directed by Gary Ross is about two modern teenagers, David and his sister Jennifer, somehow being transported into the television, ending up in Pleasantville, a 1950s black and white sitcom. The two are trapped as Bud and Mary Sue in a radically different dimension and make some huge changes to the bland lives of the citizens of Pleasantville, with the use of the director’s cinematic techniques. Ross cleverly uses cinematic techniques such as colour, mise-en-scene, camera shots, costumes, music and dialogue to effectively tell the story.

As Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel once said, “To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice,” that is why we are called to remember. Many movies, novels, and story representations of the Holocaust have been created in order to spread the memory of the past. An important part of remembering is learning, and therefore not repeating the same mistakes once again. Movies may find it difficult to represent the Holocaust accurately, while also giving it meaning and artistic expression. The writer, Edwin de Vries, and the director, Jeroen Krabbé, strive to represent the legacies of the Holocaust and Jewish culture in the film, Left Luggage (1998), based on a novel by Carl Friedman through a portrayal of the daily lives of Holocaust survivors and their children in late 1960s Antwerp, their direct confrontations with their memories of the Holocaust, and character development. The film shows us many examples of the legacy of the Holocaust as it is passed through the children of survivors, and how it continues to affect their daily lives. The audience understands the intentions through depictions of muteness and the necessity to remember.

How do the respective narrative forms of Double Indemnity and Magnolia construct their characters and provide different critical perspectives on social values? Discuss in your essay some of the various narration types and the formal narrative construction of the films' characters. However, do not simply provide a list or catalogue of the narrative differences between the two films. A critical and necessary part of the assignment is for you to argue how the narrative construction in each film provides critical perspectives on social values.

Imagination is an intrinsic part of the human experience. It has the power to mold reality by defining the limits of possibility and affecting perception. Both Alan White and Irving Singer examine aspects of this power in their respective works The Language of Imagination and Feeling and Imagination. White delineates how imagination is a necessary precursor to possibility (White 179) while Singer primarily illustrates imagination's effect on human relationships, such as love (Singer 29-48). Despite their different focuses, White and Singer demonstrate the impact that imagination has on human perceptions of reality. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Amelie explores this facet of imagination: the film

The holocaust was a tragic time which involved the killing of Jews to create a ‘pure race’ in Germany. Jacob Boas analyzes the stories of five young Jewish children through the book “We Are Witnesses,” who were forced through the hardships of war. Through the perspectives of David Rubinowicz, Yitzhak Rudashevski, Moshe Flinker, Éva Heyman, and Anne Frank, the struggles of the five children are clear as they try to hold on to their ideals while still fighting for their lives. “We Are Witnesses,” by Jacob Boas adopts repetition and diction through the eyes of David Rubinowicz, imagery using Yitzhak Rudashevski, repetition and imagery via Moshe Flinker, repetition with Éva Heyman, and repetition and syntax by Anne Frank to brandish how Jewish

In the movie Wit, English literary scholar Vivian Bearing has spent years translating and interpreting the poetry of John Donne. Unfortunately, she is a person who has cultivated her intellect at the expense of her heart. Both colleagues and students view Bearing as a chilly and unfriendly person lost in her private world of words and mysterious thoughts.

The movie I chose to do my movie analysis on was Sin Nombre. I chose this movie because it stood out to me the most, mainly because of the title in Spanish. I used four concepts while analyzing this epic movie. First I applied the power elite theory to see who had the power in this power city and how they used their power. Then I used the social conflict theory to see what caused the people to get into the gangs and how the gangs acted to the people. The socialization theory is shown in the sense that the gang makes people believe that they are a part of a family when they join. The last concept I used was deviance because of all the violence that happened in the movie.

The 1979 science fiction film Stalker, directed by legendary Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, is a film which contributes to historical understanding by being a product of its time. For many individuals in Soviet audiences, Stalker presented itself as an allegory for the yearn for greater freedom: personal, artistic or ideological freedom depending on the interpretation one ascribes to the film. Stalker’s titular character’s obsession with the the Zone, a paradise-like location, resonated with audiences’ growing dissent with the repressive nature of the Soviet Union, and their desire for that which lay outside its confines. Additionally, for Tarkovsky as well as others, Stalker is a story of faith and the arduous task of keeping one’s faith intact in a world which no longer believes. A commentary of the

Within German cinema, one can identify a particular type of films taking place in, and thematizing issues of, the former East German state. Given the undemocratic nature of the GDR, these films are particularly suited to discuss the way that people react to a status quo: whether by accepting it and conforming to it, or by rejecting and subverting it in various ways. These different options appear in the two films analysed in this essay. Coming Out (1989) by Heiner Carow was filmed in the GDR, and charts a gay man 's process of acceptance of himself. The Lives of Others (2006) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck looks back at the GDR 's past, and more specifically at the actions of the Stasi. Its plot, set in 1984, follows a Stasi agent 's “conversion” to political subversion and to being a “good man”. First, this essay will examine the representation of acceptance of the status quo in these films, before turning to the portrayal of subversion. Lastly, it will highlight some of the negative aspects of the subversion depicted – such aspects being introduced either in a conscious and critical way, or not.

In a complicated and intertwining history, emotionally and politically charged, the Solovki Islands present an example where we question whether or not spaces of uncomfortable history should be preserved - and if so, to what extent? Jeffrey Olick in Collective Memory discusses the contrast between “history” and “collective memory,” where “both are publicly available social facts – the former “dead,” and the latter “living.” As history that is an “organic” relation where collective memory is the active past that forms our identities. In the Solovki Islands in Russia, this active past is present through the commemoration of daily prayer and mourning, however, this act is shadowed in dark history many are trying to forget.

Due to the abolishment of Islam and changes to the language and writing during the Soviet regime, the mankurt in Aitmatov’s novel can be seen as symbolic of this government. Like the Zhuan’zhuan who caused brain damage by wrapping the prisoner’s head with camel skin, the Soviet’s caused a sort of “brain damage” by destroying the intelligencia that threatened them and using fear to control the population. Also, whereas the Zhuan’zhuan destroyed the mankurt’s memory in order to erase his identity and make his susceptible to control, the Soviet Union outlawed essential elements of the regions’ culture, including their religion and their language, in order to erase their old identity and replace it with a Soviet identity, allowing them to maintain control over Central Asia for almost a century. Due to these similarities, Aitmatov’s mankurt can easily be seen not only as a reminder to the importance of memory, but a symbol of the actions of the Soviet

      A Farewell to Arms begins with a god's-eye-view, cinematic pan of the hills surrounding Gorizia-the camera of our mind's eye, racing forward through time, sweeps up and down the landscape, catching isolated events of the first year in the town as it goes. The film ultimately slows to a crawl, passing through the window of a whorehouse to meet the eyes of Frederic Henry watching the snow falling. As we attach ourselves to Frederic Henry's perspective we turn (as he turns) back to the conversation at hand, a theological debate between the priest and Lieutenant Rinaldi. This debate, its dialectic made flesh in these two polar opposites, is a central question of A Farewell to Arms: What is