Symbols In Un Chien Andalou

The Unbroken film, directed by Angelina Jolie, follows Louis Zamperini’s life as an Olympic runner and World War II veteran. Different universal experiences are shown throughout the movie that follow Carl Jung’s theory, which states the same archetypal symbols can be found in all works. Louie’s story is one example of this theory being true, between leaving the hero’s original world, to staring death in the face and vanquishing it. Jolie depicts the highs and lows in Zamperini’s life and the characters that play a role in the Hero’s Journey. Each stage of Louis’s life can have a connection to the world that exists today. For instance, when Louie was a kid, he felt like nothing he did was good enough, he didn’t want to disappoint his family,

Everything a person encounters in their life affects their view on the world. In The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Santiago does not feel like he is fulfilling his life to its highest potential. In order to achieve his full potential, he sells his sheep and takes off on a journey to fulfill his personal legend. The story is not just about a boy trying to carry out his personal legend, it is about the symbolic aspects of life and how everything in a person's life affects them. Fate and omens are main motifs in The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo that helped Santiago find this way through his journey and are shown by the symbolic stones from the king, the desert he traveled through and the treasure that was found.

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.

Poetic Realism was a film movement in France during the 1930’s that combined qualities of both Impressionism and Surrealism to create a unique way to tell stories through narratives, long, continuous shots, and sets that took a slice of reality and made it their own. The various techniques used to create shots “more real than life itself” were groundbreaking for this time period. In the past, sets of films were unrealistic and exaggerated; they were telling stories outside of reality, so their sets were not attempting to immerse their viewer in the film’s location. The 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari used very simplistic sets to tell its story, but the filmmakers did not expect or want the audience to take them as reality. They were entirely aware that the walls

Photography was an ideal medium with which to explore the payers of the unconscious mind. Modernist photographers experimented with double exposure and unusual new effects similar to those of visionary Surrealist painters and sculptors. A champion of the technique, Raoul Hausmann, called photomontage “the ‘alienation’ of photography”. By this, he implied that photomontage destroyed the role of photography as a medium of recreating physical reality. But the statement also suggests that by its dependence on fragmentation and dislocation, photomontage offered a visually and conceptually new image of the chaos of an age of war and revolution.

The surrealist movement of the 1920s-1930s was largely based on the notion that excessive rational thought is a catalyst of conflict and war throughout the world. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence

This essay analyses the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of the Modernist artwork, Impression, Sunrise of Claude Monet. The artwork and Impressionism is considered to be a visual articulation of the avant-garde and the latter statement is explained. References to the writings of Charles Harrison, Clement Greenberg and Wilhelm Worringer is used to theorise the aesthetics of modernity.

Overall, the ideologies discussed within the articles Written In Blood: 20th Century Art by Stephanie Dudek and Estrangement As A Motif In Modern Painting by John Adkins Richardson address similarities and differences from various standpoints. Modernistic ideologies towards social, cultural and technological changes of the 20th century are demonstrated in both articles. The article by Stephanie Dudek emphasizes on the employment of radical and transgressive values by modern artists within their work to target cultural, and artistic principles that have persisted over many generations leading to a transformation within the subject of art (Dudek 105). Furthermore, modern art set out to obtain new visions of reality as witnessed within the Cubist

My paintings give material form to the human tendencies to compartimentalize, and desegregate, both nature and our built environments. In each two-dimensional work, I start with an impression ---a feeling, a memory, a childhood friend, a family member, or a location---and build the forms using patches of color, showing my own habit of separating parts of the world around me into smaller, consumable parts. For example, in L.A. Bus Routes, I utilized my frustration with the pervading image of Los Angeles’s car-riding culture by making a largely unspoken bus-riding culture take center stage. I drew lines with colored pencil representing the L.A.’s city blocks defined by bus routes surrounding my East Hollywood home. Fluidly, colors bled into others where watercolored shapes met, representing the permeable borders of neighborhoods in L.A. My work questions the fabric of social dissonances using a patchwork of watercolor, gouache and pencil marks that suggest a human need to compartmentalize aspects of our surroundings, our selves, and

A film can be so grand and so magnificent that it will open up our eyes to things we have never even thought possible and taking us to places that we have never been. It can also be a single set as in the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”. The film set highlights the symbiotic relationship between architecture and film and the importance of architecture as a stage. Hitchcock has demonstrated Friedrich Murnau’s statement “What you see on the set does not matter. All that matters is what you see on the screen” in his film. The entire film takes place in a single but diversified set that represents an apartment block shot entirely at Paramount studios, including an enormous set on one of the soundstages. Clever photography was used to create a series of film within a single film. The window of the protagonist as well as each window of the apartment functions as individual film screens offering both separate and linked stories of the characters.

Distancing itself from fantasy and focusing on the time at hand, American Realism presented a new breakthrough; introducing modernism and what it means to be in the present. The subject of art in America also changed by the beginning of the 20th century. Images of urban life replaced rural landscapes and nature, as a greater amount of the American population moved to cities (“Edward Hopper”).

Art has been a recurring part of history from the very beginning. As society changes so does the style of art. Each new style is known as a movement and one of the most prominent, long-lasting movements in recent centuries is known as Modernism. Modernism is characterized by its deviation from tradition. People who are a part of this movement found enjoyment in finding new mediums to use, creating art that revolves around feelings and emotions rather than reality. Abstract idealisms of modernism cause its viewers to need to think more critically about the art before them. In past movements, the meaning of the work was obvious as it was created to mimic reality.

Marshall Berman’s take on modernity is presented in his book All That Is Solid Melts into Air whereby he focuses on its issues and the cultural attitudes and philosophies towards the modern condition. In doing so he shares his experiences of modernity post WWII in New York in the height of an economic boom and then more specifically of his childhood neighbourhood, the Bronx. In addition to expanded austerity, industrial and architectural development, the end of WWII proved to be a key period in world history and by extension the history of art. A talented group of artists emerged in result that had been influenced by an influx of established European artist who had fled to New York to escape fascist regimes in their homelands. More importantly these artists produced art that was at the heart of maelstrom Berman describes in regards to his experience of modernity. I aim to highlight the correlation between Berman’s experience of modernity and the emergence of a new American modernism. Modernity throughout this period was broken into two different compartments, hermetically sealed off from one another: "modernisation" in economics and politics, "modernism" in art, culture and sensibility. It’s through the lens of this dualism in which we recognise that both Berman and these artists try to make sense of the world around them by making their individual expressions that would re-conceptualise what it is to be modern in the twentieth century.

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

The movements of German Expressionism and Japanese pre-war cinema produced trends greatly influenced by its historical context. These contexts contributed to shaping their own stylistic styles captured throughout the theme, mise-en-scene, and cultural ideologies. Although these two movements occurred in fairly similar time periods, they both occurred in different parts of the world which had a fundamental role in generating key contrasts between these movements. Both occurring in pre-war periods, a striking similarity existed between the two; they both displayed the economic instabilities. Both subtly exhibited the internal anxieties that the individuals faced in the differing societies. German Expressionism had the stylistic forms that in turn captured distorted images or grotesque style to convey an abstract sense of reality throughout 1920’s. On the other hand, the Japanese pre-war cinema expressed the humanistic family by displaying their everyday struggles of the lower middle class known as the “common people” during the 1930’s. Although these movements were individually unique throughout their distinct stylistic devices and ideologies, they essentially came together during this time period to help transform the art of national cinema.