The 's The House Is Black

The author’s narrative, ripe with horrifying descriptions, is nonetheless told with compassion appealing to the emotions of the audience

In A Home Is Not a House, Reyner Banham starts by arguing that the main function of the typic American house is to cover its mechanical structure. In fact, he states that the use of mechanical services in architectural practice varies constantly because mechanical services are considered to be new in the profession, as well as, a cultural threat to the architect’s position in the world. To show his argument, Banham states that American houses are basically large single spaces divided by partitions inside that give a relative importance to the use of internal mechanical services, causing a threat to the need of architectural design. Similarly, American cultural characteristics, like cleanliness and hygiene, also foster the use and need of mechanical

The House Taken Over, a Short story by Julio Cortázar, and The Fall of The House of Usher, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, Both have a very similar goth type themed plot. Julio Cortázar published his story in 1946, while Edgar Allen Poe’s story was published in 1839. Although both stories have many similarities, they also have many differences.

Suffering is embedded in our daily lives. There are devastating things going on in our daily environments and yet, people seldom realize this as they occupy themselves with other tasks. W.H. Auden’s, Musée des Beaux Arts, is a statement on human perceptions and how we use them to observe, or block out human suffering. While we are doing ordinary things like eating, or opening a window, bad things can be happening to others and it is as easy as looking up, to see what is actually going on. Auden illustrates societies’ indifference to human suffering through the form of his poem and by alluding to artwork that compares human perceptions and juxtaposes ordinary images with images of suffering and tragedy.

There are numerous ethnographic surrealist films that have an intriguing relationship to aesthetics and politics. A film that exemplifies this relationship is “Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan” (Land Without Bread). This film is only 27-minutes and is directed by the infamous Luis Bunuel in 1933. Bunuel was a Spanish filmmaker of the 1920’s to the 1970’s. He is often attributed to being one of the major contributors to the surrealist movement of the 1920’s. “Ethnographic surrealism is a utopian construct, a statement at once about past and future possibilities for cultural analysis.”(Clifford, 119) ‘Land Without Bread’ has a clear connection between politics and aesthetics. It uses many techniques, specifically

In Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” they put forward the central argument that film is a commercial product in the capitalist system and therefore also the unconscious instrument of the dominant ideology which produces it. In opposition to the classic film theory that applauds camera as an impartial device to reproduce reality, they argue that what the camera reproduces is merely a refraction of the prevailing ideology. Therefore, the primary and political task for filmmakers is to disrupt this replication of the world as self-evident and the function of film criticism is to identify and evaluate that politics. Comolli and Narboni then suggest seven categories of films confronting ideology in different ways, among which the second category resists the prevailing ideology on two levels. Films of this group not only overtly deal with political contents in order to “attack their ideological assimilation” (Comolli and Narboni 483), but also achieve their goal through breaking down the conventional way of depicting reality.

Although Fusco created a documentary on the live experimentation that Gomez-Pena and she have created to criticize Westerners on how they view and treat “Others” or primitive people, but her editing decisions on “The Couple in the Cage,” may have skewed the viewers the understand her satirical piece without viewer’s own personal opinion or interpretation of the performance. Comparing the live performance and to Fusco’s video, there were properties that the live performances did not have but the video did have. In the video, Fusco purposely placed videos and pictures of freak shows to juxtapose her performance to deliver same ethnocentrism that she experienced in the cage and the freak show performers who also faced the same problem. When the spectators paid to take pictures with Fusco and Gomez-Pena, there was

2. (A) Hook (2004) hits on a few key notes as to why black men are so angry and they all stem from the idea that manhood is synonymous with the domination and control over others. By being male they are in a position of authority that gives them the right to assert their will over others, to use coercion and or violence to gain and maintain power. This train of thought starts with what role men and women play in patriarchal culture. Being raised in this manner little boys are not allowed to express feelings and emotions. If they do, it’s generally associated with being weak. Many black parents feel it is crucial to train boys to be “tough.”

The symbolism of the “living house” highlights how technology leads to violence towards humans. The author is

Hugh’s school in Addis Ababa would take students on field trips to watch a “wrinkled man fill his mouth with rotten goat meat” (6) to feed to hyenas and to “examine the bloodied bedroom curtains” (6) in a palace of a former dictator. This imagery at the beginning of the piece defines a tone surrounding what kind of society that Hugh grew up in as well as painting a picture of the events of those field trips and the atmosphere surrounding them taking his audience on those field trips. Another field trip takes the readers to a slaughterhouse where a piglet entered the room with “dainty hooves clicking against the concrete floor” (6) to be slaughtered by gunshot where “blood splattered [and] frightened children wept” (6). Readers are encompassed in details that project the depressing atmosphere of the slaughter house. To the average reader, the descriptions of these field trips are undesirable due to the depressing and possibly dangerous conditions, but the narrator longs for a more exciting childhood and glosses over the negative details to focus on the positive details. Readers are left confused as to why he would be jealous of seeing such vile things, but Sedaris uses crude and depressing details to teach that people should be happy with their current

Todrick Halls “Forbidden” was released just less than a month ago, yet it has provided comfort and changed the mindset of thousands of people already. What is so different about this visual album? Hall produces his hour and a half long film based on a “backwards” society including role reversals in both sexuality and race allowing comfort for those who relate and a new perspective for those who don’t.

“Interested in your father’s glorious family tree? You aren’t included, it only includes men’s names.” In the film ‘Wadjda’, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, a girl named Wadjda from the male-dominated culture of Saudi Arabia sees a green bike that she strives her hardest to own. Although could the bike be a metaphor for something deeper? Some may say the bike is nothing more than a plain old bike, but in this essay, I will discuss how and why the green bike symbolises more than a mere green bike. The focus will be on the significance of the bike, why it has been chosen to act as the metaphor, and how/why the director has chosen it to show that Wadjda is subversive.

About Elly, originally called Darbareye Elly is a winner of the Silver Bear at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, is a 2009 Iranian film by Asghar Farhadi, a globally, critically venerated Iranian film director and screenwriter. Just one year after its release About Elly was voted the 4th greatest Iranian movie of all time by the national society of Iranian critics. What makes this film distinct from many is that the viewer is exposed to the alluringly multifaceted societal subtleties of people during trauma and how situations are handled. To be precise, this film has things to propose about some of the gradations of Iranian culture under these traumatic circumstances.

The film is a sappy recounting of Marjane Satrapis's early childhood, adolescence and young adulthood living in and out of Tehran in the years following Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Iranian Revolution. Marjane

The film La Haine, directed by Mike blah, addresses the effects of social stratification on three young men as a result of the civil unrest existing within an impoverished town on the outskirts of Paris, France. The film also focuses on the tyrannical relationship between law enforcement and the underprivileged. However, by examining experiences of the main characters, it becomes apparent that the film is ultimately critiquing society’s tendency to categorize and exploit individuals based on their race and class.