The evolution of black films (movies)
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Stereotypical and demeaning roles were originally created for Blacks in film, since the emergence of the first full length feature film, Birth of a Nation (1913). Blacks did not have power in the motion picture industry when it was originally formed. Films by Black writers, producers, and...
Conflicts abound in Slumdog Millionaire: A film analysis
Thesis - 2 pages - Film studies
The text, Intercultural Communication in Contexts by Judith M. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama defines culture as “learned patterns of behavior and attitudes shaped by a group of people” (Martin, Nakayama 81).They also stress that culture has held many acceptable definitions due to its...
The famous Steven Spielberg
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Steven Spielberg, one of the most influential film personalities of all time and the highest paid director in modern Hollywood, produced and directed many films about the Holocaust and World War Two. Even though Spielberg was born a few years after World War Two ended, having a strong Jewish...
J'ai l'impression d'avoir le coeur sec: the emotive value of breaks, shifts and ellipses in the films of Maurice Pialat
Case study - 16 pages - Film studies
This dissertation sets out to analyze the function of breaks, shifts and ellipses in the films of Maurice Pialat (1925-2003). These shifts and contrasts, which can often be sudden or violent, create problems in relation to the narrative, as they are present between and within the sequences...
'I reinvented the past in the pursuit of a haunting and timeless truth': Do Louis Malle's war films correspond to the notion of the postmodern historical drama?
Case study - 11 pages - Film studies
In a review published by the French periodical Le Nouvel Observateur, critic Jean-Louis Bory (1974: 56-57) described Lacombe, Lucien (1974) as ‘the first real film-and the first true film-about the Occupation...' He added, ‘I know. I was there'. The problematic nature of this statement...
Oppressive impressions: István Szabó's Sunshine (1999), Jewish assimilation, the Shoah, and historical transition in twentieth-century Hungary
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
István Szabó's 1999 film Sunshine depicts three generations of a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century through the period after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Originally named “Sonnenschein,” the aging patriarch Ignatz becomes a prominent...
The tensions between Claude Chabrol's use of realism and his stylized artificial mise-en-scene
Thesis - 11 pages - Film studies
Jacques Rivette defined mise-en-scene as 'a precise complex of people and decors, a network of relations, a moving architecture of relationships somehow suspended in space' (1954: 44). In the films of Claude Chabrol, the mise-en-scene seems to embrace this definition. On the one hand his...
Science and religion in The Prestige
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Christopher Nolan's The Prestige is a complex film dealing with issues other than magic. The movie touches on life themes such as family, love, and relationships, but it also talks about religious themes such as truth and sacrifice. The movie starts off with the narrator, Cutter, giving an...
Sociological concepts in Forrest Gump
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
The movie Forrest Gump tells the story of a man's life, from his childhood days in Alabama to his later years aboard a shrimp boat. This movie has many sociological ties and presents a limited picture of the culture and society from the 1960's up to the present-day. The movie follows Forrest...
Finding truth in the documentary - an analysis of the form and ethics of born into brothels
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Born into Brothels explores the lives of several children raised in India's notorious red-light district. Directed by photojournalist Zana Briski, the film chronicles the filmmaker's attempts to enroll the children into various boarding schools, all the while depicting their efforts at...
Frankenstein and the problem of visual representation in film
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly is a classic novel that was written nearly two centuries ago. The title of the book is a reference to the scientist in the novel, Victor Frankenstein, who creates this creature that has the likeness of a human, but is larger and stronger, somewhat like a...
Comparison of Pride and Prejudice: The novel and the Bollywood adaptation
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”(Austen 2001: 3). This is the well-known first line of Pride and Prejudice, the acclaimed novel by Jane Austen published in 1813. This line establishes the framework...
Masculinity and clerks
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
In Clerks 2, Director Kevin Smith resumed the lives of two convenience store workers from his 1994 film Clerks. Smith's movies traditionally appear vulgar and devoid of cinematic integrity upon first glimpse. On closer inspection the viewer can derive complex character development and thematic...
The Hours: A cinematic analysis
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
The Hours is the title of a film that was released in 2002. It is also the name of a book by Michael Cunningham released in 1998, on which the film is based, which itself is based on the classic novel once under a working title of the same name, later to become known as “Mrs. Dalloway”...
Be a thinker, not a stinker: How Sylvester Stallone flouted his own dialogue
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
Rocky (1976), written by and starring Sylvester Stallone and directed by John G. Avildsen, grossed $225 million worldwide after being shot on a paltry $1.1 million budget. Although film critics and historians, like Peter Biskind, often seem to classify Rocky as a ?post-New Hollywood feel-good...
Juno: What's good for you?
Thesis - 7 pages - Film studies
Sex, sex, sex, and more sex. We're so egotistic in this country. I remember my adolescent issues teacher in high school raising a question to the class that still resonates with me: “Does the media dictate the people in society, or do people in society dictate the media?” Sitting in her...
Edward Cullen and his To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the cinematic gaze in Twilight
Thesis - 6 pages - Film studies
Twilight is the unabashedly melodramatic, vampire-meets-girl love story of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, and despite its clear success it still seems to be strange material for the first huge literary phenomenon of the twenty-first century. The author Stephenie Meyer has a tendency towards the...
Essay about sin city (Franck Miller & Robert Rodriguez)
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
I am going to talk about Sin city, an action, detective and all in all fantastic film released in 2005, directed by Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino (but only for the sequence in Dwight's car, in which he talks with the policeman Jackie, while he (Jackie) is dead). Sin city...
The American TV series as an entertainment product (2007)
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
In September 2006, the traditional film du dimanche soir was deposed on the first two hertziennes French channels by three TV series. These three TV series are American ones: CSI (Les Experts), Without a Trace (FBI, portés disparus) and ER (Emergency Room, Urgences). After having being seen as a...
The US cinema industry (2005)
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
When I try to imagine a typical American family, the first image which comes to mind is that of a perfect family with beautiful (their teeth have to shine) and rich parents and beautiful and healthy children, who live happily in a small house somewhere in the countryside in a small village. A...
Ambivalent London: "Match Point", Woody Allen
Thesis - 8 pages - Film studies
Match Point is a movie which was directed by Woody Allen in 2004. It was shot in London. This movie tells the story of Chris, a man looking for a new life. Throughout the movie he seems to find it. As a coach in a private tennis club, he becomes friend with Tom Hewett before going out with his...
Modern Times (1936), directed by Charlie Chaplin
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
First, I will talk about the historical context of the film. Chaplin goes around the world during sixteen months. When he comes back to Hollywood, in 1932, he observes the economic and social results of the Great Depression, which made, in two years, seven million unemployed in the US. Indeed,...
Movie review: Trainspotting
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Many films deal with drugs. Among those, there are - Scarface, The Godfather, Revolver and so on. This theme is popular in Anglo-Saxon cinema. Trainspotting directed by Danny Boyle is a film which deals with drugs in a blunt way. A group of friends, in the nineties, in Edinburgh, are only...
Hollywood film genres: Melodrama
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
“Something else besides a mother” this was Stella Dallas' excuse to her daughter in order to alienate her bond with her daughter and secure the latter's marriage into the upper class society. Discussing the key-scenes of the film that reveal the two contradictory roles Stella...
National cinema and tropes of horror: Guillermo del Toro's "The Devil's Backbone" - Representing fascism through hauntology
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
Horror films, rich in texture, are capable of interpretatively referencing specific national contexts. Using the supernatural, these stories can aid in understanding national themes by correlating particular social ills or historical periods with the uncanny: the film's meaning-making, acting...
The murderers among us: Post-War German rubble films. The complexities of thematic and visual meaning
Thesis - 9 pages - Film studies
This paper will discuss the first post-world war II film to be made in Germany. The film, entitled The Murderers Among Us (Die Morder sind unter uns, 1946) was directed by Wolfgang Staudte. It is the first in a series of films, which are collectively entitled (Trummerfilme) which means postwar...
From Cagney and Lacey to Law and order: Women in the workplace as seen on TV
Thesis - 8 pages - Film studies
“Do you have kids, Detective Benson?” asks the pleading face of a father, guilty of murdering his son's rapist. Detective Olivia Benson's eyes glaze over with a familiar look of longing, and the audience sees her softening to the man, letting out a breath while muttering “No.”...
I'm at the 'Window':A look at voyeurism in the cinema and society
Thesis - 5 pages - Film studies
We all carry certain expectations with us when we go see a film at the theater. We expect the room to be dark, though we make exceptions for the beam from the projector behind us, the track lights showing us to our seats. We expect quiet, hence the ads preceding the feature presentation that...
The social commentary of anarchy and romance
Thesis - 4 pages - Film studies
The “modern” comedy can trace is roots back through a number of places. From as far back as Ancient Greece comedy has been one of the most pleasurable forms of entertainment. From the plays of Shakespeare, to the vaudeville era, and all the way into Hollywood's silent era, comedy...
Rocking the boat: How NBC's 30 Rock is subtly stirring things up
Thesis - 15 pages - Film studies
In the summer of 2006, Tina Fey announced her departure from Saturday Night Live after six seasons as the head-writer of the legendary late night sketch show. She had decided to pursue a new ambition, a primetime sitcom based in part on her experiences working at SNL. That show would become 30...
