It is hard to speak of the history of Polish cinema without situating it in relation to World War II, especially when it is one of the very few channels that express Poland’s national conscience. Through Polish cinema, veteran directors like Andrzej Wajda have been able to convey messages of trauma, disillusionment and fatality. Wajda is arguably one of the most important filmmakers of Poland, who etched his country’s history on the silver screen. The emergence of a state owned film industry through communism was perhaps one of the most significant changes to Polish cinema. Despite the possibility of censorship stifling all kinds of creative expression, Wajda was able to produce groundbreaking films like Ashes and Diamonds (1958) that are rich …show more content…
The director’s message speaks of a possibility of finding purity and beauty like a diamond amidst the rubbish and ashes from a fire. This highly symbolic scene suggests that for Maciek, who represents Polish society from Wajda’s perspective, Krystyna is the diamond, the bearer of hope and stability for a man drenched in the ashes or the aftermath of war. Throughout the film she is represented as a symbolic diamond that emerges from the darkness as a source of light. When Maciek first sees her she shines brightly in a murky bar, and as their feelings develop Maciek is conflicted but in the end chooses to become a subordinate who carries out killing orders. Then Wajda makes it clear that Maciek’s decision to choose fate over independence resulted in a lost diamond. After Maciek’s absence, Krystyna opens a window and a ray of light engulfs her fair figure rendering her invisible. Thus, the role of Krystyna in Wajda’s film is to introduce a moral dilemma rather than play an active role making that decision. Nineteen years after Ashes and Diamonds premiered, Wajda returned with Man of Marble to the silver screen with another female protagonist. However, in this film the female protagonist Agnieszka is the one who is faced with making a decision rather than bringing the social and national concern to a male character. …show more content…
She works tirelessly to get information from those who were a part of the state’s brick laying campaign, and even finds the pursuit of truth of Birkut as her personal mission to find the history of her parents. Her dogged approach shows her immense strength of character and what is mostly striking is her ability to command attention and respect from her male peers. As a female director of an all male crew, Agnieszka is shown to challenge men with ease. For instance, in the film she constantly confronts her television producer for trying to veer her into doing something that would not land them in trouble with legal and censorship issues. Agnieszka’s response is outrage, and she makes her opinions clear that she finds him a coward and that she will oppose his efforts to silence her quest for the truth. In another instance, Agnieszka questions the moral character of the filmmaker who facilitated Birkut’s rise to the nation’s symbol. As a result of contributing to the government’s propaganda efforts, he rises to fame at the expense of others by shrouding and staging the truth in the
Film Noir, as Paul Schrader integrates in his essay ‘Notes on Film Noir,’ reflects a marked phase in the history of films denoting a peculiar style observed during that period. More specifically, Film Noir is defined by intricate qualities like tone and mood, rather than generic compositions, settings and presentation. Just as ‘genre’ categorizes films on the basis of common occurrences of iconographic elements in a certain way, ‘style’ acts as the paradox that exemplifies the generality and singularity at the same time, in Film Noir, through the notion of morality. In other words, Film Noir is a genre that exquisitely entwines theme and style, and henceforth sheds light on individual difference in perception of a common phenomenon. Pertaining
It is no secret that there is an obvious difference of how women are portrayed in the media versus men. This movie discussed female characters never having lead roles and stated that when they did it ended in the women depending on, loving, or having to have a man. One young high school girl said, “Women never play the protagonist. The girls are
What the reader understands of the infidelity of Milan Kundera’s characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a mere distraction from the real substance of the story and of the character’s real purpose. Kundera offers the reader a red herring and only through close examination can one dissect and abstract the true essence of each character’s thread that links them to one another in this story. For it is not clearly seen: in fact, it can not be seen at all. It is the fierce absence of the word commitment that is so blatantly seen in each individual, yet the word itself is buried so deeply inside of Tomas and Tereza that it takes an animal’s steadfast and unconditional love to make the meaning and understanding of commitment penetrate the surface.
Power, especially in the hands of females, can be a force for immense societal changes. Director Sciamma plays with the role of power in the lives of the four girls, predominantly in the character of Lady. Lady’s sense of control, stems from winning hand on hand fights, but the opinion of the men around her lays the foundation of this empowerment. The more fights Lady wins, the more the men appear to respect her, yet as feminist Simone de Beauvoir explains “[n]o matter how kindly, how equally men treated me when I tried to participate in politics, when it came right down to it, they had more rights, so they had more power than I did (Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex- ix),” the “power” Lady obtained was provisional. Lady’s power was directly tied to the opinion of the men around her, in this scene, a portion of the boys sits on stairs physically higher than Lady, invoking a sense of power hierarchy and control. The boys only valued Lady when she successfully participated in the their world of violence, but this participation came with boundaries as “[w]omen can never become fully socialized into patriarchy- which in turn causes man to fear women and leads then, on the one hand, to establish very strict boundaries between their own sex and the female sex (Feminist theory 142).” The men had never truly incorporated Lady into their group, she had just
One of the issues that was raised is the idea of the relationship between femininty, technology and sexuality. The relationship between all of these qualities converse in one character, Maria. The real Maria has many roles thoughout the movie, including one who cares for the workers children, a preacher of peace for the workers, and one who loves Freder. The machi...
Classic film noir originated after World War II. This is the time where post World War II pessimism, anxiety, and suspicion was taking the world by storm. Many films that were released in the U.S. Between 1939s and 1940s were considered propaganda films that were designed for entertainment during the Depression and World War II. During the 1930s many German and Europeans immigrated to the U.S. and helped the American film industry with powerf...
"Whilst some feminists have argued to be included in 'male stream' ideologies, many have also long argued that women are in important respects both different from and superior to men, and that the problem they face is not discrimination or capitalism but male power." (Bryson, 2003, p. 3). The feminist art movement is unclear in its description because some describe this movement as art that was simply created by women and others describe it as art with anti-male statements in mind. For the focal point of this paper, the goal will be to analyze several female artists and their works of art who influenced, and who are said to have made powerful influence both in the feminist art movement from a political and societal perspective, then and today. With that being said, we will start with the female artist Judy Chicago and a quote from her that calcifies her position as an artist. "I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized
When Howard asserts that “it is the woman who demands her own direction and chooses her own freedom that interests Chopin most” (1) she is right on target. Howard only fails when she chooses not to expand that vision to include the truly feminist perspectives that differentiate Chopin as a woman far ahead of her time.
In the presented essay I will compare the style of work of selected artists in the montage of the film. I will try to point out some general regularities and features of Soviet cinema. At the same time I will try to capture especially what is common in their systems and similar or conversely what differ. For my analysis, I will draw on the feature films of the Soviet avantgarde, namely these are the movies - The Battleship Potemkin (S. Eisenstein, 1925), Mother (V. Pudovkin, 1926) and The Man with a movie camera (D. Vertov, 1929).
Ego is the fall of many. In critical analysis, “Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s ‘Story of an Hour’”, Lawrence L. Berkove displays his view of Louise. It is evident in his article that he pays close attention to Chopin’s details of emotion. The article describes how the story forecasts the fatal ending with suspension and clues. He believes that the key to the story is “recognizing this deeper ironic level” (Berkove). Kate Chopin leaves the story up for interpretation concerning theme and the true reason for her death. Berkove, in his article, states that the theme of the story is extreme self-assertion and that feminism shines through the story.
In the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the relationships amongst psychoanalysis (primarily Freudian theory), cinema (as she observed it in the mid 1970s), and the symbolism of the female body. Taking some of her statements and ideas slightly out of their context, it is interesting to compare her thoughts to the continuum of oral-print-image cultures.
The document, an excerpt and translation of Elizaveta Kovalskaia’s memoir, gives a firsthand account of the events in which women partook and the way they were treated in consequence. Written in 1926, Kovalskaia had the opportunity to write on the issues and progress of the radical women’s movements. Among the issues are the restrictions set on women in regards to their learning and freedom of speech, as well as the authority’s maltreatment of the women and the lengths they went to to continue their journey to change. El...
The aim of this essay is analyse women´s images in The Yellow Wallpaper and in The Awakening, since the two readings have become the focus of feminist controversy.
Also, the film revealed women empowerment and how superior they can be compared to men. While demonstrating sexual objectification, empowerment, there was also sexual exploitation of the women, shown through the film. Throughout this essay, gender based issues that were associated with the film character will be demonstrated while connecting to the real world and popular culture.
Since the creation of films, their main goal was to appeal to mass audiences. However, once, the viewer looks past the appearance of films, the viewer realizes that the all-important purpose of films is to serve as a bridge connecting countries, cultures, and languages. This is because if you compare any two films that are from a foreign country or spoken in another language, there is the possibility of a connection between the two because of the fact that they have a universally understanding or interpretation. This is true for the French New Wave films; Contempt and Breathless directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and contemporary Indian films; Earth and Water directed by Deepa Mehta. All four films portray an individual’s role in society using sound and editing.