Gender and Sexuality in The Piano
"THERE IS A SILENCE WHERE HATH BEEN NO SOUND THERE IS A SILENCE WHERE NO SOUND MAY BE IN THE COLD GRAVE, UNDER THE DEEP DEEP SEA." With these words, The Piano ends and leaves me in a state of confusion about what point the film was trying to express. The film by Jane Campion has been compared to the likes of Wuthering Heights and has been highly lauded for championing freedom of women’s sexuality and identity. Many critics, though, have debated on the final meanings of the film. This is possible because the film has such complicated characters, such as the main character Ada, who have intricate reasons for carrying out their actions. Campion created a film with a complex storyline that has no clear, easily extracted meaning. I believe that most critics have missed the film’s point when they try to argue what Ada’s expression of her gender and sexuality means. I would like to argue that while Ada does find a solution to the question of her identity and sexuality, this solution is not the feminist ideal of overcoming the status of Other and becoming a fully liberated woman that some reviewers claim it is. Nor is her solution an acceptance of the gender ideology prescribed by patriarchal society. Instead, Ada assumes a complex identity that falls somewhere in between these two extremes. The Piano demonstrates that although gender identity theories are complex themselves and help provide understanding, they fail to accurately and completely describe a particular person’s gender identity and sexuality because these can be combinations of many, perhaps even contradictory, factors. So, the movie’s representation of gender and sexuality is more Foucauldian, though some characters may still see thems...
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...Winter 1998): 227-244.
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Hardy, Ann. "The Last Patriarch." Jane Campion’s The Piano. Ed. Harriet Margolis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 59-85.
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Unacknowledged Sources." Literature Film Quarterly, 1998, Vol. 26 Issue 2, 109 116. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO Publishing. March 23, 2001 http://ehostvgw16.epnet.com
Margolis, Harriet, ed. Jane Campion’s The Piano. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Sawicki, Jana. "Feminism, Foucault, and ‘Subjects’ of Power and Freedom." Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. Ed. Susan J. Hekman. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996. 159-178.
Saving Private Ryan portrays the experiences of the mysterious captain John Miller and his army ranger Squad. The story accurately depicts what could have happened to a comparable unit mission shown had actually existed. No Saving Private Ryan character ever existed. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Saving Private Ryan’s mission ever would have been ordered. The mission shown is improbable because United States army sole survivor policy “is applicable only in peacetime.” (Sergeant Rod Powers, ret.). Regardless the movie shows the chaos that American soldiers may very well have encountered while marching through Normandy subsequent to D-day.
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
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A black widow's mouth opening is bellow its eyes. It does not have chewing mouth parts, and they eat only liquids. Various appendages around the mouth opening form a short "straw" through which the spider sucks the body fluid of its victim. The black widow can eat some of the solid tissue of its prey by predigesting it. To do this, the spider sprays digestive juices on the tissue. Chelicerae are a pair of appendages that the spider uses to seize and kill its prey. The chelicerae are above the mouth opening and just below the spider's eyes. Each chelicera ends in a hard, hollow, pointed claw, and these claws are the spider's fangs. An opening in the tip of the fang connects with the poison glands. When the black widow stabs an insect with its chelicerae, poison flows into the wound and paralyzes or kills the victim. The fangs of tarantulas point straight down from the head, and the poison glands are in the chelicerae. In the black widow, the fangs point crosswise, and the poison glands extend back into the cephalothorax. They also crush thier prey with their chelicerae.
BIBLIOGRAPHY An Introduction to Film Studies Jill Nelmes (ed.) Routledge 1996 Anatomy of Film Bernard H. Dick St. Martins Press 1998 Key Concepts in Cinema Studies Susan Hayward Routledge 1996 Teach Yourself Film Studies Warren Buckland Hodder & Stoughton 1998 Interpreting the Moving Image Noel Carroll Cambridge University Press 1998 The Cinema Book Pam Cook (ed.) BFI 1985 FILMOGRAPHY All That Heaven Allows Dir. Douglas Sirk Universal 1955 Being There Dir. Hal Ashby 1979
The book I read and am doing a presentation on is called Saving Private Ryan by Max Allen Collins. Saving Private Ryan is about the heroism of soldiers of soldiers and their duty during wartime, World War Two. This story is to remind you, the reader, that war is nothing but hell, orders on the front line can be brutal, and absurd. The story is set in Europe of 1944, as the Nazis are still advancing and taking over cities and countries. On June 6th, 1944, Captain Miller, and hundreds of other men leave Europe to accomplish one mission, Operation Overlord, also known as D-Day. When they get there, there will be a new task awaiting them.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
Radiation occurs when radioactive elements break apart. Radiation is very dangerous because it damages living things. There are three types of radiation, these are alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. They are the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha (a), beta (β), and gamma (ϒ). These particles and rays are produced by radioactive elements. Alpha particles are made of 2 protons and two neutrons that have separated from the nucleus, they are positively charged. Beta particles are usually made of one electron and a neutron, and have a negative charge. Gamma rays are a different sort of radiation. They are made of a stream of tiny particles called photons. Photons include the same particles that make up rays of light and are packets of energy. Gamma rays are very dangerous because they carry a lot more energy than the light people can see but are still invisible. Also released by radioactive elements are X-rays, they are similar to gamma rays but contain less energy.
Lacey, N. (2005). Film Language. Introduction to film (pp. 16-22). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barsam, R. M., Monahan, D., & Gocsik, K. M. (2012). Looking at movies: an introduction to film (4th ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co..
There is a moment in The Piano when the crazed husband takes an axe and chops off his wife's finger. We do not see the awful blow, but both times I watched the film the audience gasped and a few women hurried from the theater. It is a disturbing but crucial scene, the culmination of a sado-masochistic screenplay which has been condemned by some as harmful to women and welcomed by others as an important feminist work. Critics have been more nearly unanimous in their praise for The Piano, and for writer and director Jane Campion. A New Zealander, Campion made two previous low budget films with relatively unknown actors which attracted little notice and small audiences. But their quirky originality established her reputation among film cognoscenti. The Piano, by contrast, is both an astonishing artistic achievement and a major motion picture. Featuring Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel, it has made Campion an overnight celebrity. She is being hailed as a "natural" and "original" film maker, and no doubt she is.
Arachnida is a subphylum of Arthropoda, consisting of over 100 000 species, many of them being parasites which can carry disease. They are found in all environments, and mostly have eight legs, which is a feature, together with the fact that they do not have wings or antennae, often used to distinguish them from the other subphyla, though there are exceptions. They include spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites. Their bodies are divided up into three parts: the cephalothorax, the opisthosoma and the thorax, and use a type of lung for gas exchange. Most Arachnids are carnivorous, and eat pre-digested insects and other small animals. They reproduce using internal reproduction usually lay eggs, except for the scorpion which bears living young. The word ‘Arachnid’ comes from the Greek word ‘Arachne’ meaning ‘spider’.
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Barsam, Richard. Looking at Movies An Introduction to Film, Second Edition (Set with DVD). New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Print.