Lois Weber Rough Draft “In moving pictures I have found my life's work. I find at once an outlet for my emotions and my ideals. I can preach to my heart's content, and with the opportunity to write the play, act the leading role, and direct the entire production, if my message fails to reach someone, I can blame only myself” (Weber). Lois Weber is famously known as the most successful female director of the 1910s. Her influence as a director was compared to D.W. Griffith’s, another very powerful director of that time. Lois Weber had two main devotions in life: her films and her moral ideals came through her commitment to her craft, using her films as tools, and brought her ahead of her time. Throughout her life she was credited with directing 135 films, writing 114, and acting in 100. She made her first film, A Heroine of '76, in 1911 at the age of 32. She continued to make films until 1934 with White Heat, 5 years before her death in 1939 at age 60. She didn’t pursue film until about 1908. Before then, Weber moved to New York as an actress after taking a suggestion to do so from her uncle in Chicago. She sought to use her influence as an actress to spread her altruistic ideals through the stage. Weber explains her motivation in …show more content…
It seems that Lois Weber knew this back in the 1910s as she constantly and effectively used her films as a tool to express her position on certain social issues of her time such as birth control, discrimination, and modern day hypocrites. One of her earliest examples was her film The Jew’s Christmas. This three-reel silent film dramatizes the conflict between traditional Jewish values and American values. The film sought to combat racial discrimination and anti-Semitism. It aims to show that love is more important than any religious
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
Irene Gut ended up working as a nurse in a Russian hospital and helped injured soldiers after she was forced to flee Poland from German attacks.
September 2015. The school year has commenced, new students have filled the hallways and the classes of Jules-Verne. This year we have welcomed a new comer, Genoise Etman from the CSF school in Kelowna, École de l’Anse-aux Sable. Genoise a grade 10 student, is full of inspiration, dedication and perseverance and is ready to begin her high school journey with full of enthusiasm and energy. Genoise has shown a great success in many areas, she has been a dancer since a very young age, she practiced ballet,tap.jazz and lyrical, although she loves to dance she has put her passion aside to concentrate on her education to be able to follow her dream to become a medical doctor in the future. Etman, has been determined to succeed in her best abilities
The Classical Hollywood style, according to David Bordwell remains “bound by rules that set stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern.” Every element of the film works in the service of the narrative, which should be ideally comprehensible and unambiguous to the audience. The typical Hollywood film revolves around a protagonist, whose struggle to achieve a specific goal or resolve a conflict becomes the foundation for the story. André Bazin, in his “On the politique des auteurs,” argues that this particular system of filmmaking, despite all its limitations and constrictions, represented a productive force creating commercial art. From the Hollywood film derived transnational and transcultural works of art that evoked spectatorial identification with its characters and emotional investment into its narrative. The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor in 1940, is one of the many works of mass-produced art evolving out of the studio system. The film revolves around Tracy Lord who, on the eve of her second wedding, must confront the return of her ex-husband, two newspaper reporters entering into her home, and her own hubris. The opening sequence of The Philadelphia Story represents a microcosm of the dynamic between the two protagonists Tracy Lord and C.K. Dexter Haven, played by Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Through the use of costume and music, the opening sequence operates as a means to aesthetically reveal narrative themes and character traits, while simultaneously setting up the disturbance that must be resolved.
John Ford was an American motion-picture director. Winner of four Academy Awards, and is known as one of America’s great film directors. He began his career in the film industry around 1913. According to Ellis, Ford’s style is evident in both the themes he is drawn toward and the visual treatment of those themes, in his direction of the camera and in what’s in front of it. Although he began his career in the silent film area and continued to work fruitfully for decades after the thirties, Ford reached creative maturity in the thirties. Ford, unlike other directors continued to do some of his finest work after the nineteen thirties. Nevertheless, he shaped his art into personal and full expression during those precedent-setting years. (Pg.200)
Harry Hopkins, a social worker, played a key role in focusing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attention on the poor. Hopkins administered the first federal relief programs in the United States. The programs intended to help support the people devastated by the effects of the Great Depression by providing government jobs, cash grants, food and clothing.
Introducing Andrea Lewis is not complete without introducing Madison Lewis. Madison is the first and only child of Andrea, and from what Madison have been told her whole life is that she is the spinning image of her mother Andrea. Gowning up in not a perfect childhood story Madison is someone special that once you have cross paths with her, you will never forget her again. As a five year old little girl, she is a show-stopper, genius in a kid body, and lovable to anyone who she meet. To Andrea she is the love of her mother’s life and without Madison in her mother’s life Andrea would not know where she would be.
Sir Alfred Hitchcock is recognised as one of the most pioneering and renowned directors in the history of cinema (Hockensmith A, 2012). His cinematic style that favours the use of suspense over surprise has become iconic and influential in modern film. Hitchcock’s early days as an assistant director at the UFA Babelsberg Studios in Berlin (German Expressionism, 2007), had a lasting impact on some of his later works produced in Hollywood. During Hitchcock’s time in Germany he became fascinated with German Expressionism. The film style, prevalent in the 1920s, arose from Germany’s post World War I experiences and largely reflects the dismal reality of life during the era and often invokes distorted and abstract images, as opposed to naturalism
Mary Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 22nd, 1844. She was one of seven siblings, two of which died during infancy. She was born into a wealthy family as her father, Robert, was a stock broker and land agent. Her mother, Katherine, also came from a wealthy banking family and was well educated. With this wealth, she grew up in a well educated environment. When Cassatt was around six years old, she moved eastward to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to Philadelphia area where she started schooling. Her family thought that traveling was important for their children’s education. Cassatt first moved to France then to Germany. The family had moved to Germany so that one son could
The use of auteur as a marketing strategy has also been a valuable strategy in both old and new Hollywood filmmaking; as much as genre and casting has an impact on the amount of interest advertising for a certain film generates, so does the news of the director and the subject matter being addressed either explicitly or through subtext. As mentioned in the textbook, Hitchcock is a very highly celebrated auteur, and it is very easy to label and distinguish his work from other directors as Hitchcock’s perfectionist style not only created amazing films, but also acted as his own personal signature on everything he did. It was almost guaranteed that every Hitchcock film would have a good number of viewers ready to go out of their way to see it simply because Hitchcock made it. Hitchcock’s specific viewpoint and deliberate acceleration of suspense in his directing is a perfect example of the camera-stylo previously mentioned by Astruc, as only Hitchcock was able to provide the audience with a feeling untouched by any other thriller or suspenseful
Directing Styles: A practical, theatrical approach comparison between Jerzy Grotowski and Anne Bogart, and how influential Jerzy Grotowski’s directing style was in Anne Bogart’s approach to theatre and poor theatre conventions.
Stanley, Robert H. The Movie Idiom: Film as a Popular Art Form. Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2011. Print
Women’s roles in movies have changed dramatically throughout the years. As a result of the changing societal norms, women have experienced more transition in their roles than any other class. During the period of classical Hollywood cinema, both society and the film industry preached that women should be dependent on men and remain in home in order to guarantee stability in the community and the family. Women did not have predominated roles in movies such as being the heroin. The 1940’s film Gilda wasn’t an exception. In Gilda, the female character mainly had two different stereotypes. The female character was first stereotyped as a sex object and the second stereotyped as a scorned woman who has to be punished.
The absolutely stunning film, Citizen Kane (1941), is one of the world’s most famous and highly renowned films. The film contains many remarkable scenes and cinematic techniques as well as innovations. Within this well-known film, Orson Welles (director) portrays many stylistic features and fundamentals of cinematography. The scene of Charles Foster Kane and his wife, Susan, at Xanadu shows the dominance that Kane bears over people in general as well as Susan specifically. Throughout the film, Orson Welles continues to convey the message of Susan’s inferiority to Mr. Kane. Also, Welles furthers the image of how demanding Kane is of Susan and many others. Mr. Welles conveys the message that Kane has suffered a hard life, and will continue to until death. Welles conveys many stylistic features as well as fundamentals of cinematography through use of light and darkness, staging and proxemics, personal theme development and materialism within the film, Citizen Kane.
“The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation,” says Stella Adler. Theater is unique and intriguing because it blends literary and visual arts to tell a story. Before Theater 10, I viewed theater on the surface level: cheesy plot lines with dramatic scenarios for entertainment purposes. Throughout the course, I have learned what it means to appreciate theater, such as understanding Brechtian and Chinese theatre; however, I believe understanding theater’s ability to convey crucial historical and social messages, such as in the production of RENT, is more relevant and important for theater appreciation.