In my analysis of Darren Aronofsky’s second feature film, Requiem for a Dream, I will draw attention to his wonderfully balanced use of camera shots accompanied with a powerful and captivating score. By focusing on these points I will delve further into the theme and development of the main characters with a particular emphasis to the final thirty minutes.
The concluding half an hour of Requiem for a Dream are some of the most stomach twisting moments ever put to film. Inter-cutting each of the four characters individual downfalls in spectacular fashion, Aronofsky shifts back and forth from one grim scene to the next, each character’s life spiralling out of control as the montage progresses. Supplying the connective strand is Clint Mansell’s splendidly unnerving score, which unites their anguish into a melancholic symphony. The infamous orgy scene is shown in tandem with Burstyn’s electroshock therapy, Wayans is subjected to prison labour as the infection in Leto’s arm spreads. Each part is timed perfectly to deliver a lasting and harrowing moment for maximum effect, with each developing their own movement of Mansell’s score. As the pace of the cutting hastens, the score’s movements mesh together until, finally, all their woes have become the one. They all find themselves bound by some form of prison.
Similar in theme to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream addresses a different perception of drug addiction, the effect of addiction in its various forms and what it can drive a person to do. Trainspotting also has a style of its own in depicting the lives of addicts, however I found Requiem beautifully illustrated the emptiness of life and the costs of failure to satisfy one’s aspirations. The editing and camer...
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...d he has a bright future ahead of him and is comforted by this self-simulated situation. They hug as their demise is cheered by a large, live audience. A picture that represents the escalating melodrama of the film. For that instant, the dream has finally been reached and just like the euphoria experienced from the cocaine, heroin and the pills, it is gone in a moment.
In my opinion, this is Aronofsky’s best film to date. He manages to encapsulate a human element of addiction that ever viewer can relate to or, at the very least, empathise with. With his strong mix of melody and evocative imagery, deftly exemplified in the finale, he accomplishes in unsettling a range of emotions within us that are not likely to leave unnoticed. Although not a commonly used phrase the imagery attached to the words, ‘Ass to ass!’ will remain scorched in my memory forever.
... artistic vision and the disorganization relating to the Hollywood mob. Ultimately, Tod can no longer recuperate from the brutal crowd and the cacophonous sound of the siren. Instead, he loses his artist status by conforming to the status quo, more specifically, becoming like all the people he wants to paint.
Breton also mentioned in the manifesto that the combination of reality and dream could lead to “surreality”. 1 Un Chien Andalou possesses this combination in the way the camera captures the image, and partnering between the objects that we know in our own lives, that are real, with the loss of logic in the actions of the film, which corresponds with dream states.
Even more difficult than defining art is coming to an agreement of what constitutes art. Along this extensive history of debate came the consideration of whether film is art. Films were not considered an art form and had not been seriously debated until film theorist Rudolf Arnheim challenged what art could be with his theory. Arnheim, who claims that the more a film differs from reality the more it should be considered art, would certainly argue that a film like Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) is art in that it significantly displaces the viewer from their lived reality. He rejects the “assertion that film is nothing but the feeble mechanical reproduction of real life” (“Film Theory and Criticism” 228), instead postulating that human perspective and choices should be involved in the process of making a film to meaningfully shape elements of our lived experience. In Black Swan, director Darren Aronofsky uses multiple tools and aspects of the medium of film to create a surreal narrative. The film Black Swan qualifies as art by Rudolf Arnheim’s standards because of the ways that the viewers’ experience of the film differs from our experience of reality.
Just about everyone can voice their opinions on a film that viewed as we all do after leaving the theatre. It may be found to be useful when a friend or individual is interested in seeing the film themselves. However, I believe the only way that you could understand a film is by analyzing the film beyond the average person. When one begins to analyze they begin to develop an understanding of the film and may grow to love the film. The director Hitchcock is a fairly well known director. He has directed many different films from Vertigo to Psycho that are found to be popular with the viewers. In this paper I am going to analyze certain elements that spoke out to me during the film. Those elements that spoke to me the most during the film was the lighting techniques, camera movement, and symbols.
In Selby's 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream each character succumbs to self-gratification, which eventually and inevitably leads to self-destruction. The four main characters, Harry Goldfarb, Sara Goldfarb, Marion, and Tyrone C. Love each suffer from individual addictions, be it their dreams, illegal/legal narcotics, or even television. "Ultimately not only their bodies and minds, but their very souls are destroyed by their addictions" (Giles 104).
I would also like to address the levels of appeal that Moyer points out in the film. Within each kind of scene, violent acts are often accompanied by sex or humor. Not only can this be used to bring a higher level of acceptance to the viewer, but it also brings a level of gratification or appeal to the scene.
Eisenstein was radically more experimental than his contemporaries because in order to practice “intellectual montage”, one must be a practitioner of the avant-garde. Eisenstein’s theory of “collision montage” is that cinema never speaks through a single image, and the juxtaposition of several images act like words in a sentence, or parts of a character in Chinese or Japanese Calligraphy (Pg. 17, Eisenstein). Shots of foreign objects, or inserts, are not meant to contribute to a narrative but to deliver an idea intended by Eisenstein in the sequence. He also claims that montage films are faced “with the task of presenting not only a narrative that is logically connected but one that contains a maximum of emotion and stimulating power.” (Pg. 4, Eisenstein). A scene to illustrate this from Strike would be at the ending of the film where the putting down of the strike by the army is intercut with the footage of a cattle being slaughtered.
Since the late 1890’s films have been constantly changing the history of pop culture and the way people view war, politics, and the world as a whole. As the timeline of the history of film progressed, there were many different phases: gothic noir, slapstick comedy, tragedy vs. love, romance, and many more. Towards the more recent times, the central ideas of films started drifting to the greatness of the directors. Directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and many more were noted as outstanding directors of action and cinematography. In this paper I will speak about Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and the ever so infamous Baz Luhrmann. These directors have changed the way filmmaking has been and will be looked at from this point on.
The film, Of Two Minds, is based on real life accounts of individuals living with bipolar disorder. Before watching this film, I had an idea of what bipolar disorder is , but after viewing this film I was completely mistaken. Previously, I thought being bipolar was going from a “normal” mood to an angry or sad mood in a matter of seconds and could be simply fixed by taking medicine. But my previous thoughts were completely wrong and bipolar disorder is very serious and complicated. I didn’t know the severity of this disease and I think a lot of the general public is uneducated about bipolar disorder as well as mental illness. Terri Cheney describes having bipolar disorder as, “Take the best day you ever had and multiply it by a million, it 's like a flu but one hundred times worse. It 's having flu in your mind."
David Sheff’s memoir, Beautiful Boy, revolves around addiction, the people affected by addiction, and the results of addiction. When we think of the word addiction, we usually associate it with drugs or alcohol. By definition, addiction is an unusually great interest in something or a need to do or have something (“Addiction”). All throughout the memoir, we are forced to decide if David Sheff is a worried father who is fearful that his son, Nic Sheff’s, addiction will kill him or if he is addicted to his son’s addiction. Although many parents would be worried that their son is an addict, David Sheff goes above and beyond to become involved in his son’s life and relationship with methamphetamine, making him an addict to his son’s addiction.
Tragedy is an ever present part of life, whether it be illness, inability, death or anything else, it takes its toll on everyone. A very common tragedy found in literature and daily life is the loss of dreams, in Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Deferred” Hughes poses the question of what truly happens to a deferred dream: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up… Or fester like a sore… Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over...Or does it explode?” The outcome of lost dreams differs for each individual and their attitude. This is seen throughout America and also in The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner and The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
As an audience we are manipulated from the moment a film begins. In this essay I wish to explore how The Conversation’s use of sound design has directly controlled our perceptions and emotional responses as well as how it can change the meaning of the image. I would also like to discover how the soundtrack guides the audience’s attention with the use of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds.
...end of the movie the fall in love. This movie portrays a woman having a horrible life until a man comes along and gives it meaning.
Unlike any other movie, Gasper Noe’s Irreversible (2002), with his own unusual but unique way of telling a story, shows how violence roots from love, how pain roots from pleasure, how imagination roots from reality and how death roots from life. This movie focuses Marcus and Pierre’s battle with the illusion of justice to avenge Marcus’ girlfriend, Alex, from her atrocious fate. And beginning this with the ending, Gasper Noe has created not just a realistic and powerful movie but has explained, as well, what it means
There is an intellectual discussion over the accuracy of war films and whether or not these should focus more on telling the truth or decorating it a little. Indeed, the narrative of war films has change throughout the years because the purpose of such films has evolved, especially those representing the World War II years and the aftermath. At the time of war, films were employed with diverse objectives for example to urge the public to support the war, to narrate the latest events, or to rebuild the image of the heroes. Most of the times the perspectives of films could vary depending on the country the film was produced in or which side of the story was being narrated. The plot of most war films might not be real, but they were necessary