1966 was a turning point in American history. It was the height of the Space Race as well as the Vietnam War. In the entertainment industry, The Beatles had released the album Revolver, the show Star Trek premiered on television, and the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? was adapted to film. This film was controversial for several reasons, including its depiction of violence and drinking, as well as its theme of sexuality. For a movie to take on such bold scenes and topics requires other bold cinematic choices as well. These choices included casting glamorous actors and actresses in not so glamorous roles, filming in black and white as opposed to color, and using unique cinematic film shots in various scenes. The choices that the filmmakers …show more content…
is a tale about an unsavory couple inviting another younger couple over for some “fun and games.” The unsavory couple, George and Martha, were played by two of Hollywood’s most famous actors at the time, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In real life, they were married, and before this film they had done several other pictures together. One of those films was the glamorous Cleopatra. Because of this, the feeling that they were truly married and familiar with one another was present in the film. This casting was a smart choice since they were both experienced, talented, film stars. Their roles in this film were a stark contrast to their roles in previous films, where they played handsome people deeply in love with one another. This contrast helped add to the shock of the overall …show more content…
was way ahead of its time. The shots chosen by the filmmakers helped greatly to enhance the story. One scene that stands out is when George goes to the closet to get the gun. When he enters, we see a particularly dark moment as George stands in the closet. The single light bulb is swaying side to side, as George grabs the gun in a menacing manner. The reveal of the true nature of the gun is a particularly intense scene since the viewer is lead to believe that George really intends to murder Martha. Many close up shots are used in the film during key moments. There is a close up on Martha, as she paces across the living room floor explaining George’s failures to Nick and Honey. The close up allows viewers to see how angry and bitter she is. We see many close ups of George, including the scene where he is talking to Nick on the lawn about the boy who killed his parents. In this shot, we can see the effects that the evening and the alcohol have taken on George, who looks very exhausted. Mixed in are various shots of the alcohol, reminding the viewers that the characters are continuously drinking, possibly to forget their pain, or to cheer them up, but the alcohol is only making things
Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain, begins in pre-Depression California, and ends during World War II times, also in California. The main character, Mildred Pierce, is a very attractive housewife of 29, raising two daughters, Ray and Veda. Although Mildred loves both her daughters, Veda is a particular obsession with Mildred. She constantly slaves away throughout the novel to do whatever she can to make Veda happy, despite the constant abuse and deception Veda inflicts upon Mildred. After a divorce from her first husband, Bert, in the opening pages of the novel, Mildred is forced to sacrifice her pride and become a waitress in order to support her family. If Veda were ever to find out, she would be appalled; a constantly recurring theme throughout this story is Veda’s pride and arrogance, and her condemnation of jobs she deems to be menial. Mildred’s main goal is to nurture Veda’s musical talents, and manages to pay for expensive music lessons from her meager salaries as a waitress and pie baker. However, Mildred’s luck is soon to change, as she takes up with an attorney and former partner of Bert, Wally. Mildred is able to use Wally’s business and real estate savvy to build a restaurant out of a deserted model home, and from there create a thriving chain of three food businesses. After becoming bored with Wally, however, Mildred craves a relationship with another man, a prestigious local man named Monty. Veda highly approves of her mother’s choice, as this makes her feel as if she too were more prestigious and affluent, despite having misgivings about her mother still being so low as to have an average, pedestrian job. All seems to be going well; even through Veda’s constant demands and tantrums, she still gets everything she wants, and Mildred and Monty are happy. Monty, however, falls on hard times with the coming of the Great Depression, and he constantly mooches off of Mildred’s affluence, making it a struggle for Mildred to cater to Veda’s every whim. Mildred soon dumps Monty to focus on making Veda a musical prodigy; this fails, however, when Veda is told that her piano is not up to par from a local famous music teacher. After Veda recovers from this shock, she explores the opportunities offered by an acting career, and begins to spin more webs of deception and selfishness. After Veda forces money out of a local rich family, lying and claiming their son got her pregnant, Mildred and Veda have a major argument, and Veda disowns her mother.
Artists of all mediums offer the public different perspectives of reality and within the multitudinous amount of works, a truth is brought to the attention of the viewer. The truth brings awareness to the masses and changes the means of thinking of the public. Virginia Woolf’s novel, To The Lighthouse, represents a cultural shift in thought from the 19th to the 20th century state of mind by being inspired by the situation of the world at the time and the changes turn of the century brought to humanity by creating a novel that alludes to major revolutions of the time, such as the social, physiological and philosophical, and social revolutions. Woolf does this by creating a new way of expressing thought in writing, and creating characters with
George states, “Viscious children with their sad gams hopcotching their way through life” (Act ). In this quote he is trying to explain that children play silly games in order to avoid reality and forget about everything. Since he states that kids avoid life by playing games through it and throughout the play the characters are refer to as kids, thus, they are the kids playing sad games avoiding life. Furthermore, throughout the play the Martha and George refers their bashing on each other as games, which is a tool they use to decive one another in a power struggle between them. During this power struggle to see who destroys each other first, the audience members feel the high emotional tension cause by Martha and George bashing on each other. Especially when reality slips through the cracks, the characters get angrier causing the emotion to exponentially grow. The game bringing up the baby serves as the lie that help Martha and George believe that they had a loving child that made their marriage worth it. But George uses this game to kill of their fake child, thus, shattering the illusion and showing that they have horrible marriage. George also plays get the gueest, where he uses a story to exploit the marriage of Honey and Nick revealing the true intentions behind their marriage, which causes another spike in dramatic tension. Nonetheless, revealing that the
In Edward Albee’s tragic play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, each of his characters show different struggles between each other and the basic rules of society as a whole. George, Martha, Nick, and Honey, the four main characters of the play, all have backgrounds that contradict with each other in more ways than one. Each of them violate the laws of society, yet two of these characters make you feel sympathy for them. George and Martha, the elder of the two couples, go through a deeper struggle than Nick and Honey are able to comprehend. Throughout the story, the struggle is mostly anonymous to the reader as well as Nick and Honey, and is not revealed until the end of the play. This hidden secret turns out to be the largest violence of George
Until To The Lighthouse, I had never read anything that so perfectly described women: wives, mothers, daughters and artists. I felt like shouting "Eureka!" on every page. These were my thoughts, beautifully written.
Virginia Woolf was refereed to treatment due to her presumed bipolar disorder with increasing psychotic, manic behaviors. Virginia continues to go into bipolar, depressive states and has suicidal thoughts at a result. Meyer & Weaver, (2013). Virginia’s behaviors include lacking the ability to communicate her problems effectively with anyone in her immediate surroundings, with the function of the behavior being escape or avoidance from expressing needs and concerns with any immediate family members. The goal of treatment was to determine a functionally equivalent replacement behavior which included Virginia engaging in conversation with her therapist to help improve her communication
The physical and social setting in "Mrs. Dalloway" sets the mood for the novel's principal theme: the theme of social oppression. Social oppression was shown in two ways: the oppression of women as English society returned to its traditional norms and customs after the war, and the oppression of the hard realities of life, "concealing" these realities with the elegance of English society. This paper discusses the purpose of the city in mirroring the theme of social oppression, focusing on issues of gender oppression, particularly against women, and the oppression of poverty and class discrimination between London's peasants and the elite class.
The ‘New Hollywood Cinema’ era came about from around the 1960’s when cinema and film making began to change. Big film studios were going out of their comfort zone to produce different, creative and artistic movies. At the time, it was all the public wanted to see. People were astonished at the way these films were put together, the narration, the editing, the shots, and everything in between. No more were the films in similar arrangement and structure. The ‘New Hollywood era’ took the classic Hollywood period and turned it around so that rules were broken and people left stunned.
Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was a very important and historical author who had a great impact on the world of writing. Even now, 75 years after her death, she is still making an impact on society and writers of today. Virginia Woolf also had a big impact on the feminist part of society. People referred to Virginia as a “women’s writer”, but she was much more than just that. Virginia Woolf has inspired many people, men and women, who have read her books to become writers themselves.
Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' is a fine example of modernist literature, like her fellow modernist writers James Joyce and D.H Lawrence. This novel in particular is of the most autobiographical. The similarities between the story and Woolf's own life are not accidental. The lighthouse, situations and deaths within the novel are all parallel to Woolf's childhood, she wrote in her diary 'I used to think of [father] & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind ….(I believe this to be true – that I was obsessed by them both, unheathily; & writing of them was a necessary act). Woolf, Diary, 28 November 1928) Woolf like many other modernist writers uses stream of consciousness, this novel in particular features very little dialogue, preferring one thought, memory or idea to trigger another, providing an honest if not reliable account of the characters lives. There novels motifs are paired with many of the novels images. The novel features two main motifs that Woolf appears to be interested in examining, firstly we notice the relationships' between men and women and the other appears to be Woolf's use of parenthesis. The novels images only become apparent once these motifs have been explored, allowing the reader to examine the relationships between the different characters.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Fun and Games – What are the games, and how much fun do people have? The play begins with George and Martha, who have just returned from a welcoming-party at the college. From the first moments of the play, the audience are made aware of the great differences between these two characters. Martha is said to be a “large, boisterous” woman, whereas George is referred to as a “thin” man, with hair that is going grey.
The narrative of Mrs. Dalloway may be viewed by some as random congealing of various character experience. Although it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thought, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this coherence can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone which is tragic in nature. In her forward to Mrs. Dalloway, Maureen Howard informs us that Woolf was reading both Sophocles and Euripides for her essays in The Common Reader while writing Mrs. Dalloway (viii). According to Pamela Transue, "Woolf appears to have envisioned Mrs. Dalloway as a kind of modern tragedy based on the classic Greek model" (92). Mrs. Dalloway can be conceived of as a modern transformation of Aristotelian tragedy when one examines the following: 1) structural unity; 2) catharsis; 3) recognition, reversal, and catastrophe; 4) handling of time and overall sense of desperation.
According to Viktors Ivbulis (1995: 23 - 29) in Modernist fiction a special attention is paid to an individual who degrades because of the pressure from the society and is therefore shown as a small part of the society being unable to do miracles. Moreover, the 20th century's fight for the power makes the rights of an individual be dependent on the rights of the society. This individual is not a personality anymore that was established in the 19th century literature. It is a simple person, who is depressed by the highly technological world and the demands of the society and is therefore lonesome and isolated. An individual cannot compete successfully for his place in the society, as he does not even know his enemy. Therefore, he has to die at the end of the novel either physically or morally. One of the famous novels of the Modernist period in literature is "Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf, written in 1924. In the centre of it is a rich woman Clarissa Dalloway who holds high position in the society. In her life she does not lack anything from the material values, except that she starves for love and support.
Virginia Woolf offers interesting analysis of social pressure and social class in Mrs. Dalloway and The Years. Understanding Woolf’s message about society demands a certain amount of sensitivity and decoding on behalf of her reader. Her social criticism in both texts can be easily overlooked because she keeps it subtle and implicit, hidden in the patterns and courses of her characters’ trains of thoughts. Yet upon such close reading, the essential importance of conflict between the individual and society in Woolf’s work becomes clear. While Mrs. Dalloway critiques the mental consequences of socialization, self-restraint, and the subsequent regret, The Years examines the relationship between the upper classes and the lower classes and the physical consequences of their respective places in society.
“The New Dress” is a 1994 short story by Virginia Woolf. The story features Mabel Waring, who goes to a party wearing a yellow colored dress. The dress is newly made purposely for this occasion. The story is about the dress that Mrs. Warning wore and felt that it is not good. My first reaction to the story is that the story is about the dress, and it caused large discomfort to Mabel Waring. The discomfort of Mrs. Waring was not mainly caused by the dress, but the writer used the dress to symbolize the social displacement Mrs. Waring was, that she felt that she was out of place due to her social class. The writer uses some stylistic devices to bring out the message of the story and to make it appealing to the reader. "The New Dress" was the