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Depiction of women in movies
Women portrayal in popular culture
Classical hollywood cinemarepresentation of women
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Sunset Boulevard (Wilder 1950) explores the intermingling of public and private realms, puncturing the illusion of the former and unveiling the grim and often disturbing reality of the latter. By delving into the personal delusions of its characters and showing the devastation caused by disrupting those fantasies, the film provides not only a commentary on the industry of which it is a product but also a shared anxiety about the corrupting influence of external perception. Narrated by a dead man, centering on a recluse tortured by her own former stardom, and concerning a once-promising director who refuses to believe his greatest star could ever be forgotten, the work dissects a multitude of illusory folds to reveal an ultimately undesirable truth. Its fundamental conflict lies in the compartmentalization that allows the downtrodden to hope and carry on. Sunset Boulevard carefully considers the intricate honeycombs of dishonesty and deception that constitute a human life, then dissolves the barriers and watches the emotions, lies, and self-contradictions slurry together and react in often volatile and destructive ways.
The complex web of half-truths and false impressions that give the diegesis of Sunset Boulevard its convolution manifests in the visual imagery and physical attributes of a house at once lavish and decaying. The home of Norma Desmond embodies the actress’s own mental disassociation and emotional fragility, displaying an outward dilapidation held separate from the intimate glamour within. The two faces of Desmond’s estate exist in a visual disparity that mirrors the former star’s own dissociation and the private delusion of celebrity and high regard in which she wraps herself. Desmond’s belief in her own significan...
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... shadow of his narration suggests the significant influence of Joe’s bias on the manner in which the film is portrayed. The writer claims to represent the voice of empiricism, promising to deliver “the facts…(and) the whole truth” before the story gets “all distorted and blown out of proportion”, but his personality overlays the narration and his supposedly impartial retelling of the series of events contains opinions, editorials, and literary references all too reminiscent of a Hollywood drama. Joe Gillis, being a writer of fiction with an intense personal investment in the story he is telling, cannot be expected to adhere to scientific impartiality. Instead, he illustrates an essential tenet of storytelling and Hollywood mystique, the subjective nature of facts when coupled with human interpretation. Joe Gillis shows how a road can be more than a strip of asphalt.
The road movie embodies the human desire for travel and progression. The vehicle of journey is a contemporary metaphor of personal transformation that oftentimes mirrors socio-cultural desires and fears. Thomas Schatz believes that one “cannot consider either the filmmaking process or films themselves in isolation from their economic, technological, and industrial context.” This statement is especially applicable to the independent American films of the late sixties, a time of great political and social debate. Easy Rider (1969) was considered a new voice in film that was pitched against the mainstream. In the 1960s, there was a shift to highlight the outsiders or the anti-heros in film. This counter-cultural radicalism seems to have also influenced the 1991 film, Thelma & Louise. The characters of both films act as figures of anti-heroism by rebelling against the conventional and unintentionally discovering themselves at the same time. Despite their different backgrounds, the protagonists of Eas...
Judging a book by its cover is like judging a person by the words that describe him or her. Some of them are accurate, but the physical being of a person can tell you a story untold. In Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, the reader witnesses what the description of a single character can do to the voice of a piece. Frank’s use of pathos and characterization when it came to Angela, his mother, spoke volumes in his memoir, but when applied to the big screen, her character was amplified. It was then the reader realized that Angela’s true effect and purpose in Frank’s life was to be his main influence.
In today's day and age, it's rare to see famous historical events and societal disasters not be picked apart by film directors and then transformed into a box office hit. What these films do is put a visual perspective on these events, sometimes leaving viewers speculating if whatever was depicted is in fact entirely true. I have never felt that feeling more than after I finished watching Oliver Stone’s JFK.
Often, when a story is told, it follows the events of the protagonist. It is told in a way that justifies the reasons and emotions behind the protagonist actions and reactions. While listening to the story being cited, one tends to forget about the other side of the story, about the antagonist motivations, about all the reasons that justify the antagonist actions.
In Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust,” multiple characters are introduced within Hollywood, California, which is widely regarded as the national capital of the film industry. One main character focused on throughout the novel is Tod Hackett, who West portrays as being superior to the fantasy observed around him. Many of the characters have traveled to Hollywood in pursuit of a personal, ambitious goal. However, there is a reoccurring theme of failure in their pursuits due to the fictitious personalities and actions they have created for themselves influenced by a setting full of artificialness.
Keathley, Christian. "Trapped in the Affection Image" The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, Noel King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. 293-308. Print.
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust is said by many to be the best novel to be written about Hollywood. When we immediately think of Hollywood, we think of a glamorous story, in the picturesque setting of Los Angeles, full of characters with abundance of talent living the much sought after American dream. This is perhaps what sets West’s novel apart from the rest. The story is full of characters that have a vague impression of the difference in reality and fantasy in life. The characters are submerged in their lives in Hollywood, with what seems to be a false reality on how the world works. The untalented would-be actors, withering vaudeville performers and prostitutes place a certain grotesque over the novel from the beginning, and in a world of certain fantasy and chaos like this, violence is bound to come to the fore as a theme in many different forms. The protagonist of the story, Tod Hackett, is different to the rest of the characters in the novel. Tom is a talented artist, but still has a good view of reality by times, so Tom can act part as an observer in the novel. Tom however has been sucked in to the fantasy world also life has become somewhat submerged in the fantasy world.
Interpersonal relationships are a potent entity that wildly flutter, like a liberated pigeon, through the miserable docks of Elia Kazan’s 1954 film ‘On the Waterfront,’ shaping the moral metamorphosis of protagonist Terry Malloy – from an analysts perspective, the ‘power’ source of the film. Terry’s voyage from an inarticulate and diminished “bum” to a gallant “contender,” is the pedestal that the film gyrates around, however, it is palpable that Terry – a man branded with his primitive mores - is not equipped of emancipating himself from the self-preservative cycle of “D and D” singlehandedly. Therefore, the catalytic, moral facilitation of inspirational outsiders - Edie Doyle and Father Barry – are essential to the rewiring of Terry’s conscience and his propulsion into “testifying what is right against what is wrong.” However, rapports do not simply remain ‘strong’ and stable for the entire duration of the film – they fluctuate. Terry shuffles closer to the side of morality each scene, portrayed by the simultaneous deterioration of Terry’s intertwinement with Johnny Friendly and “the mob” and intensification of his romantic involvement with Edie and confidence in Father Barry. Relationships fuel and glorify Terry’s powerful, audience-enthralling journey to morality.
In ‘unreliable narration’ the narrator’s account is at odds with the implied reader's surmises about the story’s real intentions. The story und...
The director Antoine Fuqua vision for this film was to bring that intense love-hate relationship onto the big screen and showcase it for the world to see. To ensure a convincing film setting, Fuqua shot on location in some of the most hardcore neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Fuqua also wanted to show the daily struggles of officers tasked to work in the rougher neighborhoods of cities and how easy it can be to get caught up in a street life filled with killers and drug dealers. Overall the film displayed the city of Los Angeles in a different perspective. One which m...
Wilson, M. & Clark, R. (n.d.). Analyzing the Short Story. [online] Retrieved from: https://www.limcollege.edu/Analyzing_the_Short_Story.pdf [Accessed: 12 Apr 2014].
Now, one might argue that because the narrator thinks this story “is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men”, then he is biased: ergo, he’s an unreliable narrator (1940). However, being biased in and of itself is not the sole criterion for a narrator be...
When someone mentions Marilyn Monroe, one usually thinks off the seductive all-American sex goddess who captured the world with her woman-childlike charm. Yet not many know her as the illegitimate child who endured a childhood of poverty and misery, sexual abuse, and years in foster home and orphanages. Most people don’t realize that her disrupted loveless childhood may been the main reason to her early death. Norma Jeane Baker’s father, Edward Mortenson, had deserted her mother, Gladys Baker neè Monroe, before she was born on June, 1 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Due to Gladys’ instability and the fact that she was unmarried at the time, Norma Jeane was placed in a foster home. At the age of 7, Norma Jeane lived briefly with her mother. Gladys began to show signs of mental depression, and a year later she was admitted to a rest home. Norma Jeane was then placed with a family friend for a year until being placed in another orphanage for another two years. Norma Jeane was once heard to reflect on this time and say: "The world around me then was kind of grim...I had to learn to pretend in order to...I don’t know.. block the grimness. The whole world seen sort of closed to me..(I felt) on the outside of everything, and all I could do was to dream up any kind of pretend game." (MarilynMonroe,http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/mmbio3.html) In 1941, Norma Jeane again lived with a family friend when she met Jim Dougherty, who was 5 years older than her.
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
“Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine, some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.” - David Fincher. David Fincher is the director that I am choosing to homage for a number of reasons. I personally find his movies to be some of the deepest, most well made, and beautiful films in recent memory. However it is Fincher’s take on story telling and filmmaking in general that causes me to admire his films so much. This quote exemplifies that, and is something that I whole-heartedly agree with. I am and have always been extremely opinionated and open about my views on the world and I believe that artists have a responsibility to do what they can with their art to help improve the culture that they are helping to create. In this paper I will try to outline exactly how Fincher creates the masterpieces that he does and what I can take from that and apply to my films.