Figure 1. Ingrid Bergman in "Notorious" Alfred Hitchcock’s most unsettling effects are not built from chases or killings but from faces that do too little and hands that do too much. His characters are caught between what they mean and what they must pretend to mean, a performance-within-performance where gestures must advance the fiction for other characters while broadcasting contradictory emotions. Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock is a romantic ironist, staging scenes t

Realism in cinema, particularly within the Italian Neorealism movement and its global reverberations, represents a profound shift in narrative and aesthetic approaches that prioritize authenticity and social truth. The films "Bicycle Thieves" by Vittorio De Sica, "Germany, Year Zero" by Roberto Rossellini, and "Padre Padrone" by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani encapsulate the essence of Italian Neorealism with their raw depictions of post-war realities, focusing on the struggles o

Laurel Creighton Brazilian Cinema Fabio Cardoso Andrade In the 1970s, Brazil experienced an emergence of pornography as a mainstream cinematic experience. The spread of the “Pornochanchada”, a genre of erotic musical comedy, was able to present and pass itself through censorship, reaching Brazil’s vast population. Paradoxically, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Vereda Tropical (1977) faced stringent censorship by the military dictatorship that Brazil was under. This together

Laurel Creighton Ivone Margulies Selected Directors: Chantal Akerman Spring Semester 2023 Always the Mother A film that replicates itself until it has lost its colors, like shadows, phantom traces. A film that comes together in a landscape, And drifts apart. Out of black and white to white and black. Almost unidentifiable. Out of nearly abstract forms. There, that that may become an abandoned film. Without author, without subject, nor object. Mute

Laurel Creighton HIST 14100 02 The United States from the Colonial Era to the Civil War July 12, 2023 A Comparative Review of Historical Realism within Terrence Malick’s The New World and Robert Eggers’ The Witch In Cinema, the art of historical realism has been a subject of continuous exploration and interpretation from the birth of Lumiere's machine. Through the lens of adept filmmakers, the past is brought to life, giving audiences a glimpse into bygone eras, cultures, an

The film Raging Bull is based on Jake LaMotta’s memoir, Ragin Bull: My Story. The screenplay was written by Mardik Martin and re-written by Paul Schrader, but both Scorsese and De Niro ended up writing the final draft of the shooting script (Tait, 24). Famously, Martin submitted his first screenplay draft to De Niro, not Scorsese. De Niro then crossed out much of Martin’s dialogue and wrote in his own vernacular speech (Tait, 25). Robert De Niro studied this role for nearly

Notorious is an espionage film with gothic melodrama and noir elements. It stars Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Cary Grant and plays upon the fear of a Nazi revival post World War II. It was released in 1946 but began preproduction during the war in 1944. It follows in line with a series of films Hitchcock made about anti-fascism and Nazi resistance. The preceding films were: The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat. While Uranium Ore is the MacGuff

Politicians have double billed prisons as solution to crime and unemployment and this narrative has shaped the United States’ political economy to promulgate mass incarceration. The prison population in the U.S. has quadrupled since the mid 1970’s. It is the highest in the world at 2.2 million incarcerated people. The analysis of the prison system is focused on a “set of relationships” that affects our daily landscapes in ways we may not always see. For example, in Detroit, w

What is the difference between plot and story? According to Russian Formalists, the plot is what we see and hear while a story goes much deeper. The Russian Formalists’ term for the story is “Fabula.” Fabulists were interested in what happens to the viewer, and a “Fabula” is a pattern those viewers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences. By picking up narrative cues. We may never see the family background, but there may be a reference in the story to corrobor

João César Monteiro's Branca de Neve is a startling recital of Snow White over a black screen punctuated by momentary images and eerie non-diegetic sound composed by opera composer Giovacchini Rossini, of the Barber of Seville fame. The film created a controversial public debate about the limits of creative freedom, funding, and the nature of cinema in Portugal. Therefore, it is essential to understand certain esthetic choices and some history and theory behind them. Walser

Bresson's Au Hazard, Balthazar (1966, France) is an allegorical film told through the lens of a donkey named Balthazar and was based in part on The Golden Ass by Apuleius and, to a lesser extent, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. In The Idiot, a very innocent character named Mishkin associates himself with a donkey. Mishkin is a device to understand 19th-century Russian Society. The other source, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, is a 10-part novel that follows the travels of a magician who

Lizzie Borden presents a situation where individuals, especially women are still restricted and oppressed despite a "successful" Social Democratic revolution and a "victory" for the War of Liberation. The Social Democratic government does not go far enough in its afro-feminist policies or duties to all women. This futuristic feminism still rings true, especially today in an age post-Trump. The women in Borden's film cannot shed the class and racial ties that keep them in disc

Opera Mouffe is about many things but can be argued that it is about women’s visual vocabulary. A woman’s visual vocabulary exists linked to the feminine universe and it is an inspiration of attractions that draw more attention and focus than they would if seen through a man’s lens. A woman’s visual vocabulary connects ideas on three things 1.) How is a woman seen, 2.) How does a woman see (and why) and 3.) How does a woman see herself and herself as a woman? L’Opera Mouffe i

Critics and scholars agree that the 1930s were classical Hollywood's "Golden Era." Only a few years prior, in 1928, film had been revolutionized by the coming of sound; the 1930s also perfected the use of the studio system by utilizing Ford's assembly line method for filmmaking. As a result, the studio system could quickly produce many films of superb quality. It also coincided with the golden age of the American Left. Hollywood was already quite cosmopolitan from the influx

John Cassavetes says, "Maybe there is no America; it was only Frank Capra." A true rags to riches in his own life – Frank Capra became one of the most famous directors. Capra was a filmmaker best known for his American Dream filmography. Born in Italy and moving to the United States as a small child, he had a knack for seeing the American Dream through unique eyes. Although he fought in WWI before beginning to make silent comedies for Columbia – then a laughingstock of a prod

Padre Padrone is an adaptation of a novel written by Gavino Ledda, ab illiterate shepherd who became a renowned artist through hard work and the patriarchal trauma inflicted upon him by his strict upbringing by his father and his society as a whole. Directed and produced by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the film takes place in Sardinia, the southern region of Italy, and mixes the Sardinian dialect, Italian and Latin. The Taviani brothers were initially daunted by the book becau

Peter Ohlin asks the question if it is really necessary to invoke the Holocaust in order to portray the spiritual crisis of a comfortably situated actress in 1960s Sweden? It is then revealed to us that after the death of Bergman’s parents he acquired a number of family photo albums and other photographs where he then made a short film called Karen’s Face. It show us that still images stand for loss and failure in Bergman’s mind. The film is not a documentary of 1960s portrai

La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) was released in 1948 and directed and narrated by Luchino Visconti. The story follows a family in rural Sicily. The family lives under the mercy of greedy wholesalers. They risk everything to buy a boat to operate independently from the wholesalers. The story is also based on the limited success of a cooperative of Sulphur miners. The organizer is distraught over his inability to marry and support his pregnant girlfriend. Thirdly, La Terra

Rome, Open City Rome, Open City, released in 1945 and directed by Roberto Rossellini, follows Giorgio Manfredi, a resistance leader chased by Nazis to seek refuge and escape from the Nazi occupation in Rome. An "Open City" is a city to be excluded from military operations. "Open City" status was established after the surrender of the Italians when the Germans advanced into the Roman territory in fall 1943. However, the Germans immediately disregarded this. Robe

According to the Kantian theory of Enlightenment, the essay "What is Enlightenment" defines it as "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage." In Faust, Mephistopheles makes the argument to G-d that humans are "brutish," "live in dismay," and will never change [their] ways. He argues that humans would be happier without the gift of reason. Still, if we were to do away with higher reasoning and logic, our schooling would not be from other people that we incur, but from th