Academia: For the Love of the Romantic Tragedy
For this essay, I picked a movie that was still in theaters and analyzed it in terms of genre. Specifically, I determined how I would classify the film, and why exactly I came to that conclusion. I chose to write about Michael Haneke’s Amour. A week before going into Amour, I had the opportunity to speak … Read more
Academia: Altman Makes The Long Goodbye, But Not to Film Noir (Guest Post)
Last week, we posted an article about the 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s harbdoiled novel The Big Sleep starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and whether it should be classified as a film noir. This week, we look at another adaptation of a Chandler novel from 1973: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, starring Elliot Gould and Nina … Read more
Academia: The Big Sleep And Genre: Neither Here Noir There
Howard Hawks’ seminal classic The Big Sleep is difficult to categorize. The first instinct for many film writers and scholars has been to categorize it immediately as a so-called “film noir,” lumping the movie together with other classic films like John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. However, it is difficult to … Read more
Academia: Discontinuity Editing Elicits Emotion in Eisenstein’s Strike
An academic paper I wrote on how early Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein uses discontinuous editing in his film Strike to encourage his audience to empathize with his protagonists. Strike is a piece of propaganda was made in 1925 about the worker’s revolutions at the turn of the century in order to remind citizens of the Soviet Union … Read more
Academia: Get the Right Message
An academic paper I wrote on how Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Tony Kaye’s American History X deliver very ambiguous messages about race. Like Tony Kaye’s American History X which hit the big screen some nine years later, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is a sprawling commentary on race and race relations that follows a community living in constant … Read more
Academia: Chungking Express In The Framework of Classical Hollywood Structure
Here is an academic piece I wrote on how Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express fits into film expert David Bordwell’s definition of classical Hollywood structure. For reference, here is his direct quote from p. 74 of Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction: “Hollywood plots consist of clear chains of causes and effects, … Read more
