One of cinema’s most enduring and iconic images is Harold Lloyd, donning his trademark boater and circular spectacles, hanging precariously from a clock face above bustling streets below. In this timely snapshot we can see the silent era’s greatest strengths: absurdity, comedy and physicality. While trying dramas such as Birth of a Nation (1915), Sunrise (1927) and The […]
The Freedom of Movement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée
Movies as we know them are a trick. They do not technically depict motion, but rather a series individual images shown in succession. Chris Marker evokes this idea as he tells the story of La Jetée (1962) through a series of still frames. By almost entirely removing motion from his film, Marker challenges the idea that cinema is […]
The Coens and Cinematic Convention
To a person raised by Amish wolves deep in the oceans of Europa, much of the appeal of the films of the brothers Coen would make little sense. In making their films, the Coens work off of established genre conventions, twisting and inverting them into strange new forms. In doing so, the Coens operate under […]
Abstraction in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc
For this essay, my professor asked us perform a formal analysis of how Carl Theodor Dreyer uses the ideas of “simplification” and “abstraction” in his film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Vicarious emotion is key to the power of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Director Carl Theodor Dreyer was committed to the aesthetic […]
Dimensionality Evokes the Perception of Life in Persepolis
For this essay, my professor asked us to analyze how a given animated film uses dimensionality to formally and technologically give the movie a sense of life. I chose write about Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s film Persepolis through Thomas Lamarre’s theories of animation as outlined in his book, The Anime Machine. Key themes of animation […]
Eisenstein Goes Plane Crazy
For this essay, my professor asked us to find discuss an animated Disney short film through the lens of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Quotes in this piece are taken from the translated compilation of Eisenstein’s notes in Jay Leda’s 1988 book, Eisenstein on Disney. Sergei Eisenstein, a Marxist filmmaker and theorist, had a unique relationship with […]
Holmes, Hébert and the Stereoscope
For this essay, my professor asked us to choose a 19th century optical toy and discuss its relevance to animator Pierre Hébert’s essay, “Cinema, Animation and the Other Arts: An Unanswered Question.” I chose to talk about the Holmes stereoscope. Most of the images herein are stills of Pierre Hébert’s various animated works. In his 1859 […]
Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City Blurs Media, Genre and Style
For this essay, my professor asked us to find a film and talk about how it uses elements from different media, genres and styles to create something entirely new. I chose to talk about Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. A black and white hand-drawn frame from the Sin City graphic novel appears on the screen as the Blu-ray […]
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 […]
Altman Makes The Long Goodbye, But Not to Film Noir
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 […]
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 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 be […]
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 made in 1925 about the worker’s revolutions at the turn of the century in order to remind citizens of the Soviet Union why […]
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 […]
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, […]
