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Academic

The Vaudevillian Heroes of Silent Film

September 3, 2015 By Jonny Smith 1 Comment

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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 […]

Academic

The Freedom of Movement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée

August 26, 2015 By Søren Hough 2 Comments

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 […]

Academic

The Coens and Cinematic Convention

April 30, 2014 By Sam McAdoo 1 Comment

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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 […]

Academic

Abstraction in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc

January 20, 2014 By Søren Hough 2 Comments

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 […]

Academic

Dimensionality Evokes the Perception of Life in Persepolis

January 17, 2014 By Søren Hough Leave a Comment

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 […]

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Academic

Eisenstein Goes Plane Crazy

December 19, 2013 By Søren Hough 6 Comments

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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 […]

Academic

Holmes, Hébert and the Stereoscope

December 12, 2013 By Søren Hough 2 Comments

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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 […]

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Academic

Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City Blurs Media, Genre and Style

June 26, 2013 By Søren Hough 4 Comments

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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 […]

Academic

For the Love of the Romantic Tragedy

April 9, 2013 By Søren Hough Leave a Comment

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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 […]

Academic

Altman Makes The Long Goodbye, But Not to Film Noir

February 15, 2013 By Anthony Putvinski 1 Comment

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 […]

Academic

The Big Sleep And Genre: Neither Here Noir There

February 5, 2013 By Søren Hough 2 Comments

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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 […]

Academic

Discontinuity Editing Elicits Emotion in Eisenstein’s Strike

January 4, 2013 By Søren Hough 1 Comment

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 […]

Academic

Get the Right Message

December 28, 2012 By Søren Hough 2 Comments

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 […]

Academic

Chungking Express In The Framework of Classical Hollywood Structure

November 5, 2012 By Søren Hough Leave a Comment

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, […]

London Film Festival 2024 Highlights

November 1, 2024 By Søren Hough

London Film Festival 2024 Preview

October 20, 2024 By Søren Hough

https://www.fungifilmfest.com/2023

Mushrooms Galore at Fungi Film Festival 2023

December 26, 2023 By Corrado Nai

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