Vision, Representation and Cinema
Jean-Luc Godard's My Life to Live: Neo-modernist film language
My Life to Live tells the story of Nana, who leaves her hopelessly bourgeois husband and infant son with the vague hopes of becoming an actress. Nana seems less to aspire to be in the movies than to make her life into a movie, however. She is bored with her suburban life and entranced with all of the garish trappings of commercialism of 1960s Paris. Anna first finds work in a shop, but gradually falls deeper and deeper into the dredges of society until she becomes a prostitute and is murdered in argument between her pimp and another pimp at the end of the film. Entering into prostitution does not seem to upset Nana, the film suggests that Nana takes a detached view of her life, and that making love to men she does not love is no different than her joyless, loveless marriage.
The film deploys a cool, distanced technique, as if Nana consciously knows she is playing a role. Her articulated dream of becoming an actress, although not realized in a literal sense in the film, is realized instead by the actress playing Nana...
Vision, Representation and Cinema Discuss the representation of the province in Nuri Bilge Ceylas' Clouds of May in relation to modernity. The film Clouds of May depicts a clash of two worlds: a more traditional world, and the world of modernity. The film reveals the tensions between the old and the new, and also the real and the unreal. It depicts the attempts of an urban filmmaker named Muzaffer to create a
The outcome of all of this was a rock concert which -- aside from the actual happenstance of performances -- was heavily controlled by the interest of the filmmaker. Though various aspects of the concert-attendance experience indicate that great care was paid to the appeal of the event itself, there is an explicit self-consciousness on the part of the subject as to the grander intention of the captured film
Mis) representations of African-Americans in film: From the Birth of a Nation onward Recently, the Academy of Motion Pictures awarded 12 Years a Slave the title of Best Picture of the year. However, it is important to remember that the development of American cinema, racism, and the perpetuation of African-American stereotypes in film has a long and ignoble history. In the essay "The Good Lynching and Birth of a Nation: Discourses
(Baudry, the Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema 707). Baudry explains that in reality, the spectator is actually convinced to assume this due to the effective application of the cinematic apparatus, thus enforcing a standardized spectatorial basis. Furthermore, Baudry later also mentioned that the cinematic apparatus and its ideological connotations created focus upon the ability of the cinema to symbolize the psychic desire of the
Dara Birnbaum's Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman is meant to discuss gender roles from society's perspective. The Wonder Woman character in the film constantly changes from a secretary into a super hero and has audiences concentrate on a few particular issues. Birnbaum emphasizes the fact that television is meant to trick people in ignoring several otherwise obvious things. Instead of focusing on the matters that they usually considered when seeing Wonder Woman-related
Counter Cinema Rejecting Ideological Indoctrination: Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Born in Flames as Forms of Counter Cinema Jean Baudry in his analysis of narrative cinema argues that film ideologically indoctrinates the viewer. In his essay "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" he asks whether instruments (the technical base) produce specific ideological effects, and are these effects themselves determined by the dominant ideology? He continues, that in
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