When The Graduate Film Techniques

The Sounds of Silence from Critics: Making Meaning from the Text Alone In the late 1960s, director Mike Nichols began a film project that would shed light on a generation. While this film is still celebrated and discussed by film critics, Nichols himself avoids addressing and sharing his intended meaning of his controversial ending to the film The Graduate, in which two of the main characters run away together on a bus after a failed marriage ceremony. Whether these two were seeking freedom from oppressive parental figures or attempting to pursue new-age ideas of the time that is open to viewers to decide. Studying this scene from the film follows the formalist ideas of T. S. Eliot, who in his work Tradition and Individual Talent, believed in allowing the creators of texts to …show more content…
Using avant-garde techniques, Nichols sought to focus on a controversial topic, a mother seducing her friend’s son who recently graduated from college. While the historical context of the film does seem to impact the feelings and emotions the characters convey, the message is more universal than that. This film has certainly survived the test of time, and as such, illustrates Eliot’s idea that examining a text based on the historical information embedded into the plot can create restrictions on how a person draws conclusions and makes meaning from the characters and plot of the story itself. The Graduate does utilize references from the era to express certain themes and emotions, but the most important ideas including the conflict between adolescents and adults, the desire to find one’s place in the world, and the struggles of love are all universal. The feelings we experience as a result of witnessing this text are relatable to any generation at any time, which highlights the fact that Nichols has written and directed a quality