Why Is Fiddler On The Roof Considered A Classic

Fiddler on the Roof was directed by Norman Jewison and it was released on the year of 1971. It is considered a classic, because each person has their rituals to follow throughout their life. Some set it for themselves, while others inherit it from generations of family cultures and traditions that were passed down to them. Everyone wish to uphold their traditions, but in this modern era is hard to do so. Society’s influence, differences in cultures, and adapts to modernized things made it hard to perform these traditions. In the film Fiddler on the Roof, the main character Tevye told the audience that traditions keep control in their village of Anatevka, Russia. Everyone plays a role in village life and as long as they mind their own problems …show more content…
Tevye met Perchik an educated young man from Kiev when he was new in town. In exchange for food, Tevye arranged Perchik to give lessons to his daughters. This shows Tevye as a parent is transforming into becoming an open-minded parent since he decided for his daughters to receive an education besides the plain homemaking skills. Perchik believes that the villagers are supposed to have an awareness of the current issues in the outside world. He manages to convince Hodel the second daughter of Tevye to dance with him. This is breaking the tradition of the village because he introduced something that is worldly to a Jewish girl and women are not permitted to dance with men. Meanwhile, one of the camera technique known as two-shot can be seen when Tveye rejects Chava in scene where only both of them are together, it affects the viewer by Tveye breaking tradition and gave in to Chava’s choice of husband and fixed the gap between their father-daughter …show more content…
Tveye’s choice to embrace the changes to avoid the turmoil and turbulence that can bring to family life exemplified the breaking of traditions. The old ways of doing things have repeatedly been questioned, but life will be more interesting when we place the family needs above the traditions and adopt a new way of doing things. This is a good example of art and it is well presented. It resembles literature, theater, and art by its historical and social elements. Based on my research of other reviews or scholarly commentaries, “Fiddler on the Roof won lavish praise from the press. John Chapman, a reviewer for the New York Daily News, called it ‘one of the great works of the American musical theater’. His colleague Howard Taubman added, ‘it catches the essence of a moment in history with sentiment and radiance’ (n.p.). I would recommend this work of arts to others, because it was a mixture of Apollonian and Dionysian experience, as it captures my attention the whole time with its information that is related to historical and social