When considering culture in the 20th century, film and literature are two of the most important components. Both mediums create huge responses from their audiences, as these forms of art serve to let the audience experience something viscerally, all the while letting them connect these emotions to specific events occurring around them. Both world wars and the Cold War greatly impacted film and literature in Europe, ultimately leading to different ways to connect and understand art. At the beginning of the century, film was a new, visual way to tell stories. With the first film studios built in the late 1890’s, movies went from being less than a minute long to becoming several minutes with a variety of different shots (Broughall). However,
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One such piece of literature that accomplishes this is Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis. In Kafka’s novella, Gregor Samsa is transformed into a gigantic creature that alienates him from the rest of the world. Kafka is able to take the confusion and frustration surrounding him about the current situation of the world, and channels it into Gregor’s character. He is unable to change his situation, and can only hope that one day, things will change. Gregor’s isolation, and the absurd situation itself, can be seen as a parallel of the metamorphosis that a soldier underwent during WWI. There was no explanation for why they specifically were drafted, or why there were forced into killing men who they had never met, just as Gregor never received any answers regarding his own …show more content…
Starting in the late 1950s, New Wave films were defined by experimentation with film form, and the desire to engage their work with the social and political upheavals of the time (Parnell). These ideas of experimentation and radical political commentary can clearly be seen in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Firstly, the main character Ivan Denisovitch is a poor and uneducated man, a huge departure from the aristocrats depicted in previous Russian literature such as Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Additionally, Denisovitch toys with the idea of being able to find acceptance in a life that has practically no meaning, while also taking on harsh criticism of the nation that forced him in this life in the first
One such piece of literature that accomplishes this is Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis. In Kafka’s novella, Gregor Samsa is transformed into a gigantic creature that alienates him from the rest of the world. Kafka is able to take the confusion and frustration surrounding him about the current situation of the world, and channels it into Gregor’s character. He is unable to change his situation, and can only hope that one day, things will change. Gregor’s isolation, and the absurd situation itself, can be seen as a parallel of the metamorphosis that a soldier underwent during WWI. There was no explanation for why they specifically were drafted, or why there were forced into killing men who they had never met, just as Gregor never received any answers regarding his own …show more content…
Starting in the late 1950s, New Wave films were defined by experimentation with film form, and the desire to engage their work with the social and political upheavals of the time (Parnell). These ideas of experimentation and radical political commentary can clearly be seen in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Firstly, the main character Ivan Denisovitch is a poor and uneducated man, a huge departure from the aristocrats depicted in previous Russian literature such as Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Additionally, Denisovitch toys with the idea of being able to find acceptance in a life that has practically no meaning, while also taking on harsh criticism of the nation that forced him in this life in the first