Cinema Paradiso

With Dunkirk Christopher Nolan has reached new heights of filmmaking and he seems to have employed a whole new set of techniques. Gone is the dialogue and one-liners that we associate with Hollywood. No famous Hollywood stars (with a couple of exceptions) are present either. Speaking of stars, the director focuses on the anonymity of a few people, without revealing their names most of the time. And if you expect to watch a war film like Saving Private Ryan you will be disappointed. According to…

Silent movies were a great source of entertainment during the early 1900s, but when sound was added the film industry was revolutionized. It only took two years after The Jazz Singer, the first film with spoken lines, for the silent film era to end. It showed the viewers that there was no reason for silent movies. Big names in silent film making, like Charlie Chaplin, thought “talkies” ruined the film industry. Sound changed the way we watch movies for the better. Sound helps its viewers follow…

The film Les 400 Coups is autobiographical, through the character of Antoine Doinel, Truffaut recounts the struggles of his upbringing as a troubled young adolescent in Paris. Les 400 Coups (a French expression meaning to “raise hell”) shows the result of neglectful, or entirely absent, parenting as it is of youth delinquency. Antoine is certainly not blameless, many of his actions are dictated by necessity. He is a victim of circumstance. There is no doubt as to where our sympathies lie or…

The most electrifyingly opportune motion picture playing in New York was made in 1965. Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers is well known, however for quite a while it's been accessible just in washed-out prints with ineffectively interpreted, white-on-white subtitles. The recently deciphered and subtitled 35-millimeter print at Film Forum is probably the form that was secretly screened in August for military work force by the Pentagon as a field manual for battling terrorism. Previous…

Throughout the United States’ participation in World War II, the American film industry was called upon by the federal government to produce film after film to inform the public of the events overseas and to emotionally influence the American people in order to keep them invested in the war efforts. From films of live combat during the Battle of the Midway, to cartoons promoting the donation of resources like rubber for military purposes, to dramas of romance between a soldier and his lover back…

By today’s standards, this is a lighthearted romantic comedy. However, Otto Preminger encountered a great deal of resistance when he tried to distribute his film. In the Production Code files archive there are several letters between Otto Preminger and Joseph Breen (the director of The Production Code Association) discussing the denial of a seal of approval for The Moon is Blue. Among these are letters between Preminger and the heads of many studios that also refused to distribute the film due…

The Motion Picture Association of America and their ‘rating system’ (Motion Picture Association of America, 2016) serves as an industry backed form of self-regulation for the content of films for the American consumer. However, amongst the changing times of the Country following World War II and leading into the turbulent 1960’s, Major movie companies were willing to forego industry-approved regulation for major films, forcing the MPAA to change from the Production Code towards the modern-day…

In Hollywood, stars are not only known for acquiring plentiful identities, but also several distinctive types of identities, which are determined by the diverse traits of their characters, along with the various characters that they depict (Shingler, 121). This has made it fundamentally impossible to distinguish between the star, the character, the private personality and the public persona of the actor, especially since these distinct and overlapping identities are both exposed and concealed at…

The film version of the ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, is not only known for winning Academy Awards for the several categories, it was also known for its casting cinematic appearances. The film version, though retaining most of the novel’s motifs and themes, possesses differences from the novel in significant ways. Although there film exhibits pronounced differences from the content of the novel, it retains the natural verses the institutional themes, the creative nonconformity battle…

Priscila Chivalan CART 329 1 November 2017 Commentary #2 Question 1 The Films The Trip (1967) and Taxi Driver (1976) are two films that were created during the time Hollywood was having set backs and during the time that they created new ideas that eventually took them out of the struggle. This was considered Hollywood's fall and rise They are both similar in a way due to the way the movie films were shot. Both of these films were created to allow us to see what the…