Classical Hollywood cinema

Hollywood cinema is widely viewed as narrative with most viewers seeing films only as entertainment and nothing else. And most movies are for entertainment, providing a story with a narrative form or also called Classical Hollywood Cinema. This includes forms of narration, sound, editing, cinematography, etc. Anything you find in the normal classical cinema such as the Marvel movies, Disney movies, or the endless remakes of Planet of the Apes movies. All these films are similar in style because they follow the Classical Hollywood Cinema movement. However, there are alternatives to classical cinema, alternatives meaning that these films don’t obey the typical guidelines for the classical Hollywood cinema. Viewers might be confronted when watching…

Women were seen as sex symbols and tools to make the male lead, or hero, more appealing. They were the assisting actor who was to never steal the spotlight, and to only make the male character more relatable for the audience. In Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” we see how women are truly portrayed in the business of entertainment. Women are seen in Hollywood films as expendable and an untainted, virgin body image. Their characters weren’t as important as males, or as…

Paper 1 Describe the classical Hollywood narrative structure. Use examples from the film Shadow of a Doubt to illustrate the structure The Narrative structure of cinema has been ductile through history. Today we have a very wide spectrum of different plotlines and structures that directors and writers get to choose from; however, the classical Hollywood narrative structure stuck to one consistent narrative structure that follows a linear timeline through 3 basic steps: equilibrium, disruption,…

Film, in general, is a narrative medium, or, at least, a medium of many narrative capacities” (Kuhn). For a film to be a narrative it must present a story with a series of events in ways that imply connections between one event and the next. Narratives must, therefore, have constituent parts, which are also discernibly related; however, the type of relationship may vary greatly. Generally we expect a cause-and-effect relationship: one event has the effect of causing another event, which causes…

find out the ideal way to format and enhance it in order to make it perfect. This was helped substantially by a book called ‘Save the Cat’ by Blake Snyder [1]. In looking at various points towards the Femme Fatale and castration anxiety, we looked at the book ‘Feminism and Film’ by Maggie Humm [2] and ‘Visual and Other Pleasures’ by Laura Mulvey [3]. These helped us in writing and portraying phallic imagery (in the form of a gun) and the death of Mia for castration anxiety, the gun being the…

During the late 80’s an innovated film maker named Spike Lee created a revolutionary piece of cinematic history called Do The Right Thing. Lee not only directs this incredible film he also stars as the lead role named “mookie”. Unlike most films in the 80’s Lee exposes the audience to thing they aren’t used to seeing. He uses classical Hollywood cinema techniques to capture his film in a different way. For instance, an individual may notice the use of synchronized sounds, close up shots, and the…

partner gets murdered and a woman, Ruth Wonderly, shows up needing his help to find a falcon statue. Spade meets a variety of characters all with the same motive of acquiring the falcon statue. This films use of a classical opening and closing, the way it develops its characters, the omniscience of the narrator, and causal linearity combined with the continuity editing system define this film as an example of classical Hollywood cinema. The opening of the Maltese Falcon represents the exposition…

become the spirit background color of this era. People in sixties did change the world, especially the world for Hollywood. In the process of continuous breakthrough, post-classical Hollywood reduced the harm from Paramount Decrees little by little, established new relationship with television industry and seized the heart of younger audience (Richard, 23). Compare to Classical Hollywood, Post-classical Hollywood makes lots of…

The bottom line: filmmaking is expensive, and therefore, a film must be efficient in its conveyance of story. Classical Hollywood cinema depends on the idea that cinema is deliberate, pointed, driven quickly through a linear narrative by carefully orchestrated action and plot devices. Transitions are smooth and fast paced, dialogue is pithy and heavily directed, not one second wasted on narrative “blank space”. But what happens to this model when the story a film strives to tell is a story not…

with death and inexplicably, kills himself multiple times with no effect. This film is a solid example of pushing the limits of Classic Hollywood Film, it includes known actors, a fair budget, good special effects and was produced by one of the “big five” film companies, namely, Paramount Pictures. In the film Harold and Maude, Harold Chasen, a nineteen-year old death obsessed boy, elaborately stages fake suicides after barely escaping a chemistry fire in his school. Harold, who often attends…