Laura Pendergest-Holt

THE STRUGGLES HELEN KELLER OVERCAME Helen Keller is a remarkable woman. She was put through so much in her life and overcame obstacles that some might not understand. Reading her books and hearing the stories about how she slept and night and tossed and turned, it will give you a different perspective. Her life was filled with silence and darkness until Anne came along. Their friendship grew and grew; Anne helped Helen through her darkest hours and Helen did the same in return. Helen…

distant and sexually cold creatures, who very often end up to be evil and manipulator. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (1977) Tania Modleski interprets Notorious according to the female point of view, as the film theorist Laura Mulvey had already done in her essay, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975). Mulvey argued that in classical Hollywood cinema the spectator is inevitably in a masculine subject position while the woman on screen is seen as the object of…

Many feminists have pointed that classical Hollywood film has been associated with the “male gaze” in most case. British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey (1975) expands on this conception to argue that in cinema women are typically depicted in a passive role that provides visual pleasure for male viewing that male audience tend to take the female character in film as his own personal sex object because, he can relate himself, through ‘looking’, to the male character in the film. Not only in…

“The Gaze,” also known as “The Male Gaze,” is a concept that has been prevalent in the arts for hundreds of years. Throughout history, male viewers have perceived women as taboo, pleasurable, beautiful, offensive, and sometimes all of these at once. These unfair judgments were dismissed far too often. Sometimes, the use of an “imagined spectator,” where the viewer of a piece becomes an essential part of it, draws awareness and strong responses to these issues. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger…

“A film is made up of a hundred or more hidden things,” Vincente Minnelli once said in an interview. The quote seems to sum up Minnelli’s layered film making style. In this essay I will be exploring the themes of feminism, one of the hundred or more hidden things in Minnelli’s work. The essay will move through the life of Minnelli, analysing films from both the beginning and end of his career in the context of the time in which they were made. Vincente Minnelli was born Lester Anthony Minnelli…

The Piano: Excavating National Cinema’s “Desire” The concept of a national cinema is one that speaks to a discourse of a particular state or nation. However, the definition of what the constructs of this cinema is inherently problematic. Andrew Higson (1989:52) discusses the implications of the terminology asserting that “... the parameters of a national cinema should be drawn at the site of consumption as much as at the site of production of films”. Higson attempts to underline and further…

A theme in our history has been the removal and the disregarding of rights in accordance to a specific subculture in our society, usually characterized by one 's gender, sexual preference, or nationality.As a result of such beliefs individuals were being deprived of their basic human rights; they were being discriminated against. Discrimination based on one 's gender is a common and frequent violation of one 's civil rights. Throughout history women have been ostracized due to their appearance…

“Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don’t think you can hold on.”(James Frey). In the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, Louie faces many obstacles that he overcomes. Louie had a rough start to his life. At a young age, Louie was drinking and smoking, but he got better when he started training with his brother Pete for the Olympics. Louie went back downhill again when he went to war. He suffered as a POW in the war. Louie thought almost for sure he was not going to make it.…

According to Merriam-Webster, Magical Realism is a literary genre that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. In the novel Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, uses different forms of magical realism to catch the reader’s interest in the novel. Esquivel also uses hyperbole to exaggerate until it becomes magical. Three of the most significant magical realism parts in the novel are the rose petal dinner, the chicken fight, and Tita and Pedro’s last…

such as how the movie was made, to even the ideas discussed in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema written by Laura Mulvey. The times we currently live in (and even the times during which the movie was produced) has hidden meanings that we would not normally notice, but through the film Psycho, we are able to analyze these things and understand how Hollywood cinema truly works. In Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative, she argues that the perspectives that are presented in…