Central Station Film Analysis

Question One The conventions of a road movie are simple: a couple characters go on a trip and they change along the way. While the destination is important, the journey is even more interesting. When it comes to road movies, both Central Station and the Motorcycle Diaries are prime examples. “Genre films work by engaging viewers through an implicit contract. They encourage certain expectations on the part of spectators, which are in turn based on viewer familiarity with the conventions” (Grant). The characters in Central Station go through many different perspective changes due to their experiences. Dora and Josue travel from place to place on what seems like a never ending trip to find Josue’s father. Their views of each other continually
Instead of being a film that is gloomy and sad, the film has the remaining family members preparing a feast and arguing over where to bury the body. We don’t ever feel sad that the character is dead in the first place. We just laugh at the way they go about putting her to rest. They set the story up so that we focus less on the death and more about the bickering between family members. One of the characters also pokes fun at certain aspects of religion, which is always a very controversial topic in movies. Juan of the Dead takes an interesting look at the dreaded zombie outbreak. Instead of having the characters dramatically fear for their lives throughout, they instead decide to turn murdering the undead into a business. They try to make money off clearing people’s houses of their dead loves ones for a charge. This is as black as comedy gets. Instead of killing normal alive loved ones though, we’re killed undead zombies, so we laugh at the character’s need to capitalize on the situation. It’s also something we have never seen
That’s why Nora’s Will and Juan of the Dead can both be hilarious, even though they are all about people who have died.
Question Three The auteur theory is something that is extremely relevant to films like Stellet Licht and Amores Perros. Both films are told in a way that is not average whatsoever, and the decision to make mostly came from the director. The auteur theory extends even more than usual to these two films as they are both written and directed by one person. Carlos Reygadas could have directed Stellet Licht as a simple melodrama about a husband’s affair. Instead, he chose to make it all seem like one day, with the sun rising in the beginning and setting at the end. The shots of the film are extremely long so that they felt like they were in real time. This heightened the realism as we watched this husband go through the guilt and pain that comes with this situation. He chose to explore the inner workings of each character, following their thoughts all the way to the end so that we can understand a little bit more about why they are the way they