Preview

Film Review: Imitation Of Life And Maureen Peal

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
431 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Film Review: Imitation Of Life And Maureen Peal
Imitation of Life & Maureen Peal

Imitation of Life is about Peola Johnson, light skined black girl who tries to go through life as a white person. To achieve this she ostracises her family. She breaks all ties with her black mother and her culture and tries to fit into this community in which she really has no place.
"It's because of you, you made me black! I won't be black!"
The problems Maureen Peal and Peola Johnsson share are as serious as the ones the young blck girls have in the bluest yes.
According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis:
In each film's representation of the transgressive woman-the black daughter who looks white, and who, because of the contradiction between being and seeming which defines her, can fit comfortably into neither
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Analysis Of D. W. Griffith's Film Birth Of A Nation
    • 323 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Analysis Of D. W. Griffith's Film Birth Of A Nation

    Throughout the film it depicts blacks in a submissive position to which they are abusing their powers, such as the scene of the state legislature portraying black legislature are drunken pigs who’s only interest is intermarriage, every white persons nightmare. It’s a foreshadow of what the nation would be like if blacks were granted positions in…

    • 323 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Charles W. Chesnutt Analysis
    • 453 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Charles W. Chesnutt Analysis

    As all mothers, she recognize her daughter but he daughter does not. The daughter thinks of herself as white. “[w]hile the mother belongs to the class of biracial characters2 that Chesnutt refers to in this story as “a little less than white”. In these both stories, color line issue is clear because each protagonist has light-skinned mulatto weather man or woman.…

    • 453 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Dear White People Film Analysis
    • 1195 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Dear White People Film Analysis

    So the movie sketches many notable points at various locations. The movie reviles that all the characters working in the movie are narrow minded either they belong to the white community or the black community. The movie shows that both the parties are trying to inserting their cast or the community but no one is trying to promote the humanity. At individual level both the parties are trying their best for this…

    • 1195 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Formal Analysis, "Pariah" by Dee Rees
    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Formal Analysis, "Pariah" by Dee Rees

    “My spirit takes journey, my spirit takes flight, could not have risen otherwise & I am not running... I am choosing.” Alike is an intelligent and poetically talented 17 year old girl. On the surface, Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011), is the coming of age story of African-American lesbian, Alike. Growing up in a traditional household that is sexually repressed and a society that is hateful towards her for being homosexual she finds solace in poetry and academics. Through her plight, the film intelligently layers the dark themes associated with the struggles of a gay teenager growing up in the inner city- gender, sexuality, family relations, hate, religion, ignorance, etc. But the film is very hopeful in that it contrasts the dark themes with pleasant moments of optimism. I am analyzing one of the final scenes in the Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011). The scene [@ 01:15:11] where Alike is reconciling with Arthur, her father, on the rooftop of Laura’s building. The rooftop scene encompasses the beauty of the morals of the narrative really well and at the same time contrasts the dark themes of the film in a manner that compliments the overall aesthetic of the production.…

    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Summary Of Sister Outsider '
    • 480 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Summary Of Sister Outsider '

    In the readings and video presented in week 3, I think, that each one’s main theme was about gender, race, age, intersectionality, and the traditional cultures that people were raised in. In Sister Outsider, where Audre Lorde discussed age, race, class, and sex, she states that within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. She talks about the struggles of colored women in the todays society and lists examples like the literature of colored women, how women of color are the lowest paid wage earners in America, that they are targets of abortion and sterilization abuse, and homophobia among black women. In Borderlands La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua she explains her culture and how females were supposed to be subordinate to males and how she chose a different route, entering the world by way of education and career and becoming a self-autonomous person. She talks about how society says that someone cannot be both genders and about the fear of going back home due to her differences she chose against her native culture like homosexuality.…

    • 480 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Best Essays

    Black Exploitation in Film.
    • 1804 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Black Exploitation in Film.

    This essay will look at two main points on representation, in a pre-determined ten-minute clip of Shaft, firstly cultural representation which in this case is focused on the emergence of the Blaxploitation (Black-exploitation) genre. Then the representation of women and how their gender status affects the film’s narrative, and characters and how the film portrayed both points.…

    • 1804 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Best Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Stereotypes In The Film 'The Mask I Live In'
    • 758 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Stereotypes In The Film 'The Mask I Live In'

    The film also shows how males are being raised to treat women as if they are less then they are (the mask). The facts that the whole film brings up I feel are all related to the environment that the person is raised…

    • 758 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Pleasantville film analysis
    • 1027 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Pleasantville film analysis

    The attention to detail of the use of colour throughout the film highlights the racial discrimination and the civil rights movements of the 1950’s. It is interesting to remark upon the fact that during the court room scene it is all the coloured characters sitting in the…

    • 1027 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Sam Staggs Imitation Of Life Analysis
    • 217 Words
    • 1 Page

    Sam Staggs Imitation Of Life Analysis

    Sam Staggs feels that the Imitation of Life was emotional for others including himself. The most important lesson that he learned was “Beware of conditional parental love.” Which in my introduction I explained how a mother will love their child no matter what. The author explains how when he was younger he didn't realize how much the movie was based on Hollywood until he was older. However black woman frequently would take the role of being a mother and seldomly as the daughter but was always discriminated. As for white woman always took the role as a leader, and well taken care of. The point that the article is trying to make is that black woman were always seen as invisible. Not only did blacks and whites had an emotion on Imitation of life…

    • 217 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Julie Dash Illusions
    • 448 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Julie Dash Illusions

    Julie Dash had a mission statement as a filmmaker that set out to redefine how we see African American women on screen. Their wants, their desires, their needs, theirs joys and sorrows. Dash wanted to be able to see African American women share spaces previously only reserved for men and white people. TV tropes such as riding into the sunset successfully, things you just didn’t normally get to see these women do. This imbedded issue suggests that they couldn’t do these things, which is the fundamental problematic blight on society and earlier film. Dash believed in showing the world that women live full lives, exciting lives, worthy stories and important voices to be shared. And told on their own terms, crucially. Cinema had an inexplicable tendency to reduce women to simply reacting…

    • 448 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    The Imitation of Life
    • 2123 Words
    • 9 Pages

    The Imitation of Life

    Imitation of Life can indubitably be considered one of the most moving and influential films ever produced in American cinema history. Based on the 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, the movie is directed by John Stahl and stars actresses Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers; it depicts the story of two widows, one black and one white, who meet, become friends, and work together to obtain their piece of the American dream for their daughters and themselves (Flitterman-Lewis, 325). The two women’s success is countered by despair that is ultimately the result of their daughters’ actions. One mother looses the man that she loves when she realized that her daughter has become her rival for his affection, while the other is heartbroken by the hostility and ultimate rejection that her daughter displaces onto her as she attempts to cross the color line (Bougle, 57-59).…

    • 2123 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Racial Beauty Standards in "The Bluest Eye"
    • 1364 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Racial Beauty Standards in "The Bluest Eye"

    In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the character Claudia struggles with the beauty standard that harms her sense of self-esteem. Claudia tries to make sense of why the beauty standard does not include black girls. The beauty standard determines that blonde-haired blue-eyed white girls are the image of beauty and therefore they are worthy of not only attention, but are considered valuable to American culture of the 1940s. Thus, learning she has no value or beauty as a black girl, Claudia destroys her white doll in an attempt to understand why white girls are beautiful and subsequently worthy, socially superior members of society. In destroying the doll, Claudia attempts to destroy the beauty standard that works to make her feel socially inferior and ugly because of her skin color. Consequently, Claudia's destruction of the doll works to show how the beauty standard was created to keep black females from feeling valuable by producing a sense of self-hate in black females. The racial loathing created within black women keeps them as passive objects and, ultimately, leads black women, specifically Pecola, to destroy themselves because they cannot attain the blue eyes of the white beauty standard.…

    • 1364 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Collective Voice In The Bluest Eye
    • 2411 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Collective Voice In The Bluest Eye

    In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the main protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, is outcasted by the Black community of Lorain, Ohio and Morrison shows this through collective voice. Pecola is a young African American girl with very dark skin who thinks that if she could have blue eyes, she would be the White communities standards of pretty and treated like the other girls surrounding her. The Black community looks down on her and rejects her. One scene in The Bluest Eye when this is evident is when the characters Claudia and Frieda MacTeer and Maureen Peel are walking home from school and see Pecola surrounded by a group of young African American boys shouting at her “ Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepnakked…” (The Bluest Eye 55). The boys“heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of majority, they gaily harassed her”(The Bluest Eye 55). Morrison show’s collective voice in this scene by representing the attitudes of all the boys against Pecola in one scene by using words like “they” and having them all chant in unison. They are outcasting her from her own Black community by bullying her. Similarly to this scene, Morrison shows outcasting through collective voice in The Bluest Eye in many other scenes. Another scene where this is prevalent is when the character, Geraldine, outcasts Pecola because she is a member of the lower class Black community. Geraldine's son, Junior, enjoyed tormenting the lower class members of the Black community that his mother would not let him play with. One day when Pecola goes to play in a park, he invites her to his house where his mother's car is accidently killed. Geraldine comes home to see this and has a flashback where Pecola represents the entire poor Black community. This flashback shows collective voice because it represents the views of…

    • 2411 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Waking Life Movie Review
    • 26421 Words
    • 106 Pages

    Waking Life Movie Review

    A young man asleep on a train dreams of a boy and a girl playing with a with a hand-held paper puzzle that opens to reveal the words, "Dream is destiny." Later in the dream, the boy observes a shooting star and begins to float off the ground, his hand resting for a moment on the door handle of a car. At a train station, the young man calls a friend and leaves a message while a mysterious woman watches him. He hitches a lift in a car that looks like a boat, whose driver, dressed as a sea captain, tells him, "The ride doesn't require an explanation, only passengers." In the back seat, the other passenger remarks, "There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity." The young man has no destination in mind, so the other passenger instructs the driver where to drop him off. There, he finds a note in the middle of the street telling him to "look to the right." A vehicle speeds toward him from that direction, but the instant before he is struck, he awakens in bed. He awakens into a perpetual dream state. Was he hit by the car, or did he dream that, too? Will he ever awaken again?…

    • 26421 Words
    • 106 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Film Analysis: The Fact Of Blackness
    • 649 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Film Analysis: The Fact Of Blackness

    The colorless multi-coloredness of whiteness secures white power by making it hard, especially for white people and their media, to see whiteness. Instead of thinking about white people in movies, the audience identifies the characters by gender, age, nationality, and social class. People only notice whiteness when put in contrast with blackness, as if only non-whiteness can give whiteness any substance. All the three films Dyer has mentioned in his essay associate whiteness with order, rationality, rigidity, qualities brought out by the contrast with black disorder, irrationality, and looseness. The presence of black people allows one to see whiteness as whiteness, and relates to the existential psychology that is at the origins of the interest in otherness as an explanatory concept in the representation of…

    • 649 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics