Rarely has a film impacted an audience and held the test of time as the film Gone with the Wind. I have always been curious if director, Victor Fleming and producer, David O. Selznick and screenplay writer, Sidney Howard knew what they were creating a masterpiece and how this film would have such an enormous impact on audiences for years to come. Interestingly enough there were some who thought the film should not be made, as Irving Thalberg said to Louis B. Meyer in 1936, “Forget it Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel” (Ten Films that Shook the World). This romantic melodrama was released in January, 1940, yet it was at the 1939 Academy Awards that Gone with the Wind was nominated for thirteen awards, the eight awards that were won were Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, Screenplay, Color Cinematography, Art Direction, and Editing (Ten Films that Shook the World). ”If the total income for Gone with the Wind were to be adjusted for inflation, it would be considered the most successful of all time” (Ten Films that Shook the World). When you think of “Gone with the Wind” from a film criticism standpoint, it’s hard to judge it by the Auteur Theory, which states that the director is supreme overlord of a films artistic merit because in the case of Gone with the Wind, Fleming takes a back seat to Selznick. The film chronicles the grandeur and splendor of the Old South, how it crumbles during the Civil War and the New South during reconstruction. The characters are basically simple folk living a simple life until their world is shattered by the Civil War and this devastation creates a new world, one which will require courage and resilience to survive. Selznick genius in the aspects of cinematography lighting, sound, costumes and societal impact and genre…
Nelmes, Jill, ed. An Introduction to Film Studies. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.…
* Describe the film techniques (visual and aural) that are used to convey these values and ideas…
The film is a documentary and drama which uses live action and music to deliver the sympathetic and distressful mood the film creates. An example of the…
The United States prison system is notorious for the way it treats its inmates. There are so many theories, and facts to back up the claim that the prison system is not working the way it was intended to be, and it continues to be a growing issue that the government is not addressing. Further, within the already complicated prison system, there is another issue. Solitary confinement, which was originally supposed to be used as a short term punishment within prisons, or jails, has now become an integrated part of prison life (Edge, 2014). Solitary Nation, is 2014 documentary highlights the damages that solitary confinement is doing to people (Edge, 2014). Individuals whom have not shown any signs of degrading mental health come out of segregation, or as the inmates call it, “seg,” disturbed (Edge, 2014).…
Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Film Theory and Criticism. Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall. New York: Oxford, 2009. 24-40.…
People watch; it’s what they do naturally and they enjoy doing it, and according to theorists Linda Williams and Laura Mulvey, it is that visual appetite and the pleasure found in its fulfilment that leads to a natural viewer engagement with the camera, and its ability to observe, in film. This viewer engagement and its companion…
‘There are…two kinds of film makers: one invents an imaginary reality; the other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, criticise it…and finally, translate it into film’…
Over a period of time, specific audiences construct expectations of different types of media, related to either what they have been told, or perhaps what the media have exposed them to in the past. Indeed, it could be argued that the success of a film to a large degree, rests on whether or not such expectations are met, surpassed, else the audience successfully surprised. Certainly, such expectations have to be addressed by the film, if it is to be considered satisfying for the audience, and in this way, elements within the film, such as character representations, the narrative and cinematography are all important components which allow this to be achieved. Additionally, the social and political context in which the film is being viewed must be considered, as it is against this background that their expectations will have been formed.…
Zapatista, a film by Benjamin Eichert, Rick Rowley, and Staale Sandberg is based in the most southern state in Mexico, Chiapas. This films depicts indigenous people in Chiapas fighting for visibility and recognition against their country and government. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in to law, on January first 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Movement (EZLN) rose up and seized several cities in Chiapas to fight against global corporate power and the treatment they faced because of NAFTA (Zapatista 1999). The film depicts the conflict between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas form the perspective and experiences of the Zapatistas. The unique perspective…
In contrary to a stage or screen performance, a documentary film displays real people living everyday life. For many viewers, the notion of documentary film is based on the genuineness of a normal individual playing his or her role in society; without being staged or designed by a producer. However, documentary films, in the aim to portray a daily routine, may encompass professional actors to reenact such performance. Bill Nichols, professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University and author of Introduction to Documentary, helps us distinguish the differences between a social and professional actor. Nichols explained that a social actor “presents themselves in everyday…
In the summation of the article, a powerful and interesting description of this era of film-making is made. “What is called the “postmodern condition” might be more accurately thought of as the “postmorbid condition…And given that we cannot contain or stop this careless proliferation, violence and death both on the street and in…
We all watch films, and documentaries. Generally, we learn some things from them, but can we be sure what we learned is true, and objective? If the films compare and analyze the context (religion, language, etc.) well, we call these kinds of films as ‘ethnographic’ films. A simple question can be appeared in our minds: which films are the ethnographic films? We will try to find an answer to this question with discussing the intentions, the wholeness and the ethics of ethnographic film-making.…
What I try to do is edit the films so that they will have a dramatic structure, that is why I object to some extent to the term observational cinema or cinéma vérité, because observational cinema to me at least connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another and that is not true. At least that is not true for me and cinema verité is just a pompous French term that has absolutely no meaning as far as I'm concerned. Aftab, Weltz…
In his text “The Storyteller” Walter Benjamin states that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”.2 He sets as background the increasing incommunicability of experiences of modern man, declaring that after the first World War period the human capacity of sharing experiences was quickly disappearing. The essay, published in 1936, details the characteristics of what Benjamin sees as a true storyteller, exploring as a model and example the russian writer Nicolai Leskov. Since then, has storytelling, as defined by Benjamin, really come to an end or has it been reinvented through new channels, keeping its core features but using them in different ways? This essay considers Benjaminʼs critique of contemporary storytelling, then goes on to argue that the key aspects he identifies in fact live on in modified structures in contemporary art forms, including the documentary. On the next pages the documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010)3 is outlined along with the attributes that shape it into an “essay documentary” as described in Laura Rascaroliʼs articleThe Essay Film: Problems,…