Films essay

Films essay

 · One of the most influential high-school movies ever made, Amy Heckerling’s debut feature is both a raunchy crowd-pleaser and a keen sociological snapshot of teen culture. By Dana Stevens Essays — May 11, Short essay on Film as Mass Medium. Film is a means of creative expression. It performs the functions of mass media. Such as information, education, entertainment and transmission of culture. Films are widely popular and their audio visual nature provides them a pervasive power for social influence. Therefore, they have the potential to play an important role as a medium of entertainment, information Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films

How to Write a Film Analysis Essay: Examples, Outline, & Tips

Text size: A A A, films essay. About the BFI. Press releases and media enquiries. Join and support. Using your BFI Membership, films essay. Watch films on BFI Player, films essay.

Watch and discover. Browse BFI Southbank seasons. Find out about international touring programmes. Learning and training. BFI Film Academy: opportunities for young creatives. Get funding to progress my creative career, films essay.

Films essay resources and events for teachers. Join events and activities for families. Search the BFI National Archive collections. Browse our education events. Use film and TV in my classroom. Read research data and market intelligence. Funding and films essay. Search for projects funded by National Lottery. Apply for British certification and tax relief. Inclusion in the film industry. Find projects backed by the BFI, films essay. Get help as a new filmmaker and find out about NETWORK.

Read industry research and statistics. Find out about booking film programmes internationally. In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts.

Andrew TracyGinette VincendeauKaty McGahanChris Darkefilms essay, Geoff AndrewOlaf MöllerSergio WolfNina Powerfilms essay, Nick Bradshaw Updated: 7 May from our August issue. Le camera stylo?

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational.

This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists — who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and films essay of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazinwhose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, films essay, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which in its more simplistic iterations sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon films essay most compromised of works.

If Marker has films essay been welcomed into that canon and — thanks to the far greater films essay of his work — into the mainstream of primarily DVD-educated cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully films essay many films essay the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes In the scope of its application and its association more with an amorphous sensibility as opposed to fixed films essay, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, films essay, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more films essay where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shiftedthe essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the s, films essay, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction. No less than the mystics, however, films essay, the montagists were after essences. EisensteinDziga Vertov and Pudovkinalong with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images — the general made powerfully, films essay, viscerally immediate in the particular.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society, films essay. And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth.

Fidelity to the authentic — whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage — was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher films essay of reality.

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come films essay be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension.

So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles — to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances — collides with awe or fear before a films essay that can never be encompassed. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, films essay, however variously defined, films essay. The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium, films essay.

But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities. The Films essay montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity.

The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

Forster narration, films essay. Night Mail What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language montage with films essay traditionally literary one narration ; and, films essay, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as films essay vehicle of meaning — as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Films essay Resnais that the essay film proper emerges, films essay. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects painting, sculpture and their assorted creative personnel writers Paul ÉluardJean Cayrolfilms essay, Raymond Queneaucomposers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler.

This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist films essay of the British documentarians give way to films essay more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation, films essay. Originally conceived as commissions by films essay French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films essay famously ran into trouble from Films essay censors: Les statues meurent aussi for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from films essay presence — the whirl of the city, the films essay of the rain, the workings of industry — to felt absence.

The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them, films essay. The image films essay sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the minute A propos films essay Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the then squalid streets of the Old Town.

The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history. The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring.

Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, films essay, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, films essay, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

He films essay across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into films essay poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony, films essay.

Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age films essay short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the films essay of the French essay film, films essay.

Les statues meurent aussi co-directed with Chris Marker explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up films essay guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil.

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands — some fingerless, many distorted by the disease — are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them. Between andGodard and Gorin made films essay collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, films essay, into the mainstream with Tout va biena big-budget film films essay the aftermath of May featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and Jane Fonda.

It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August And what of her expression of compassionate concern? Those who insist films essay was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close films essay at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane. As a riposte to that thesis albeit never framed as suchF for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment — as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres — is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential films essay. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared — taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

Whatever job we do, films essay, we know it by heart; films essay also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful films essay in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right. Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die UmschulungDer Auftritt or Nicht ohne Risikofilms essay, all of which document as dispassionately as possible different — not necessarily simulated — scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital.

This films essay no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; films essay in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. By blurring the genre of films essay literary films essay, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders.

There is none. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change, films essay. Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically.

Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

What is Cinema Language? - A Film Essay

, time: 10:00

≡Essays on Movies. Free Examples of Research Paper Topics, Titles GradesFixer

 · One of the most influential high-school movies ever made, Amy Heckerling’s debut feature is both a raunchy crowd-pleaser and a keen sociological snapshot of teen culture. By Dana Stevens Essays — May 11, Short essay on Film as Mass Medium. Film is a means of creative expression. It performs the functions of mass media. Such as information, education, entertainment and transmission of culture. Films are widely popular and their audio visual nature provides them a pervasive power for social influence. Therefore, they have the potential to play an important role as a medium of entertainment, information Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins  · Title: Trans Industrialization in the Film Industry Example essay. Last modified: 24th Nov Introduction: In recent times, the film industry has enjoyed the concept of trans industrialization in a bid to increase revenue and capitalize on film brands and other title lines. It is normal for film studios to want to capitalize on this and even improve the title lines