King Kong: The Entertainment of the Masses “It's money and adventure and fame. It's the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o'clock tomorrow morning” (King Kong, Carl Denham). As Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) drags King Kong to Broadway, he makes ten thousand dollars in just one night for the exhibition of “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Thousands of New Yorkers paid twenty dollars per ticket, or the equivalent to three hundred sixty-nine dollars in today’s currency, to gaze at a prehistoric ape. This gaze found in King Kong is the “imperial gaze” developed against foreigners in early Hollywood travel films. Ann Kaplan comments on early travel films in “Hollywood, Science and Cinema: The Imperial and the Male Gaze in Classic Film” and states that: “They [travelers] mainly went to dominate, exploit and to use the Other for their own ends.” (61). For this reason, the …show more content…
Right after the audience gazes and criticises Kong for the first time, Denham asks the press to “take the first photographs of Kong and his captors.” As the sixteen photographers begin to take pictures, Kong roars in fury. Since Denham is only interested in the profit that can be generated from the press, he quickly calms the audience and tells the photographer to capture a photo of Ann (Fay Wray) and Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). A closeup of the flashing cameras is shown and then Kong gets out of control. It is worthy to mention that Kong had not roared as loud as in this scene (not on stage at least) to notice that the flash was what triggered Kong to act in a savage manner. It is then clear that the use of technology enraged Kong because he felt estranged and threaten. The camera symbolizes how the white traveler dehumanizes the foreign individual and reproduces this visualization to the rest of the
Looking at The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, we can see the first aspect used is the on-camera interview. The opening shot of this movie is an interview of the World Champion Donkey Kong player. The film itself has multiple interviews with different people. Most of the film is footage from the interviews. The directors take time to interview the World Champion, the challenger, the referee, other world champions of other games, and the families of the competitors. The interviews gave the audience a sense of who the person was and gave us some background information on their skill and how they came to like the game. Given the interviews, we were able to gain extra information about the gamers that we might not have been able to see from just watching them play the game. Additionally, it would be hard to make a movie about the Donkey Kong Champion without making it a documentary full of interviews. The interviews conducted informed the audience on the
Classic stories remain a classic because they convey a message which appeals to people of multiple generations despite changes in society. King Kong was released in print in 1932, a year prior to its release in Hollywood, as a part of the film’s advance marketing. The public of this generation easily accepted the story’s racist, colonialist, and sexist themes. Today, literary critics such as Cynthia Erb view the novel and film as representation of the early 30s and thus a resource to understand the cultural context of the times. In particular, King Kong provides a window through which a modern audience can understand and interpret racism of the 1930s.
This essay is based on films of the same story, told in different ways, with emphasis, themes, meaning and interpretation shaped or shaded by the situation of the storyteller; the cinematic mise-en-scene. Based on the same story, the films reveal and reflect the film-maker’s social norms and views, emerging from their different national contexts. While exploring the two films, this essay will examine elements of film language or semiotics: color saturation (or black and white), sound, setting, type of camera angles used; repetition of visual motifs (Metz, 1985). The two films explored were made in the 1960s. Neither film is American, yet both reveal influences and reflections on American cinema and American power; the Western film, adherence or detracting from Hollywood Classical cinema tropes, i.e. close-ups, shot-reverse-shot, POV, depth of field (Bazin, 1985: 128-9). The two films are Kurasawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964), from Japan and Italy, respectively. How are they different; how similar? Why do they use the same plot,
One does not necessarily have to cluck in disapproval to admit that entertainment is all the things its detractors say it is: fun, effortless, sensational, mindless, formulaic, predictable, and subversive. In fact, one might argue that those are the very reasons so many people love it. At the same time, it is not hard to see why cultural aristocrats in the nineteenth century and intellectuals in the twentieth hated entertainment and why they predicted, as one typical nineteenth century critic railed, that its eventual effect would be to over turn all morality, to poison the springs of domestic happiness, to dissolve the ties of our social order, and to involved our country in ruin." said Neal Gabler, the author of Life in the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. I agree with this quote, that entertainment is mind numbing and lessen the values of our society. Back in the nineteenth century, entertainment was something that actually stimulated their minds,
1. The thesis of this essay in the author's words is "Travel is how we put a voice to the Other and step a little beyond our second hand images of the alien." In other words, the author is trying to tell us that travelling is necessary in order for us to not hold prejudices and experience the lifestyle of other cultures.
It was November 20th, 2015, seven days after “the incident”. The sky was filled with patches of darkness. Marc Darko an angry, depressed, and brave man was on his way to Chicago because he needed to leave Wong Kong after “the incident”. When Marc Darko lived in Wong Kong he didn’t have a great time there.
clever camera techniques which create tension and fear. The camera shots also pay close attention to detail. For example, when the man with the dog throws a stick for his dog to fetch into the sea, the camera
obviously an allusion to the gigantic ape King Kong, which is an expression of his
The monster I chose for my topic is about a monster of a ape. His name is King Kong. He has been on film dating back from 1933. They had remade the film in 1976 and 2005 as well. This monster has toys, movies, books, comics, video games, theme parks and etc. The list goes on.
Symbolism is an inherent literary device used throughout Ishirō Honda’s 1962 film King Kong vs. Godzilla. By utilizing two of the most iconic monsters in cinematic history, King Kong and Godzilla, Honda depicts the shift from one culture to another and the battle that ensued. Honda also shows the different cultures that King Kong and Godzilla represent: Kong as the embodiment of modern Japanese culture, while Godzilla represents the traditional Japanese culture. However, when comparing these two creatures, one must first look at their origins from two other supplemental sources: Merian Cooper’s 1933 film King Kong and Ishirō Honda’s 1954 film Godzilla. These films reveal how each entity differs from Ishirō Honda’s 1962 film King Kong vs.
The musical aspect of this scene essentially begins with the native’s sounding of the gongs. This sets off a gradual increase in musical and dramatic tension. In the first twenty seconds of this scene we are presented with a slow tempoed trumpet piece before King Kong is introduced to the film. The rhythm of the trumpets mimics the thumping sound of King King’s steps.
Cinema of Attractions is concerned with the ability to display. Attractions wanted to show the ‘here and now’, interacting with its spectator with the aim of satisfying the audience’s curiosity quickly (Gunning, 2004: 44). It displays current events, scenes form everyday life, composed scenes, vaudeville performances and also camera tricks (as pioneered by George Méliès). Cinema of Attractions aims to astonish its audience (Strauven, 1999: 50). through displaying, rather than amusing its audience through narrative content. This is seen in films such as G. Méliès’ ‘ L'homme-orchestre (One Man Band)’ (1900), or his ‘L'homme à la tête de caoutchouc (The Man With The Rubber Head)’ (1901) where the actor(s) constantly address the camera/spectator and the audience is
Later, the sequence shows an ape holding the tools and hitting the ground with the tools along with a dramatic non-diegetic sound emphasizing the significance of the scene, and this scene also foreshadows that the violence will gradually get more serious relating to the human society later in the film. Other then the sounds, Kubrick also uses jump cuts from the ape to the monolith, then back to the ape followed by the animal bodies hitting the ground, finally cutting between the ape and the tool hitting the ground. With the shots, Kubrick exaggerates the violence to call attention to the action, so introducing how violence will play an effective role in the rest of the film, as well as how violence influences the behavior of human as they
pag) and (“Universal Studios Hollywood” 13). On the island, the filmmakers find that the inhabitants live within a huge palisade as protection from the island's monsters (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag) and (“Universal Studios Hollywood” 13). But King Kong, most fearsome of them all, is only placated by sacrificial offerings of young women (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag) and (“Universal Studios Hollywood” 13). Ann Darrow is kidnapped and offered to the giant gorilla beast (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag). Instead of killing her, he is infatuated, fighting in her defense against the other monsters (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag). Jack Driscoll and the others rescue Ann and capture the giant gorilla that is then taken to New York for exhibition (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag). King Kong subsequently breaks loose and searches for Ann, terrorizing the city (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag). In the end, the great ape climbs with his beloved to the top of the Empire State Building, where fighting airplane flyers machine-gunned him to death (Selznick, Cooper and Schoedsack n. pag).
The two movies I decided to do a film review on was Money Monster and The Big Short. Money Monster released on May 13th, 2016 was directed by Jodie Foster an award winning American actress () . Foster has been a successful actress ever since she was young,at age 12 she received an Oscar nomination for the film Taxi driver eventually leading to her winning a Golden Globe and being named as one of the best actresses of her generation(). The movie Money Monster is about a frustrated investor by the name of Kyle Budwell who lost $60,000,as a result of investing in a company called IBIS. The company had an unexpected glitch to the system during a trading algorithm, which led to a loss of $800 million for IBIS investors. Due to the unexpected financial loss Kyle faces he decides to make an unexpected