Meshes Of An Afternoon And Memento: A Comparative Analysis

Although cameras are machines used to capture a moment, Ondaatje argues that they do not accurately portray a person’s essence and their true self. To know someone’s genuine character, one must interact with them, rather than only viewing them through “ground glass or tripod” or the stories told through another person’s perspective. “Ground glass” represents camera’s lenses, a filter altering reality to fit the desired perception of a moment. Cameras are machines that influence someone’s perspective, rather than providing the true nature. Readers typically view Western society as an unknown wild land with no laws, but is it really so? Ondaatje’s use of cameras as a machine questions this notion and shows that cameras and images are only a biased representation of someone and how they want to be perceived.

In the short yet complex work “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, readers see a woman who goes through a complete spectrum of emotions in the short span of an hour. When the main character learns that her husband is dead, like most, she is shocked and utterly filled with grief. As the story continues, a dramatic change takes place within the mind of the main character, Louise. Upon the conclusion of her natural, wifely grief, she realizes that she is finally out from under the grasp of her husband and is now a free woman in a time when men dominated life at home and the goings on of society. Through his death, Louise finds the opportunity to be born again. Many of the emotions that the main character goes through are depicted through the imagery of her constantly changing environment, and the author specifically uses the architecture of her home as a main tool. In the story, the use of visual imagery projects the rise and fall of the main character as her life transitions quickly back and forth. Through an analysis of her characterization, these changes ultimately prove too much for her to handle. In Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” a character analysis can be performed based on the changes in her environment compared to the changes in her life situation. The layout of the world around Louise is used to show her initial grief, sudden realization of freedom, and her gateway to a new life free from oppression of men.

In David Resha’s “The Cinema of Errol Morris,” the author explores Morris’ use of testimonies and reenactments to reveal the “frailties of human subjectivity” (50). During the film “Thin Blue Line,” Morris employs an open voice documentary style that demonstrates an individual’s reality is born of their personal truth and objectivity. This is especially evident during the conflicting testimonies of the witnesses and the various versions of reenactments, which span from reality based to complete falsehoods. These inaccuracies are most often symbolized by the spilled milkshake, which represents “Officer Turko’s unreliability and more broadly, the mistakes, deceptions and confusions surrounding the Adam’s conviction” (64).

Reflexive documentaries do not aim to hide their objectivity and instead encourage viewers to embrace “documentary for what it is: a construct or representation” (Resha 2). Morris’s highly constructed shots and reenactments do not try to give the viewer a false reality but instead are used to progress the narrative. The reenactment sequence is the most groundbreaking characteristic of the film. The stylized shots of a milkshake flying through the air, the officer falling to the ground, and the car speeding away bring drama and excitement to the film in a way a simple retelling never could. The reenactments replay multiple times, highlighting the atypical path along which Morris is retelling the murder’s narrative.

The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s telling of the lives of three women in the course of a few days, reveals how the simplicity of objects can give insight into the characters, just by the way they interact with them. His use of mirrors, water and flowers explain the disparities between Clarissa’s, Virginia’s, and Laura’s lives suggesting that ultimately their weakness is themselves.

Memento is a movie directed by Chris Nolan. It was released in 2000. The leading actor is Guy Pearce. Carrie Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano are also in this movie. Memento is a perplexed thriller.

I enjoyed reading your post this week. I think that Maya Deren’s avant-garde film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), is subjective realism. In fact, I enjoyed the challenge of watching this film because after the fourth time, I realized the editing that distorted the time sequence. After trying to keep up with the film through jump cuts, and trying to understand what the repeated images of the key, knife, and the flower; I realized and understood that this is a dream-like film with no direct patterns. Overall, my interpretation of the film is a personal struggle of a woman regretting her decision of death from a life where being a female with all of the restrictions back in the 1940’s became too much for her to bare.

In Christopher Nolan’s 2001 neo-noir psychological thriller, Memento, he explores the idea of trust through a unique narrative structure. The film explores trust through the protagonist, Leonard Shelby and his interactions with characters, Natalie and Teddy in his hunt for the man who raped his wife. The structure of the film is split into two parts: colour scenes (the main plot line) and black and white scenes (the sub-plot line). Nolan alternates between the two; however, the colour scenes are shown backwards in time, from Leonard’s point of view, in first person; and the black and whites scenes are told forwards in a documentary style with just voice over and simple images. The start of the film opens with a scene literally shown backwards, which makes the audience aware of the structure of the way the story will be told.

This week we spent both classes watching Memento. The movie’s story wasn’t linear, instead two stories were shown simultaneously one starting at the beginning of the plot and one starting at the end of the plot, and both meeting in the middle. The story moving forward in time was shown in black and white, and the story moving backwards in time was shown in color. There were other hits to help viewers decipher at point of the plot they are watching. Some of the hints include what tattoos he has and what condition his car is in.

Many films have been made about the Vietnam War over the decades, however, the events and people that many of these films portray are not historically accurate. Many of these films have been embellished to satisfy the expectations of the viewers. Rather than producing a film that reflects the true nature and the events of the Vietnam War, the movie industry invents fictional characters and uses stereotypes in unison with fictional backstories that are meant to keep the audience’s attention throughout the film. The goal of the film is not to tell the truth, but rather to entertain people while earning profits from the film. In comparison to the average filmmaker, historians seek to find the actual truth of events that have occurred through the use of documents and first-hand accounts to understand history.

Finally, I argue, that by using a silent approach, that is, by not consciously using voiceover or providing historical explanations, these documentaries distance themselves from testimonio, first-person narratives, the “subjective turn” and “the performative documentary” that characterized the “first wave” (to use a term coined by Idelber Avelar) of postdictatorship documentary films in Argentina. In this sense, the films dialogue with Gastón Gordillo’s differentiation between haunting and memory. For Gordillo: “Strictly speaking, a haunting is distinct from memory, for it is not reducible to narratives articulated linguistically; it is, rather, an affect created by an absence that exerts a hard-to-articulate, nondiscursive, yet positive

In a story, things are often not quite what they seem to be. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up are good examples of stories that are not what they first appear to be. Through the medium of film, these stories unfold in different and exiting ways that give us interesting arguments on the nature of truth and reality.

La Jetée by Chris Marker is a 1962 science-fiction film that experiments with the concept of time travel and memories. This essay will discuss the use of narrative style in La Jetée by Chris Marker, in relation to the techniques used and their effects, and evaluate its effectiveness in conveying theme and concept, and argue that it was successful to a large extent.

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In “Story of an Hour”, Kate Chopin tells the story of a woman, Mrs. Mallard that goes through a hard time with the grieving of her husband’s death. However, Chopin focuses on the change of emotions when Mrs. Mallard sees her husband’s death as a welcoming to her freedom knowing that her marriage was consuming her own life. While grieving alone in her room, she looks through a window that illuminates her life when she looks at the “new spring life”(Chopin) that surrounds and awakens the nature. However, that’s not the only thing that she starts appreciating. The window does not only represent her opportunity to look outside, but it also represents a mirror or