The Last Train Home

After reviewing the discussion of genre in Chapter 8 of Film: From Watching to Seeing, demonstrate your understanding of one selected genre using a feature-length film.

    Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.

Bart Layton built this doc not from one perspective, but from a collection of them. Some stories, like “The Imposter” need a panoptic approach to connect the audience to the film. The themes of manipulation, identity and love are the main themes conveyed by Layton. These themes are communicated through sounds and visual imagery.

On the story of “On the Subway” the author Sharon Olds describes the main character in depth. The author uses imagery and symbolism as the techniques that describe the main character.

The novel depicts slavery and the problems faced by people due to racism in the history of America. The basic theme of the novel is the troubles and distresses that were faced by the slaves or colored people in those times. The book shows the struggles they did and the sacrifices they made for freedom.

1. Magnus Andreas Brattesto was born April 14 1890 in Norway. Magus was the first-born son in his family of dozen children. He works on a fishing boat when he left school at ten. Magnus took a ship to America by the fist Norwegian immigrant ship called Restauration and nicknamed the Norwegian Mayflower. He like many immigrants turned to service in the army was in order to become a full citizen, when servicing somewhere no longer discriminated because they shredded blood for their country.

Casablanca, first released on January 23rd, 1943 is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of Classical Hollywood film. Written and released in the midst of World War Two it explores themes such as love, desire and especially sacrifice. Although the love story of the protagonists is the cause and catalyst for most of the narrative, one would not necessarily associate it with the conventional Classical Hollywood love story. Rather as a fabula based on the principle of the importance of sacrifice in order to overcome a common enemy, in this case the Nazis. Casablanca does indeed contain many of the common characteristics identified with the Classical Hollywood film. An example being the the way director, Michael Curtiz used a mainly chronologically ordered narrative structure and the utilisation of a Cause and Effect chain. In this essay I will looking at the various ways I believe this film does fall into the criteria of a Classical Hollywood narrative and also how some could perceive that it does not.

In “A Century of Cinema”, Susan Sontag explains how cinema was cherished by those who enjoyed what cinema offered. Cinema was unlike anything else, it was entertainment that had the audience feeling apart of the film. However, as the years went by, the special feeling regarding cinema went away as those who admired cinema wanted to help expand the experience.

In service of this argument, the essay unfolds in three parts. The first section sketches an appropriate framework for understanding how cinema marshals and moves viewers by engaging them in a fully embodied experience.4 The second section offers a brief overview of the film's plot before turning to an analysis of its triptych narrative and affective development. The third and final section considers the methodological, critical, and theoretical implications suggested by the preceding analysis.

Relations between sympathy-empathy expressiveness and fiction have become a significant issue in the debate on the emotional responses to the film fiction. Due to their complexity many scholars found it useful to diagram them. With his essay, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”, Alex Neill tries to develop new theory for analyzing the fiction and, especially, the emotional responses from the audience on it. The project of this essay is represented with an aim to show the audience the significant value of the emotional responses to the film fiction. From my point of view in the thesis of his project he asks a simple question: “Why does the (film) fiction evoke any emotions in the audience?”, further building the project in a very plain and clever

One of the most important components for the movie is aesthetic. The reason is that aesthetic can create atmosphere and mood. Especially, one of the most famous Hong kong director Wong Kar Wai, who direct In the mood for Love (2000) put many elements of Aesthetic such as Mise en scene, sounds and cinematography. Aesthetic is an essential factor to construct a character, and create mood. Especially Wong Kar Wai has unique aesthetic to elicit emotion. “” Those components can bring audience to the movie. In this essay, I will argue that the subject of heartrending but romantic narrative has been depicted through the two components which are mise en scene, cinematography and sound. This will be done by analyzing every scene, followed by analyzing each element of the film aesthetic.

One of the last games I ever played of baseball didn't end till 10:00 pm. The game began at 7:00 and I was tired at the end of the game. The lights came on during my game and the lights only come on when it’s pitch black out. When the lights came on I knew it had to be really late for my game to end. Since my game was so late my family didn’t stay for the whole game. My dad wanted to take me home from the game since it was so late.

Naomi Greene once said that, “Pier Paolo Pasolini was the more protean figure than anyone else in the world of film.” This means that Pasolini was a versatile film director because he simplified cinema into the simplest way possible, while still visually embodying an important message to his cinematic viewers. Because of his encounter with Italy’s social changes, it influenced the writing and films he chose to write. His aspirations regarding his written work “Cinema of Poetry” explains how a writer usage of words and a filmmaker’s choice of images are linked to how cinema can be a poetry of language. He characterizes cinema as irrational and his approach on free indirect point of view is used to achieve a particular effect in his body of work. His claims made in the Cinema of Poetry illustrate why he stylized his films in the manner he did, such as Mamma Roma through the images he portrayed on screen. By examining Pasolini’s approach to poetic communication in the Cinema of Poetry, we can see that these cinematic attributes about reality and authenticity depicted in Mamma Roma are utilized to question cinematic viewer’s effortless identification of cinema with life. This is important to illustrate because Pasolini wants to motivate viewers to have an interpretative rather than a passionate relationship with the screen.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. Thesis. N.d. N.p.: Laura Mulvey, 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. NG Communications, 2006. Web. 20 Feb. 2014. .

David Bordwell wrote his article ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film’ in an effort to convey the main idea that “art cinema” can be considered as a distinct mode of film practice, through its definite historical existence alongside other cinematic modes, set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures. Rather than searching for the source of the art, or what drives the art in film, Bordwell compares art cinema to the classical narrative cinema, and highlights the differences in narrative structure. Bordwell makes the assumption that it defined itself against the classical narrative mode; especially with the way it deals with space, time, and the cause and effect link of events.