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Magic realism (or magical realism) is a literary genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realist setting. The term was coined in the 1920s by a German art critic to describe certain American paintings (see History below), but it is most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the twentieth century, marked by the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in 1967, which is considered the seminal magical realist text. Magical realism can be detected in the supernatural tales of E.T.A. Hoffman, which are related in the down-to-earth tone of confessional journalism. Magical realism may be viewed as more than a specific historical-geographical literary movement; it is an element of style that can be located in a large variety of novels, poetry, painting, and even film.
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The following elements are found in many magical realist novels, but not all are found in each novel and many are found in novels that fall under other genres.
As a literary style, magical realism often overlaps or is confused with other genres and movements.
The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to describe the unusual realism of primarily American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1920s, under whom traditional realism became subtly infused with overtones of the surreal and fantastical. The term grew popular in the 20th century with the rise of such authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Ernst Jünger, and many Latin American writers, most notably Jorge Luis Borges,Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, who confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." The most widely read of the South American magical realism narratives is García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction in the 1960s by a Venezuelan essayist and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South American genre; it only came in vogue after Nobel prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias used the expression to define the style of his novels. Today, magical realism is perhaps too broadly used, to characterize all realistic fictions with an eerie, otherworldly component, such as the tales of Edgar Allen Poe.
In painting, magical realism is a term often used interchangeably with post-expressionism. In 1925, art critic Franz Roh used this term to describe painting which signalled a return to realism after expressionism's extravagances which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself.
Other important aspects of magical realist painting, according to Roh, include:
Magical Realist Painting and Franz Roh (http://www.uh.edu/~englmi/gallery.php?mygal=franzRoh&title=Magical%20Realist%20Painting%20and%20Franz%20Roh)
A minority of theorists, such as Wendy B. Faris, argue that certain films, such as The Witches of Eastwick and Field of Dreams could be described as magical realist, but the term is still primarily used to describe literature.
Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was the dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s. It maintains that cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological. Its mechanics of representation include the camera and editing. The central position of the spectator within the perspective of the composition is also ideological.
Apparatus theory also argues that cinema maintains the dominant ideology of the culture within the viewer. Ideology is not imposed on cinema, but is part of its nature.
Apparatus theory follows an institutional model of spectatorship.
(this is an incomplete list)
Art film is a film style that began as a European reaction to the classical Hollywood style of film making. Art film provides similar kinds of cinematic illusion that one finds in classical Hollywood, but by loosening the ties between its style and narrative concerns, it allows for increased subjective realism and authorial expressivity.
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In the classical Hollywood form, film style is dictated by narrative. Everything that happens or is portrayed in a classical film is supposed to advance the narrative forward. All characters that are introduced are causal agents in the narrative, and classical films are filled with redundant images, verbal expressions, or symbols to get the message across to the viewer. This can be viewed as an artificial construction of reality, since nothing will be included in the film that does not clearly help the viewer understand what is going on. Art film rejects this as unrealistic, and attempts to portray real life situations and characters where things happen that do not always have a clear meaning or purpose, but instead are vague and even mysterious. Therefore, art film does not worry about clearly explaining how everything fits together. Any causal gaps that appear in the narrative of art film are often permanent.
Ambiguity
Because art films do not always have to explain themselves, they will often have episodic plots or wandering episodes, where a character might wander off, encounter something, do something, or say something for no clear reason, and no definite explanation will ever be provided in the film. Instead, things remain ambiguous to the very end. This presents a challenge to most viewers who are accustomed to the classical style, because loose ends are not all tied up in the final scene of the art film, as opposed to classical Hollywood films which have strong closure. Art film is less about pure escapist entertainment compared with the classical system, also adding to the challenge for the viewer.
The art film deals with realistic social problems in both objective and subjective ways. Classical Hollywood films are also able to portray social issues, but only within the bounds of the narrative, and therefore social issues are looked at only from the outside, objectively. But unlike classical Hollywood, art film is considered to be more effective at portraying its characters as more true to life, because their inner psychological state is portrayed with more subjective realism. Therefore, the characters are complex, and their behaviour as well as their relationships cannot be easily understood.
Because art film is not dictated by narrative concerns, there is more freedom for authorial expressivity. The film maker can express their own style or peculiarities more freely. For this reason, it is easy to recognize the makers of art films as auteurs.
Erotica, from the Greek eros, "love", are works of art, including literature, photography, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or arousing descriptions. Erotica is rather a modern word used to describe the portrayal of human sensuality and sexuality with high-art aspirations, differentiating such work from commercial pornography.
It has been said, ironically, that "The difference between erotica and pornography is simple. Erotica is what I like; pornography is what you like, you pervert".
While pornography popularly focuses on unadorned and unemotional lusts and the explicit depiction of sexual acts, erotica tends to define material and higher emotional content, the development of place, character and story line, or of an overall artistic theme. However, such distinctions are necessarily subjective and may say more about the critic's own tastes on erotic material than the artistic and other attributes of the material itself. In the motion picture sense, soft porn is a similar kind of commercial art form that resides in the area between erotica and hardcore pornography, although erotica, as a type of fine art, may also be highly explicit.
It is a notable trait of the strength of the human reproductive drive relative to the psyche as a whole, that unambiguous reference to sexuality, framed in a manner which the perceiver thereof finds acceptable, tends to initiate an involuntary reaction of sexual arousal, possibly building increased sexual desire, which may lead to creating or taking advantage of opportunity to engage in sexual activity. This can be true of erotica just as well as other, both more and less refined references to sex. Depictions of the human body which merely fail to conceal or disguise the secondary sexual characteristics of its particular gender may be all that is necessary to trigger arousal in a person who is attracted to that gender. For this reason, erotica is too broadly described merely in terms of the effect that it engenders in its audience, as all sexually related matter has the potential to create such an effect. For example, in the absence of the availability of pornography, some men have used clothing catalogs as a form of erotica.
Film noir is a stylistic approach to genre films forged in depression-era detective and gangster movies and hard-boiled detective stories which were a staple of pulp fiction.
Film noir is based in large part on naturalism, a movement in literature based on realism. Film noir is French for "black film", and is pronounced accordingly ("fīlm nwahr"): the transliterated plural is films noir.
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The term film noir is often attributed to French film critic Nino Frank. Prior use of the term has been cited to the French writing team Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau whose novels were adapted into films: D'entre les morts became Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo; Celle qui n'était plus became Diabolique. (see writer Stuart Kaminsky).
Ultimately, the term derived from the name of a series of hard-boiled detective fiction books entitled Série Noire, from the French pattern of naming a series of books after the color of their bindings. They were mainly shot in black-and-white in the United States between the early 1940s and the late 1950s. Many were low-budget supporting features without major stars, in which 'moonlighting' writers, directors and technicians, some of them blacklisted, found themselves relatively free from big-picture restraints. Many of the most popular examples of film noir center upon a woman of questionable virtue and are also known as bad girl movies. Major studio feature films demanded a wholesome, positive message. Weak and morally ambiguous lead characters were ruled out by the "star system", and secondary characters were seldom allowed any depth or autonomy. Flattering soft lighting, deluxe interiors and elaborately-built exterior sets were the rule. Noir turned all this on its head, creating bleak but intelligent dramas tinged with nihilism and cynicism, in real-life urban settings, and using unsettling techniques such as the confessional voice-over or hero's-eye-view camerawork. Gradually the noir style re-influenced the mainstream it had subverted. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is often referred to as the last "classical" film noir.
In the 1960s American filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn and Robert Altman created genre films that broke the strict format of the genre's rule to convey social and political messages. In The Long Goodbye Altman's hard-boiled detective is presented as a hapless bungler who can't help but lose the "moral battle". While not a direct influence, the "Spaghetti Westerns" of Italian director Sergio Leone incorporated the moral ambiguity and gritty characterizations of film noir, reviving the moribund genre of the American Western.
The genre has been parodied (both ruthlessly and affectionately) on many occasions, the most notable examples being Steve Martin's black-and-white "cut and paste" homage Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam. Many of Joel and Ethan Coen's films are excellent examples of modern films influenced by the film noir genre – especially The Man Who Wasn't There, the comedy The Big Lebowski and Blood Simple, the title of which was lifted from the Dashiell Hammett story Red Harvest.
The cynical, pessimistic worldview of noirs strongly influenced the creators of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction in the early 1980s. Blade Runner is among the most popular films coming from this era. Characters in these films are derived from 1930s gangster films and, more importantly, from pulp fiction magazines such as The Shadow, Dime Mystery Detective and The Black Mask.
The aesthetics of film noir are heavily influenced by German Expressionism. When Adolf Hitler took over Germany, many important film artists were forced to emigrate (among them were Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak). They took with them techniques they developed (most importantly the dramatic lighting and the subjective, psychological point of view) and made some of the most famous films noir. Another important influence came from Italian neorealism. After 1945, film noir adopted the neorealist look, and scenes were shot in real city locations, not in the studio; a perfect example of this being the film which is often referred to as the archetypal film noir, Double Indemnity. Books by the Black Mask writers Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler (Murder My Sweet, based on Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely; The Big Sleep) became among the most famous films noirs.
Recent development related to film noir-type media include the 2005 comic book movie Sin City and even a video game, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.
Noirs tend to include dramatic shadows and stark contrast (a technique called low-key lighting). Technically speaking, film noir specifies a movie made using monochrome, high contrast images, typically a 10:1 ratio of light to dark, rather than the more typical 3:1 ratio. Film noir in this sense makes use of deep shadows and carefully directed lighting. Since films using this technique usually fit the genre described above, the term lost its technical meaning and became the name of the genre itself.
Film noir tends to feature characters existential situations and making choices out of desperation. Frequent themes are murder/crime, infidelity, jealousy, corruption, betrayal, and hopeless fatalism. Comedy, however, has been handled with the stylistic affectations of noir, for example the Thin Man movies, Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein and the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.
Film noir is at its core pessimistic. The stories it tells are of people trapped in a situation they did not want, often a situation they did not create, striving against random uncaring fate, and usually doomed. Almost all film noir plots involve the hard-boiled, disillusioned male and the dangerous femme fatale. Usually because of sexual attraction or greed, the male commits vicious acts, and in the end both he and the femme fatale are punished or even killed for their actions.
Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential German dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.
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Born in Augsburg, Bavaria, Brecht studied medicine and worked briefly as an orderly in a hospital in Munich during World War I. After the war he moved to Berlin where an influential critic, Herbert Ihering, brought him to the attention of a public longing for modern theater. Already in Munich his first two plays, Baal and Drums in the Night, had had performances, and he got to know Erich Engel, a director who worked with him off and on for the rest of his life. In Berlin, In the Jungle of the Cities, starring Fritz Kortner and directed by Engel, became his first success.
During the postwar socialist governments and then the Weimar Republic, Brecht met and began to work with Hanns Eisler — the composer with whom he shared the closest friendship throughout his life. He also met Helene Weigel, who would become his second wife and accompany him through exile and for the rest of his life. His first book of poems, Hauspostille, won a literary prize.
Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple Lehrstücke (teaching plays), which attempted a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did his first great play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray the drama in financial transactions. He also worked in the theaters of Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.
This collective also created the story for, and Brecht wrote songs and engaged Kurt Weill to compose, The Threepenny Opera — the largest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. This was followed by Mahagonny, less of a success and eclipsed by the dawn of fascist rule in Germany. After Adolf Hitler won the elections, Brecht was in great danger and left for a long exile — in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, then England, and finally in the United States.
In exile and in active resistance of the Fascist movement, Brecht wrote his most famous plays: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Puntila and Matti, his Hired Man, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Good Person of Sezuan, among many other works. He also wrote many poems which have continued to attract notice to this day. He participated some in screenplays for Hollywood, for instance Hangmen also Die, but had no real success or pleasure in this.
After World War II the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) hounded Brecht, and he left the United States. He came to Switzerland where he adapted Antigone and then was invited to Berlin by East Germany. Horrified at the reinstatement of Nazis into the government of the western portion of Germany, Brecht made his home in the east. He had not been a member of the communist party, but had been deeply schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch. He saw the goal of communism as the only reliable antidote to militarist fascism and spoke out against the remilitarisation of the west and the division of Germany.
He was almost as uncomfortable for his East German hosts as for the West Germans across the iron curtain. Brecht was a scruffily dressed person and he invented designer stubble — he always looked as though he had shaved three days earlier. As a result, security guards once excluded him from a reception being given in Berlin in his own honour.
Brecht also found the experience of living in a Stalinist state far different from what he imagined in exile, when he composed works such as Die Massnahme (The Measure), which glorified the self-denying infallible vanguard party, or, more concretely, in Die Massnahmen, which justified the political decisions made by the Comintern that resulted in the spectacular failure of the revolution attempted in Shanghai in 1927. Brecht showed his more sober appreciation of the impossibility of socialism without democracy in a piece he wrote while living in Berlin in the 1950s, after the state suppressed a workers' revolt in 1953:
"Die Lösung"
Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?
"The Solution"
After the uprising on June 17th
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had flyers distributed in Stalin Way that said
That the People had frivolously
Thrown away the Government's Confidence
And that they could only regain it
Through Redoubled Work. But wouldn't it be
Simpler if the Government
Simply dissolved the People
And elected another?
Although he lived in the DDR, a copyright on his writings was held by a Swiss company and he received valuable hard currency remittances. He used to drive around East Berlin in a prewar DKW car — a rare luxury in the austere divided capital.
The Berliner Ensemble, that world famous theater which toured and was the most influential theater of the postwar decades, was given to his wife: the actress Helene Weigel. She ran it as a theater devoted primarily to the plays and praxes developed by Brecht until her death in 1971. Brecht wrote few plays in his last years in Berlin, none of them as famous. Some of his most famous poems though, including the "Buckower Elegies", were from this time.
Brecht died an early death at the age of 58 in 1956 (of a heart attack), leaving a legacy which has been taken up by nearly every country in the world, particularly those where political activity is occurring. In one of his last poems he ironically suggested that inscribing "He made suggestions; we took them on" on his gravestone would be "a way to honour everyone". In fact, on his grave at the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder Cemetery in Berlin there is only a boulder with his name.
Had he wanted to use it, one of his late poems could have served as a fitting epitaph:
Und ich dachte immer, die allereinfachsten Worte
Müssen genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist
Muß jedem das Herz zerfleischt sein.
Daß du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst.
Das wirst du doch einsehn.
And I always thought that the simplest words
Must be enough. That when I say how things are
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up.
"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than
an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a
diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first
person and will relate what has happened to them. It may be the
story of their first love or their most recent; of their political
awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service,
their marriage, their last vacation...and it will be enjoyable
because it will be true, and new...The film of tomorrow will not be
directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom
shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.
The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the
number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends
the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love."
— François Truffaut, published in Arts magazine, May 1957
Source: Miami
The structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of codes and conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication. An example of this is understanding how the simple combination of shots can create an additional idea: the blank expression on a man's face, a piece of pie, and then back to the man's face. While nothing in this sequence literally expresses hunger--or desire--the juxtaposition of the images convey that meaning to the audience.
Unraveling this additional meaning can become quite complex. Lighting, angle, shot duration, juxtaposition, cultural context, and a wide array of other elements can actively reinforce or undermine a sequence's message.
Lev Kuleshov was an early Russian filmmaker who believed that juxtaposing two unrelated images could convey a separate meaning. In the Kuleshov experiment he filmed Ivan Mozhukhin, a famous Russian actor, and shots of a bowl of soup, a girl, a teddy bear, and a child's coffin. He then cut the shot of the actor into the other shot; each time it was the same shot of the actor. Viewers felt that the shots of the actor conveyed different emotions suggested by the other stimulus, though each time it was in fact the same shot.
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The effect has also been studied by psychologists.
Queer literary interpretation is a method of literary interpretation stemming from Marxism, Feminism, and the gay rights movement. It is an addition to literary theory in the 1980s.
Only partially based on gay, lesbian and bisexual issues, a queer literary interpretation is largely concerned with sexual identity, especially "closeted" (hidden) sexual identity. Other "closeted" aspects of works are often examined, as well.
There are opposing views of queer literary theory. One view is that sexual identity is "fixed", and may be discerned by careful study. The opposing view is that sexual identity is both fluid and socially constructed, and thus there is no "absolute" identity.
Questions that a queer literary interpretation might attempt to answer:
A traditional work of literature can be "queered" by applying this type of interpretation.
Examples:
Good works for queer literary interpretation:
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play by Tennessee Williams describing a culture clash between Blanche DuBois—a pretentious, fading relic of the Old South—and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, inner-city immigrant class. The first stage version was produced by Irene Mayer Selznick with Marlon Brando starring as Stanley, Jessica Tandy as Blanche, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. Brando portrayed Stanley with an overt sexuality that made Brando, Stanley, and Tennessee Williams into cultural touchstones. The play opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948.
Brando's magnetic performance tricked audiences into rooting for Stanley in the opening scenes of the play, effectively implicating them in Stanley's eventual brutality towards Blanche.
Blanche DuBois is a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her nymphomania and alcoholism. After her ancestral southern plantation is "lost" (due to the "epic fornications" of her ancestors), Blanche arrives at her sister's house in the French Quarter of New Orleans where the multicutural setting is a shock to her nerves.
Stella, the sister, is just as addicted to sex as Blanche and is willing to put up with Stanley's crudity and lack of culture because he is great in bed. (Of course, she doesn't put it in quite those simple terms -- but this was racy stuff in the 1940s.)
Blanche and Stanley, together with Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, are among the most recognizable characters in American drama.
The reference to the streetcar (tram) called Desire is ironic, as well as an accurate piece of New Orleans geography. Blanche has to travel on it to reach Stella's home, the idea being that she has already indulged in desire before she arrives. Her sorrow is that the pleasure brought from desire is only short, just like the streetcar journey. It does not give her security. Still, she cannot return on the streetcar named Desire because she has only a one-way ticket.
In 1951, Elia Kazan directed a movie based on the play; Vivien Leigh replaced Tandy but the other three main characters remained the same. In 1999 the film, widely regarded a classic, was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Censorship of the time called for the end of the film involving Stella's renunciation of Stanley's rape, perhaps to the point of leaving the household. The actual play's ending is far more ambiguous with a distraught Stella (at having sent off her sister Blanche) mutely allowing herself to be fondled by Stanley.
The movie won Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Karl Malden), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Vivien Leigh), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Kim Hunter), and Best Art Direction -- Set Decoration, Black-and-White. It was also nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Marlon Brando), Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Costume Design, Black-and-White, Best Director, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, Best Picture, Best Sound, Recording and Best Writing, Screenplay.
Streetcar came shortly after Williams's first big success, The Glass Menagerie of 1945. While Williams kept writing plays and fiction into the 1980s, none of his later works lived up to the critical reputation of his first hits.
Streetcar explores a similar sitatuion to the works of Chekov, who explored the parallel fall of the upper class in turn of the century Russia. Stanley may in some interpretations be seen as a hero in the style of Ayn Rand, a new-age meritocrat struggling to overthrow the old pretentious upper class.
The concept of gaze (often also called the gaze), in analysing visual media, is one that deals with how an audience views other people presented. This concept is extended in the framework of feminist theory, where it can deal with how men look at women, how women look at themselves and other women, and the effects surrounding this.
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The gaze can be characterized by who is doing the looking:
These are not the only forms of gaze. Other forms include the gaze of an audience within a "text within the text", such as Lisa Simpson and Bart Simpson watching the cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy on The Simpsons, or editorial gaze, whereby a certain aspect of the text is given emphasis, such as in photography, where a caption or a cropping of an image depicting one thing can emphasize a completely different idea.
Other theorists such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen provide the idea of the gaze as a relationship between offering and demanding gaze: indirect gaze is an offer by the spectator, where we initiate the gaze, and the subject is not aware of this, and direct gaze is a demand by the subject, who looks at us, demanding our gaze.
Gaze can also be further categorized into the direction of the gaze, where
the subjects are looking at each other, apart, at the same object, or where
one is gazing at another who is gazing at something else.
Gazing and seeing someone gaze upon another provides us with a lot of information about our relationship to the subjects, or the relationships between the subjects upon whom we gaze upon, or the situation in which the subjects are doing the gazing.
The mutuality of the gaze can reflect power structure, or the nature of a relationship between the subjects, as proposed by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, where this "tell[s] us who has the right and/or need to look at whom".
Gazing can often reflect emotion without speech - in Western culture, continued staring upon another can be quite unsettling upon the subject.
Although it may appear that "gaze" is merely looking at, Jonathan Schroeder tells us that "it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze". The gaze characterizes and displays the relationships between the subjects by looking.
This idea forms a basis of feminist analysis of texts.
The gaze is used in feminist theory as a means to demonstrate power asymmetries by what is termed male gaze, whereby a man gazes at a woman. Such feminist theorists posit that since it is almost always the females who are being gazed upon by the male, the male exhibits power over the woman.
This form of gaze can be the sexual gaze by a man towards a woman (so called "taking a pass"), or the gazing of an image of a woman in some text or in the media. Laura Mulvey, identifies the action of possessing a gaze as being an intrinsically male (the "male gaze"), and identifies the action of being gazed upon with the female. This harks back to binaries of male/active, female/passive.
This idea of power relationships within the gaze can be continued to analyse gendered power relationships in the depictions of women in advertising. Some advertising presents women in a sexual manner, and it is argued that this degrades women because of the power that the gaze provides for heterosexual men viewing these advertisements. Furthermore, Erving Goffman in Gender Advertisements describes that in his study the placement of men was higher than that of women in an advertisement. This positioning forces the gaze asymmetrically, the male must look down to the woman, and the female up to the man.
Male gaze in relation to feminist theory presents asymmetrical gaze as a means of exhibiting an asymmetrical power relationship, that is, the male gazing upon a female renders the female having an unwanted gaze upon her. However, this may not necessarily be the case; many societies have women who enjoy being gazed upon, models and beauty pageants in Western society for example, have women who are willing to be gazed upon. Some second-wave feminist viewpoints would argue whether the women are actually willing or not. Evolutionary biological explanations for the male gaze also exist.
The question of whether a female gaze exists in contrast to the male one arises naturally in considering the so-called male gaze. Mulvey, the originator of the phrase "male gaze", argues that "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze...". Nalini Paul describes Wide Sargasso Sea, where the character Antoinette views Rochester and places a garland upon him to appear as a hero, and "Rochester does not feel comfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus he rejects it by removing the garland and crushing the flowers."
In the perspective of male gaze as merely posessing a gaze, the position of a female posessing the gaze is then the female assuming the male gaze. Eva-Maria Jacobsson supports this by describing a "female gaze" as "a mere cross identification with masculinity".
However, disregarding the viewpoint of gendered posession of gaze as proposed by Mulvey above, there is a lot of evidence to support a view of a female gaze, an objectification of men in some texts, such as in some advertisements and teenage magazines. The view that men are somehow reluctant to be gazed upon is also not necessarily supported, for example, at an exhibition called The Female Gaze, where female artists study the male form, Therese Mulligan mentioned "To get these men who had leered at her on the street to strike these poses was amazing. And you could tell that they loved being looked at by her. These guys aren't attractive, but they sure think they are."
Female gaze is also not always sexual (neither would be male gaze), but can also be directed towards other women for several reasons, such as in comparison of body image or in clothing.
Jacques Lacan, early and influential theorist into child development, found the concept of the gaze important in what he termed "the mirror stage", whereupon children gaze upon their own image and present themselves as the ideal ego.
Other theorists use a Freudian perspective upon the gaze, identifying it with the same feelings of fear of castration and the talion principle.
The concepts of psychoanalysis have been applied to films in various ways; however the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of theory that took concepts developed by the French psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan and applied them to the experience of watching a film.
The film viewer is seen as the subject of a "gaze" that is largely "constructed" by the film itself, where what is on screen becomes the object of that subject's desire.
The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which the film may appear to offer through identification with an image; in fact, according to Lacanian theory, identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always split simply by virtue of coming into existence.
In film theory, narrativity refers to the proceses by which a story is both presented by the filmmaker and interpreted by the viewer. The term must be distinguished from narrative, which refers to the story itself.
Narrativity is a common subject of debate in film theory. Many believe that the interpretation of a film's narrative is subjective. In other words, the same story may appear differently to a viewer, depending on their background. Other important aspects explored by film theorists are the factors which distinguish narrativity in film from that of other art forms.
When exploring narrativity in film, several factors must be taken into account. For example, the order in which the events of the story are presented. Films often employ non-linear storytelling, which refers to a story not presented chronologically. Another important facet of narrativity is montage, or the juxtaposition of images. Perhaps most importantly of all, are the images themselves. A filmmaker's choice of what to show, and what not to show is key to understanding them as an artist and a storyteller.
Intellectual montage is an alternative to continuity editing proposed by Sergei Eisenstein where a new idea emerges from a sequence of shots and where the new idea is not originally found in any of the individual shots.
This style of editing offers discontinuity in graphic qualities, violations of the 180 degree rule, and the creation of impossible spatial matches. It is not concerned with the depiction of a comprehensible spatial or temporal continuity as is found in the Classical Hollywood continuity system. It draws attention to temporal ellipses because changes between shots are obvious, less fluid, and non-seamless.
Intellectual montage might employ jump cuts, often using jump cuts and non-diegetic inserts or frequentative editing.
Eisenstein argued that “Montage is conflict” where new ideas emerge from the collision of images and where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of the edited sequence. A new concept explodes into being.
Eisenstein argued that the new meaning that emerged out of conflict is the same phenomenon found in the course of historical events of social and revolutionary change. He used intellectual montage in his experimental films (such as “October”) to portray the political situation surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution.
He also believed that intellectual montage expresses how every-day thought processes happen. In this sense, the montage will in fact form thoughts in the minds of the viewer, and is therefore a powerful tool for propaganda.
Eisenstein relates this to non-literary “writing” in pre-literate societies, such as the ancient use of pictures and images in sequence, that are therefore in ‘conflict.’ Because the pictures are relating to each other, their collision creates the meaning of the ‘writing.’ Similarly, he describes this phenomenon as a dialectical materialism.
Intellectual montage follows in the tradition of the ideological Russian Proletcult Theatre which was a tool of political agitation. In his film “Strike,” Eisenstein includes a sequence with cross-cut editing between the slaughter of a bull and slaughter of people. The affect that he wished to produce was not simply to show images of people's lives in the film but more importantly to shock the viewer into understanding the reality of their own lives. Therefore, there is a revolutionary thrust to this kind of film making.
Eisenstein discussed how a perfect example of his theory is found in his film "October," which contains a sequence where the concept of ‘god’ is connected to class structure, and various images that contain overtones of political authority and divinity are edited together in descending order of impressiveness so that the notion of god eventually becomes associated with a block of wood. He believed that this sequence caused the minds of the viewer to automatically reject all political class structures.
Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism as defined by later Communists and their Parties (sometimes called "orthodox" Marxism). As the name signals, it is an outgrowth of both Hegel's dialectics and Ludwig Feuerbach's and Karl Marx's philosophical materialism, and is most directly traced to Marx's fellow thinker, Friedrich Engels. It uses the concepts of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to explain the growth and development of human history. Although Hegel and Marx themselves never used the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" model to summarize dialectics or dialectical materialism, it is now commonly used to illustrate the essence of the method.
Some Marxist theorists, critical of dialectical materialism, have called for a reassessment of the place of Engels' work Dialectics of Nature in the Marxist canon. They note that Marx preferred the term "the materialist conception of history," which was later shortened to "historical materialism." This, they argue, limits his method within a specifically human, sociological context, distinguishing it from a universalizing theory. And apart from the historical materialists, other thinkers in Marxist philosophy have had recourse to the original texts of Marx and Engels and have created other Marxist philosophical projects and concepts which are alternatives, and sometimes rivals, to the often-Party-sponsored ideas of "diamat" (an abbreviation for "dialectical materialism").
While dialectical materialism has been traditionally associated almost exclusively with Marxism, some claim that the philosophy is applicable to a non-Marxist worldview as well. There is nothing in either the concept of dialectic as elaborated by Hegel or in materialism itself which requires Marxism. However, because Marxism is essentially free of traditional theological influences, it is particularly well-suited to dialectical materialism, and a comparable political system based on the philosophy has not yet emerged.
Dialectical materialism was foreshadowed in Taoism, an ostensibly materialistic philosophical system which, being free of supernatural elements, posits a naturalistic unity of complementary polarities known as Yin and Yang. This co-substantial union of opposites, known as the Taiji or 'Supreme Ultimate,' is a forerunner of modern dialectical thinking.
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In essence, materialism answers the fundamental question of philosophy by asserting the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought.
Materialism holds that the world is material, that all phenomena in the universe consist of matter in motion, wherein all things are interdependent and interconnected and develop in accordance with natural law, that the world exists outside us and independently of our perception of it, that thought is a reflection of the material world in the brain, and that the world is in principle knowable.
Dialectics is the science of the most general laws of development of nature, society, and thought. Its principal features are as follows:
1) The universe is not an accidental mix of things isolated from each other, but an integral whole, wherein things are mutually interdependent.
2) Nature is in a state of constant motion:
3) Development is a process whereby insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes lead to fundamental, qualitative changes. The latter occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, in the form of a leap from one state to another.
4) All things contain within themselves internal contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, change, development in the world.
The three laws of dialectics are:
The New Wave (French: Nouvelle vague) of French cinema was a cinematic movement of the 1960s.
The writers of the magazine Cahiers du cinéma decided to apply their theories of the auteur — the director as the center of all moviemaking — to the world by directing movies themselves. They praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Former writers of the magazine such as François Truffaut with his The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard with Breathless (1960) marked the beginning of this era. Other directors included Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais.
The movies featured hitherto unprecedented methods of expression, such as seven minute tracking shots. The movies also featured existential themes, such as the stressing of the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. The themes and expressions were not the only critical aspects of the films: how they were shot was also important. French New Wave directors often shot in the streets, rejecting the idea of films made in studios. The use of lightweight cameras, lights and sound equipment were innovations that the filmmakers used to their advantage. Many New Wave Films are recognizable by their fluid movements, with shots often following characters down the Paris streets.
It is important to realize that many of the French New Wave films were done on extremely small budgets. Often they were shot in a friends' apartment, and used the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots). The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations: for example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, several scenes have a choppy feeling to them, as they were filmed in one long take: parts that didn't work were simply cut right from the middle of the take.
The style had an impact on American movies as well. After Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) the New Hollywood directors (e.g. Altman, Coppola, De Palma and Scorsese) of the late 1960s/early 1970s made movies inspired by their European (and in particular French) counterparts. The latest American director who admits a serious influence of the French new wave is Quentin Tarantino.
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Feminist analysis is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical, ground. It encompasses work done in a broad variety of disciplines, prominently including the approaches to women's roles and lives and feminist politics in anthropology and sociology, economics, women's and gender studies, Literary criticism, and philosophy (especially Continental philosophy).
Feminist analysis aims to understand the nature of inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality. While generally providing a critique of social relations, many proponents of feminism also focus on analyzing gender inequality and the promotion of women's rights, interests, and issues. Themes explored in feminism include discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression and patriarchy
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Feminists have taken many different approaches to the analysis of cinema. These include discussions of the function of women characters in particular film narratives or in particular genres, such as film noir, where a woman character can often be seen to embody a subversive sexuality that is dangerous to men and is ultimately punished with death.
In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Through the use of various film techniques, such as shot reverse shot, the viewer is led to align herself with the point of view of the (male) protagonist. Notably, women function as objects of this gaze far more often than as proxies for the spectator.
See Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which can be found here (http://www.panix.com/~squigle/vcs/mulvey-vpnc.html).
The study of feminist legal theory is a school thought based on the common view that law's treatment of women in relation to men has not been equal nor fair. It possesses many similarities to liberal feminism, however it is not seen as a alternative to other feminist schools of thought rather than a complimenting theory.
The goals of feminist legal theory as defined by leading theorist Claire Dalton, consist of understanding exploring the female experience, figuring out how law and institutions oppose females, and figuring out what changes can be committed to. This is to be accomplished through studying the connections between the law and gender as well as applying feminist analysis to concrete areas of law.
There are three phases in the developement of feminist legal theory. Initially there was the "equality stage" where women would fight for equal rights and representation. From this women achieved the right to vote, better access to male dominated jobs, and other goals. Secondly, there was the "difference stage" where the inate female experience was taken into account. This brought about issues such as the inequity in the work environment in dealing with pregnancies, among others. Lastly, there was the "diversity phase" where the focus changed to looking at the experience of female minorities.
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in women's studies and gender studies by "third-wave" authors. In the most general and simple terms, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s -- in the first and second waves of feminism -- was concerned with the politics of women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature. Since the arrival of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity and third-wave feminism, feminist literary criticism has taken a variety of new routes. It has considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as part of the deconstruction of existing relations of power, and as a concrete political investment. It has been closely associated with the birth and growth of queer studies. And the more traditionally central feminist concern with the representation and politics of women's lives has continued to play an active role in criticism.
Modern Feminist analysis has been extensively criticized as being predominantly, but not exclusively, associated with western middle class academia.
Feminist film theory is theoretical work within film criticism which is derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Feminists have taken many different approaches to the analysis of cinema. These include discussions of the function of women characters in particular film narratives or in particular genres, such as film noir, where a woman character can often be seen to embody a subversive sexuality that is dangerous to men and is ultimately punished with death.
In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument. This argument holds that through the use of various film techniques, such as shot reverse shot, a typical film's viewer becomes aligned with the point of view of its male protagonist. Notably, women function as objects of this gaze far more often than as proxies for the spectator.
In diegesis the author tells the story. He is the narrator himself who presents to the audience or the readership his or his characters' thoughts and all that is in his or their imagination, their fantasies and dreams.
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Diegesis has been contrasted since Plato's and Aristotle's times with mimesis, the form that is showing rather than telling the thoughts or the inner processes of characters, by external action and acting. Diegesis, however, is the main narrative in fiction and drama, the telling of the story by the author, in that he speaks to the reader or the audience directly. He may speak through his characters or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.
Diegesis may concern elements, such as characters, events and things within the main or primary narrative. However, the author may include elements which are not intended for the primary narrative, such as stories within stories; characters and events that may be referred to elsewhere or in historical contexts and that are therefore outside the main story and are thus presented in an extradiegetic situation.
In film, diegesis is the narrative that includes all the parts of the story that are not actually shown on the screen, such as events that have led up to the present action; people who are being talked about; or events that are presumed to have happened elsewhere; in fact, all the frames, spaces and actions not focused on visually in the film's main narrative.
Sound in films is termed diegetic if it is part of the narrative sphere of the film. For instance, if a character in the film is playing a piano, or turns on a CD, the resulting sound is "diegetic." If, on the other hand, music plays in the background but cannot be heard by the film's characters, it is termed non-diegetic.
Cahiers du cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca. It was a development from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma and the members of two Paris film clubs - Objectif 49 (Bresson, Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, etc.) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin. Initially edited by Eric Rohmer (Maurice Scherer) it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut.
The critical writing of Cahiers re-invented the basic tenets of film theory (auteurs, mise en scène, la critique des beautés etc.) and film scholarship - establishing the 'value' of the Hollywood films of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks then directors including Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, and Anthony Mann, as well as Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophuls, and Jean Cocteau. While also attacking the existing French directors (La qualité francaise - novelization, over-elaboration etc.). The magazine also created the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave of French cinema, which was largely directed by ex-writers of the magazine.
After being reactionary and isolated in the 1950s the replacement of Rohmer by Jacques Rivette in 1963 meant that the magazine staff were more sensitive to political and social trends as well as responding more to non-Hollywood films. The style moved through literary modernism in the early 1960s to radicalism and "dialectical materialism" by 1970 and through the mid-70s the magazine was run by a Maoist collective. A return to more commercial perspectives in the late 1970s, marked by a review of Jaws, and a more organised turnover of editors (Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, and Charles Tesson) meant the rehabilitation of some of the old Cahiers favourites as well as some new names (like de Oliveira, Raúl Ruíz, Hsiao-hsien, Chahine, and Pialat). More recent writers have included Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, Charles Tesson and Franck Nouchi, Andre Techine, Leos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Danièle Dubroux, and Serge Le Peron.
In 1998, the Editions de l'Etoile (the company publishing Cahiers) was acquired by the press group Le Monde.
The New Wave (French: Nouvelle vague) of French cinema was a cinematic movement of the 1960s.
The writers of the magazine Cahiers du cinéma decided to apply their theories of the auteur — the director as the center of all moviemaking — to the world by directing movies themselves. They praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Former writers of the magazine such as François Truffaut with his The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard with Breathless (1960) marked the beginning of this era. Other directors included Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais.
The movies featured hitherto unprecedented methods of expression, such as seven minute tracking shots. The movies also featured existential themes, such as the stressing of the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. The themes and expressions were not the only critical aspects of the films: how they were shot was also important. French New Wave directors often shot in the streets, rejecting the idea of films made in studios. The use of lightweight cameras, lights and sound equipment were innovations that the filmmakers used to their advantage. Many New Wave Films are recognizable by their fluid movements, with shots often following characters down the Paris streets.
It is important to realize that many of the French New Wave films were done on extremely small budgets. Often they were shot in a friends' apartment, and used the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots). The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations: for example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, several scenes have a choppy feeling to them, as they were filmed in one long take: parts that didn't work were simply cut right from the middle of the take.
The style had an impact on American movies as well. After Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) the New Hollywood directors (e.g. Altman, Coppola, De Palma and Scorsese) of the late 1960s/early 1970s made movies inspired by their European (and in particular French) counterparts. The latest American director who admits a serious influence of the French new wave is Quentin Tarantino.
| This film-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_new_wave&action=edit). |
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Poetic realism was a film movement in France leading up to World War II. It includes the films of Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Carné. It generally involves a heightened aestheticism combined with heavy themes of class relations. The movement had a significant impact on later film movements, in particular Italian neorealism (many of the neorealists, most notably Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni worked with poetic realist directors before starting their own careers as film critics and directors) and the French new wave.
Notable films:
Neorealism is a cultural movement in cinema that, following the realism in literature, brings elements of true life in the stories it describes, in contrast with a tendency to depict a world mainly existing in imagination only.
The movement was developed in Europe, mainly soon after the end of WWII, with notable examples in Italy.
Luchino Visconti, Duke of Modrone (November 2, 1906 - March 17, 1976) was an Italian theatre and cinema director and writer.
Born into a noble and wealthy family, the Visconti (one of the richest of northern Italy), in Milan, at the age of 30 he went to Paris and began his filmmaking career as third assistant director in Jean Renoir's Une partie de campagne (1936), thanks to the intercession of a common friend, Coco Chanel. After a short tour to the U.S., where he visited Hollywood, he returned to Italy to be Renoir's assistant again, this time for La Tosca (1939), a production that was interrupted and later completed by German director Karl Koch because of the war.
Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the salotto of Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, at the time the national arbitrator for cinema and other arts) and here presumably met also Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis he wrote the screenplay of his first film as a director: Ossessione (Obsession) (1943), the first neorealist movie.
Visconti was also a celebrated theatre director. During the years 1946-1960 he directed many performances of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company, with Vittorio Gassmann, and several operas, including a famous revival of Donizetti's Anna Bolena at La Scala in 1957 with Maria Callas.
In 1948, he wrote and directed La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), from the novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga.
He died in Rome at age 69.
The Postman Always Rings Twice is a 1934 novel by James M. Cain that was made into three movies.
The 1946 film starred Lana Turner and John Garfield as the deviant couple, Cecil Kellaway, and Hume Cronyn. It was directed by Tay Garnett.
The story is one about a drifter who stops at a rural diner for a meal and soon goes to work there. The diner is operated by a young, beautiful woman and her much older husband of foreign extraction. The wife and drifter have an affair. The wife (the eventual femme fatale) is tired of her situation married to a man she does not love working at a diner that she hates. She and the drifter scheme to murder the husband in order to get his insurance and start a new life. Their first attempt at the murder is a failure, but they eventually succeed, and are acquitted of the crime at trial. They plan for a future together, but as they seem to be prepared to live "happily ever after" the woman dies in a car accident.
Except for two scenes in the 1946 version in which Turner wears black (one when she contemplates suicide and the other when she goes to her mother's funeral), Lana Turner wears nothing but white in the film. The film was also voted #49 on the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Love Stories list.
The 1943 Italian film entitled Ossessione (Obsession) was directed by Luchino Visconti and starred Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti. Cain was not credited as the author of the story, although it was directly derived from his work; wartime conditions made the pursuit of legal action by Cain against the producers most impractical even if he had chosen to pursue such.
The 1981 remake, based on a screenplay by David Mamet and directed by Bob Rafelson, starred Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.
The title is seen as something of a non sequitur; nowhere in the novel does a postman character appear, nor is one even alluded to. When asked for an explanation, Cain stated that the manuscript had been rejected by 13 publishers prior to being accepted for publication on his 14th attempt, so that when the publisher asked him what he wanted the work to be entitled he drew on this experience and suggested "The Postman Always Rings Twice".
Italian neorealism is a film movement lasting from about 1943 to 1952.
The movement is characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed in long takes on location, frequently using non-actors for secondary and sometimes primary roles. Italian neorealist films mostly contend with the difficult economical and moral conditions of postwar Italy, reflecting the changes in the Italian psyche and the conditions of everyday life: defeat, poverty, and desperation. Because Cinecittà (a complex of studios in Rome--the center of commercial filmmaking in Italy since 1936) was occupied by refugees, films were shot outdoors, amidst devastation.
The movement was developed by a circle of film critics that revolved around the magazine Cinema, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Gianni Puccini, Giuseppe De Santis, and Pietro Ingrao. Largely prevented from writing about politics (the editor-in-chief of the magazine was none other than Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce), the critics attacked the telefono bianco films that dominated the industry at the time. As a counter to the poor quality of mainstream films, some of the critics felt that Italian cinema should turn to the realist writers from the turn of the century.
The neorealists were heavily influenced by French poetic realism. Indeed, both Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti had worked closely with Jean Renoir. Additionally, many of the filmmakers involved in neorealism developed their skills working on calligraphist films (though the short-lived movement was markedly different from neorealism). Elements of neorealism are also found in the films of Alessandro Blasetti and the documentary-style films of Francesco De Robertis. Two of the most significant precursors of neorealism are Toni (Renoir, 1935) and 1860 (Blasetti, 1934).
There are a number of traits that make neorealism distinct. Neorealist films are generally filmed with non-professional actors (though, in a number of cases, well known actors were cast in leading roles, playing strongly against their normal character types in front of a background populated by local people rather than extras brought in for the film). They are shot almost exclusively on location, mostly in poor neighborhoods and in the countryside. The subject matter involves life among the impoverished and the working class. Non-acting is always emphasized, and performances are mostly constructed from scenes of people performing fairly mundane and quotidian activities, completely devoid of the self-consciousness that amateur acting usually entails. Neorealist films generally feature children in major roles, though their roles are frequently more observational than participatory.
Neorealism was first introduced to the world in 1946 with Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City), which was the first major film to come out Italy after the war. Despite containing many elements extraneous to the principles of neorealism, it depicted clearly the struggle of normal Italian people to live from day to day under the extraordinary difficulties of the German occupation of Rome, consciously doing what they can to resist the occupation. The children play a key role in this, and their presence at the end of the film is indicative of their role in neorealism as a whole: as observers of the difficulties of today who hold the key to the future.
At the height of neorealism, in 1948, Luchino Visconti adapted I malavoglia, a novel by Giovanni Verga, written at the height of the 19th century realist verismo movement (in many ways the basis for neorealism), bringing the story to a modern setting, which resulted in remarkably little change in either the plot or the tone. The resulting film, La Terra trema, (The Earth Trembles) starred only non-professional actors and was filmed in the same village (Aci Trezza) as the novel was set in. Because the local dialect differed so much from the Italian spoken in Rome and the other major cities, the film had to be subtitled even in its domestic release. The celebrated 1952 film Umberto D., by Vittorio De Sica, about an elderly, impoverished retired civil servant struggling to make ends meet is often cited as a classic neo-realist effort.
Italian neorealism has had as deep and broad an impact on the history of cinema as any of the most significant movements in film. Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luchino Visconti, three of the most important and celebrated filmmakers of all time began their careers in neorealism, and brought elements of it with them through their careers. The French New Wave critics celebrated neorealism and incorporated much of it in their own movement. Other movements in The United States, Poland, Japan, The United Kingdom and elsewhere developed many of the ideas first articulated by the neorealists. Some of the most notable neo-realist influenced films were the popular "spaghetti westerns" directed by Sergio Leone in the mid-1960s, which spawned many subsequent imitators.
Some of Pier Paolo Pasolini's works in the 1970s were considered part of a new neorealist sub-genre, even if Pasolini's attention to picaresque was this time openly declared and evident. The neorealist content would then be in an accessory description, spectacular and perhaps documentary, of some elements of true common life in Italy during and after the so-called economic "boom" of the 1960s.
In recent times other movies have been produced that deeply recall the neorealist canons, including works by Gianni D'Amelio and others. Arguably, something of neorealism can be found in most Italian cinema and often also in TV fiction.
Italian neorealism was inspired by French cinema verite (and deeply inspired the French New Wave), German Kammerspiel, and influenced the U.S. documentary movement and the Polish Film School. Its effects can be seen as recently as the Danish Dogme 95 movement.
Sergio Leone (January 3, 1929 – April 30, 1989) was an Italian film director. Born in Rome, he was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone and the actress Francesca Bertini, and started working in the film industry himself at the age of eighteen.
He began writing screenplays in the 1950s, primarily for the so-called "sword and sandal" or "peplum" historical epics which were popular at the time. He also worked as an assistant director on several large-scale, high-profile Hollywood productions, a.k.a. runaway productions, filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, notably Quo Vadis (1951), and Ben-Hur (1959). As a result, when the time came to make his solo directoral debut with The Colossus of Rhodes (Il Colosso di Rodi) 1961, he was well equipped to produce low-budget films which looked and felt like Hollywood spectaculars.
In the early 1960s, demand for historical epics collapsed, and Leone was fortunate enough to be at the forefront of the genre which replaced it in the public's affections - the Western. His A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari) (1964) was an early trend-setter in a genre which came to be known as the "spaghetti western". Based closely enough on Akira Kurosawa's medieval samurai adventure Yojimbo (1961) to elicit a legal challenge from the Japanese director, the film is notable for its establishment of Clint Eastwood as a star. Until that time, he had been an American television actor with few roles to his name.
The look of the film was established partly by its budget, and partly by its Spanish locations, and it presented a gritty, violent, morally complex vision of the American West which paid tribute to traditional American Westerns, but significantly departed from them in storyline, plot, characterization and mood. Leone deservedly gets credit for one great breakthrough in the Western genre that is still followed today: in traditional Western films, heroes and villains alike looked like they had just stepped out of the fashion magazine and the moral opposites were clearly drawn, even down to the hero wearing a white hat and the villain wearing a black hat. Leone's characters were,in contrast, more "realistic" and complex: usually "lone wolves" in their behavior, they rarely shaved, looked dirty, and there was a strong suggestion of body odour, and a history of criminal behavior, they were morally ambiguous and often either generously compassionate or nakedly and brutally self-serving as the situation demanded. This sense of realism continues to affect Western movies today, and has also been influential outside this genre.
His next two films - For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) - completed what has come to be known as "The Dollars Trilogy", with each film being more financially successful and more technically proficient than its predecessor. All three films featured remarkable scores by the prolific composer Ennio Morricone.
Based on these successes, in 1967 he was invited to America to direct what he hoped would be his masterwork, Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West) for Paramount. Filmed in Monument Valley, Utah as well as in Spain and Italy, and starring Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale it emerged as a long, violent, dreamlike meditation upon the mythology of the American West. It was scripted by Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, both of whom went on to have significant careers as directors. Before its release, however, the film was ruthlessly edited by Paramount, which perhaps contributed to its poor box-office results, although it was a huge hit amongst film students, and has come to be regarded by many as Leone's best film.
After the relative failure of Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone directed A Fistful of Dynamite (1971), a satire starring James Coburn and Rod Steiger poking fun at the spaghetti western genre. He turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather, but spent the next ten years building up to another epic work, this time focusing on a quartet of New York City gangsters of the 1920s and '30s who had been friends since childhood. This work, Once Upon a Time in America (1983), was a project he had conceived before Once Upon a Time in the West, a meditation on another aspect of popular American mythology, the role of greed and violence and their uneasy coexistence with the meaning of ethnicity and friendship, and like that film, it was too long and stately for the studio to stomach. The studio cut its four-hour running time drastically, losing much of the sense of the complex narrative. The recut version too flopped. At the time of his 1989 death, Leone was part way through planning yet another epic, this time on the Second World War battle for Leningrad.
See also: Other notable figures in Western films
In the contexts of debate or of rhetoric, the phrase slippery slope, also appearing as the thin end of the wedge or the camel's nose, refers both to an argument about the likelihood of one event given another, and to a fallacy about the inevitability of one event given another. Invoking the "slippery slope" means predicting (without necessary justification) that one step in a process will lead unavoidably to a second (generally undesirable) step.
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The slippery-slope argument occurs in the following context: A, B denote events, situations, policies, actions etc. Within this context, the proposer posits the following inferential scheme:
The argument takes on one of various semantical forms:
For example, many civil libertarians argue that even minor increases in government authority, by making them seem less noteworthy, make future increases in that authority more likely: what would once have seemed a huge power grab, the argument goes, now becomes seen as just another incremental increase, and thus appears more palatable (see here (http://www.eff.org/effector/HTML/effect15.36.html#IV) for a specific example).
Eugene Volokh's Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope (http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/slippery.htm) (PDF version (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh/slippery.pdf)) analyzes various types of such slippage. Volokh uses the example "gun registration may lead to gun confiscation" to describe six types of slippage:
The slippery slope argument may or may not involve a fallacy (see the discussion on the two interpretative paradigms below: the momentum paradigm and the inductive paradigm). However, the slippery slope claim requires independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A. Otherwise the slippery slope scheme merely serves as a device of sophistry.
Often proponents of a "slippery slope" contention propose a long series of intermediate events as the mechanism of connection leading from A to B. The "camel's nose" provides one example of this: once a camel has managed to place its nose within a tent, the rest of the camel will inevitably follow. In this sense the slippery slope resembles the genetic fallacy, but in reverse.
As a simple example of how an appealing slippery slope argument can be provably unsound, suppose that whenever a tree falls down, it has a 95% chance of knocking over another tree. We might conclude that soon a great many trees would fall, but this is not the case. There is a 5% chance that only one tree will fall, a 9.75% chance that two or less trees will fall, and a 92% chance that 50 or less trees will fall. On average, only 20 trees will fall. In the absence of some momentum factor that makes later trees more likely to fall than earlier ones, this "domino effect" quickly curbs itself.
Arguers also often link the slippery slope fallacy to the straw man fallacy in order to attack the initial position:
This form of argument often provides evaluative judgements on social change: once an exception is made to some rule, nothing will hold back further, more egregious exceptions to that rule.
Note that these arguments may indeed have validity, but they require some independent justification of the connection between their terms: otherwise the argument (as a logical tool) remains fallacious.
The "slippery slope" approach may also relate to the conjunction fallacy: with a long string of steps leading to an undesirable conclusion, the chance of all the steps actually occurring is actually less than the chance of any one individual step occurring alone.
Contemporary examples of the slippery slope fallacy may include:
Several common analogies support slippery-slope arguments. Among these are analogies to physical momentum, to frictional forces and to mathematical induction.
In the momentum analogy, the occurrence of event A will initiate a process which will lead inevitably to occurrence of event B. The process may involve causal relationships between intermediate events, but in any case the slippery slope schema depends for its soundness on the validity of some analogue for the physical principle of momentum. This often takes the form of a domino theory or contagion formulation. The domino theory principle may indeed explain why a chain of dominos collapses, but an independent argument is necessary to explain why a similar principle would hold in other circumstances. To achieve this one might (for example) establish an abstract model for the terms that occur in the argument, in which the momentum principle obtains. This leaves showing the validity of the abstract model as a separate intellectual exercise.
An analogy similar to the momentum analogy is based on friction. In physics, there is usually more frictional force against a nonmoving object (static friction) than against an already moving object (kinetic friction). Arguments that use this analogy assume that people's habits or inhibitions act in the same way. If a particular rule A is considered inviolable, some force akin to static friction is regarded as maintaining the status quo, preventing movement in the direction of abrogating A. If, on the other hand, an exception is made to A, the countervaling resistive force is akin to the weaker kinetic frictional force. Validity of this analogy requires an argument showing that the initial changes actually make further change in the direction of abrogating A easier.
Another analogy resembles mathematical induction. Consider the context of making an evaluation (is the occurrence of the event harmful or not?) on each one of a class of events A1, A2, A3,..., An. We assume that for each k, the event Ak is not much different from Ak+1, so that Ak has the same evaluation as Ak+1.
We deduce that for k = 1, 2, 3, ...,n the event Ak has the same evaluation as A1.
Therefore A1 should be considered harmful if An is considered harmful.
For example, the following arguments fit the slippery slope scheme with the inductive interpretation
Appropriately formulating the semantics of the slippery slope scheme can help in evaluating the soundness of the argument. In the naïve presentation as an instance of mathematical induction, the argument does clearly have validity. However, in most real-world applications, including the two given above, this naïve semantics fails because the inductive scheme fails for imprecisely defined predicates.
Mental health, mental hygiene and mental wellness are all terms used to describe the absence of mental illness. By this definition, mental status has two possibilities: either health or illness.
However other experts consider mental health as a continuum. Thus an individual's mental health may have many different possible values. Using this model, it has been suggested that mental wellness can be a positive attribute, such that a person can become more "mentally healthy", even if they do not have any diagnosable mental illness. This definition of mental health includes emotional well being, having the capacity to live a full and creative life and also the flexibility to deal with its problems. Many therapies and self-help books claim to be able to increase the mental wellness of otherwise healthy people.
Dr. William Glasser, M.D. and psychiatrist, a recognized authority in therapy and counseling, wrote his first book, Mental Health or Mental Illness (1961), referred to in that book as Mental Hygiene. In using that term he was following the dictionary definition of hygiene which is the establishment and maintenance of health, ie. mental health. Currently, many mental health professionals, focus more on medications than on mental health.
Mental Health as a concept completely separate from mental illness plays no part in what most mental health professionals actually do, relying almost completely on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) using the medical model to diagnose and treat what they call mental illnesses and disorders.
For an informed discussion of this topic, Dr. Glasser has published Treating Mental Health as a Public Health Problem -- A New Leadership Role for the Helping Professions.(2004 -- www.wglasser.com )
Dr. Glasser defines mental health as an entity completely separate from mental illness, explaining that as long as the medical model prevails, we will be unable to deliver the mental health many people need at a cost they can afford. Dr. Glasser asserts that the Public Health Model is much better suited to delivering mental health than the Medical model.
The Public Health Model has been successfully delivering physical health to millions of people for hundreds of years. He explains how this model could be expanded into a low cost Public Mental Health Delivery Model that could easily be put into practice by all mental health professionals and institutions by hiring mental health professionals to deliver mental health without diagnoses and without drugs directly to people whose mental health needs improvement.
Dr. Glasser's work is closely associated with Choice theory.
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New Times
Surely you see that.
Brecht created an influential theory of theatre, the so-called epic theatre: a play should in his opinion not cause the spectator to emotionally identify with the action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the actions on the stage. For this purpose, he employed the Verfremdungseffekt (often translated as 'alienation effect', but 'distancing effect' is a more helpful parallel), the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. Such techniques including the direct address by actors to the audience, exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting, the use of song, and explanatory placards. He was famous for putting up signs with the writing "Glotzt nicht so romantisch!" ("Don't stare so romantically!") in one of his first stagings. This manner of production has proven both fruitful and confusing to those who try to produce his works or works in his style, and his theory of theatre has heavily influenced modern theatre, although it is believed that the effect of the epic theatre wears off after watching a few plays of this style. Some of his innovations, though, have become so commonly taken on that one hardly remembers the lack of them before him. Another useful translation of Verfremdungseffekt is estrangement effect. This translation places an emphasis on how Brecht tried to make situations strange in order to distance the audience from the play. Although Brecht's work and ideas about theatre are generally thought of as belonging to modernism, there is recent thought that he is the forerunner of contemporary postmodern theatre practice. This is particularly so because he questioned and dissolved many of the accepted practices of the theatre of his time and created a uniquely political theatre that involved the audience in meaning-making. Moreover, he was one of the first theatre practitioners to incorporate multimedia into the semiotics of theatre. Links: Brechtian acting Epic Theatre
Because several Brecht works were not performed until long after they were written, the dates below show both the year they were written, followed by the year they were first produced.
