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Jaws

Jaws Jaws was released in 1975 and was directed by Steven Spielberg. It focuses on Amity island. The island's main income comes from vacationers and beach goers, so after the chief of police wants to close the beaches after a shark attack, the mayor does not agree. A boy is killed by the shark and his mother puts a bounty on the shark so many hunters come to the island in search of the shark. The 1970s was an important time in film history for many reasons. There were many social and political things taking place that influenced the film industry. Mistrust of authority and government, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam war, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, the conspiracy and government connection to their killings, the space program, the counter-culture led by the hippy movement, the drug culture, and Woodstock to name a few. It was a time when films were allowed to build reaction, to open and let audiences find t...
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Bonnie and Clyde

  Bonnie and Clyde The film Bonnie and Clyde is set during the Great Depression . Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker meet when Clyde tries to steal Bonnie's mother's car. Bonnie, who is bored by her job as a waitress, is intrigued by Clyde and decides to take up with him and become his partner in crime. They pull off some holdups, but their amateur efforts, while exciting, are not very lucrative. Bonnie and Clyde turn from small-time heists to bank robbing. The film itself pushed many boundaries of censorship rules and they were greatly influenced by foreign films.  Bonnie and Clyde was released during a time of Hays code in film. Hays code was a set of industry guidelines that films had to follow to keep them from being too violent or inappropriate. The code was a set of 36 rules that kept Hollywood under its thumb for decades. The Hays Code stated “corrupt” behavior and immorality (as the MPAA defined it, which by 1930s standards was a broad and oppressive spectrum) could not be...
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Rashomon

                                                                            Rashomon  Rashomon is a Japanese film that was directed and written by Akira Kurosawa. It is a psychological thriller about a samurai who was murdered in the woods. Various people are describing how he was murdered, and they are all lying and telling it differently to make themselves look good. Akira Kurosawa does a great job telling this story from the cinematography to the different perspectives used when storytelling.  One thing about Rashomon that makes it stand out is the cinematography. This is important in this film because he is trying to bring the feeling of a silent film into Rashomon. Many scenes in the film are silent, relying only on the filming and the action to get across what they are trying to...
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Citizen Kane

                                                                      Citizen Kane Citizen Kane is a movie made in 1941 that was directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. Many people have made the claim that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time. In order to agree or refute this claim you have to look deeper than if you enjoyed the movie or not and instead look at why the people made this claim. This claim was made because they used many things in the film that had never been seen in films before it. One thing Citizen Kane did that no other film before it had used was the circular narrative. A circular narrative is a story that starts and ends in the same spot. The movie starts with Charles Kane on his deathbed and right before he dies, he says the word “rosebud”. A newspaper is working on his ...
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The Wizard of Oz

  The Wizard of Oz One memorable aspect of The Wizard of Oz is its use of color. Although the film was not the first to use color, its bright production design and saturated palette made it stand out. They used color in a very unique way. When she is in Kansas the film is not in color but when she is in Oz the film is in color.  The movie was filmed with a Sepia tone film which is why the Kansas scenes are more of a brownish tint and not black and white. They chose not to add color to the Kansas scenes because it is described as colorless and filled with “the great gray prairie” in the book. There was so much attention to detail when it came to the colors they chose that it took days to pick out a shade for the color of the yellow brick road.  In my opinion, the most interesting use of color in the film was roughly twenty minutes into the film when Dorthy opens the door to Oz. It is the first time we see the bright vibrant colors and they show the house still colorless ...
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Films as a reflection of their time

  M By: Fritz Lang The film M by Fritz Lang is a German suspenseful film released in 1931. It is about a serial killer who murders children in Berlin, and it is based on a real German serial killer from 1929 named Peter Kurten. When the police have a hard time catching him other criminals take matters into their own hands and attempt to find him themselves. It turns into a race between the police and the criminals on who finds him first so that they can serve their version of justice. M is about justice and the good and evil that comes with that.  This film is a big reflection of the time it was filmed. It was a parallel to the case of Peter Kurten who was a serial killer during 1929 known as the “Vampire of Dusseldorf”. One parallel between the film and the real case is that the hunt for the Vampire of Düsseldorf had included the recruitment of a famous Berlin homicide detective Ernst Gennat, who Lang would base his unconventional detective Inspector Lohmann. Gennat, like ...
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German Expressionism

  Megan Kettler 02/02/2023 German Expressionism German Expressionism can be identified by bright colors, dark lines, and contrast images. It is filled with a lot of artists with different styles, so each artist's interpretation of expressionism and what they choose to do with it is unique. Although the filmmakers use facial expressions and visual distortions, they use them in different ways. The movie The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari is the perfect example of German Expressionism. As I learned in the lesson from this week, the film was visually inspired by the artistic movement of expressionism. The influence that this film had on popular filmmakers like F.W Murnau, who directed The Last Laugh , started the German Expressionism movement in film.  “German Expressionist filmmakers used a lot of visual distortion and hyper-expressive performance to show inner turmoil's, fears and desires of that era.”(Movementsinfilm.com). In the movie The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari uses a lot of visual ...
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