Megans film history blog

                                                                      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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...