by Kelly Mu

For me personally, Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag was perhaps the most impactful reading of the quarter. Its defiance of a long tradition of hermeneutics seemed relatable but also revolutionary. It shed light on a question that I have always struggled with, whether in reading literary works or watching a film. That is, how am I supposed to engage with a piece? Do I critically analyse every imagery and cinematic technique, or simply let my emotions consume me? An Elephant Sitting Still, a four hour Chinese film by the deceased director Hu Bo, was a chance for me to do both and reflect on their effectiveness.

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by Julian Spencer

I don’t think there’s any genre that’s as hard to pull off as horror. The percentage of horror films, games, and books which are critically acclaimed (or, for that matter, even well reviewed) is uncharacteristically low. It’s not that these works have an issue with actually scaring the viewer; even the most experienced filmgoers can’t help but feel an adrenaline rush when a monster suddenly appears with an obnoxiously loud sound. Rather, it’s the fact that not all types of fear are enjoyable. When the shock of a jumpscare dies away, we’re left feeling like the subjects of a middle school “gotcha” prank, more frustrated than interested.

The distinction is in creating a horror which is enjoyable — one which inspires dread, doubt, and uneasiness — rather than immediate fear. This is exactly what the Alien franchise does so well. Recently, I dedicated a weekend to the original 1979 film and the tangentially based 2015 game Alien: Isolation. On a surface level, the two mediums are remarkably similar; as I explored the Nostromo, I was continuously stunned by the accuracy with which everything from the doors to the weapons to, of course, the alien, were recreated. On a surface level, they are practically indistinguishable. Though it was wonderful to relive these aspects of the movie, what brings me here today is how well the unique sentiment of the original picture is captured in the game.

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by Niky Charouzová

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is set in a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany and through the revealing nature of the title itself, depicts the themes of liberty and confinement. The film follows the imprisonment of Fontaine, a French soldier during World War II, who throughout the film devises an escape plan from the prison and uses the materials from his room to aid him. He ends up having to escape with his cellmate, François Jost, with whom he ends up walking away into the night after they have succeeded. The black and white film is unlike many others mostly due to its lack of special effects or emotion of its characters, which helps draw significant attention to perhaps the key component of the film: sound, or rather, silence. Additionally, the fact that the film is devoid of these special effects forces the audience to focus on the actual events of the storyline without any distractions. Many times throughout the film, however, sound is even more important to the story than the image itself, and if the image is restrictive, sound often guides us and replaces it to some extent.

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by Rami Kablawi

Hansel and Gretel is a story that remains with me from my childhood. It was the fairy tale my mother repeated to me most often, with my sticky fingers and penchant for lying. Even as a second grader, the thought of a witch that would cook me alive for my sweet-tooth did little to instill in me any desire for temperance. It wasn’t until I watched Spirited Away (2002)—that I marveled in disgust and fear at the transformation of Chihiro’s parents into pigs—that I learned to put down the cookies.

Why is this? How does Miyazaki’s world in Spirited Away arise such strong reactions from its viewers, and does the work of a fairy tale without relying so heavily on its formal narrative structures? Hansel and Gretel need their Witch, as a personification of the ills of greed, to carry out the moralizing message of their tale. Animation transcends the need for such interpretive plot devices; even more so than live action photography, it is capable of making the moving image convey meaning on an affective and sensorial scale. Through its use of exaggerated features, body-morphing, and the grotesque, Spirited Away achieves just this: the creation of a world beyond our own, one that leaves its audience hanging onto themes of generosity, environmentalism, and individuality, without ever requiring its audience to interpret their meaning through a dissection of the film.

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By Paul Chang

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a cinematic masterpiece in many critically acclaimed ways: it masterfully uses color and color motifs to drive the story; it uses music and silence at important junctions to convey the gravity of the situation; it looks at themes of identity and masculinity through viewpoints that are uncommon to Hollywood films, and so forth.  One aspect of Moonlight in particular stands out in its effectiveness and ability to convey messages and foster character development.  Jenkins purposefully includes multiple parallels that can be seen in the film, driven by both audio and visual components.  These parallels effectively nudge the viewer to call back to previous scenes which contain similar components.  At the same time, the differences between the parallels form strong contrasts and induce the viewer to consider what might have changed between the first and second scenes.  This drives development and character growth.  These parallels are both visual – expressed through framing, camera movement, and setting, and auditory – expressed through dialogue, silence, or musical components.  By invoking viewers’ callbacks to previous scenes, Jenkins induces comparisons between the scenes that help develop the characters over the course of the film.

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by Hasnat Ahmad

Rear Window is a 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock which follows a globe-trekking photojournalist named Jefferies who’s been confined to his home due to a leg injury. While Jefferies is sitting in his wheelchair, he decides he has nothing better to do but spy in on the going-abouts of his neighbors, leading him to suspect a certain Mr. Thorwald of murdering his wife. But the film is not so much a murder mystery as it is a film about voyeurism and the pleasures of viewing other’s lives without their express knowledge or consent. Hitchcock uses multiple cinematic techniques, including camera movement, set design, editing, and zoom to create an effective presentation of the role of scopophilia in an increasingly modernized and urban society.

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by Tomi Kolapo

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a landmark in the evolution of mainstream superhero releases. It is both a superhero movie and an animated movie. It exists in the era of live-action superhero films. It proved to be a success by grossing over $375 million worldwide. The unique animation style that mimics comic book drawings resulted in widespread critical acclaim for its visual originality along with its box office success. 

The film is centered around the main character of Miles Morales. He is infected by a radioactive spider. However, unlike other iterations of Spider-Man, Miles is not the only Spider-Man that exists. Instead, he is another one of the multiple dimensions in the world. Miles is the main protagonist of the multiple spider-man. In Miles’s situation, he is given a flash drive by an older Spider-Man as he witnesses the previous Spider-Man get murdered by Green Goblin. The flash drive has the function of deactivating an accelerator that could destroy the city. Green Goblin works for Kingpin. As a result, the rest of the film serves as an adventure to defeat Kingpin and his intentions with the use of the flash drive. This adventure reveals itself to be interdenominational as a result of encounters with different versions of the hero.

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by Eric Chang

Now that we have transitioned to studying Hollywood’s narrative tradition from the perspective of screenwriting guides, it is important that we understand that our analyses focus on just that: tradition. In the paradigms advanced by Syd Field and Kristin Thompson, both models of Hollywood-style narration are based on the then-historical body of work produced by Hollywood cinema. Thus, I view the following discussion as a matter of discerning which model is a more faithful representation of a fixed set of cinematic work rather than a matter of discussing the merits of non-tangible theories regarding ideal narration structure.

Syd Field’s book Screenplay, published in 1979, proposed the “three-act structure,” where the majority of Hollywood’s films could be divided into three distinct acts: the setup, confrontation, and resolution (see below). These acts are divided by major plot points and would take up 1/4, 1/2, and 1/4 of both the script and the film’s run time respectively. Since its publication in Screenplay, this model of the prototypical Hollywood narrative has become a staple in both film production and analysis.

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