1. Appreciating Cinema

2. Chapter 5 Critical Perspectives

3. Type
Style
Content
Form
Narrative
Characterization

4. The traditional way of approaching content is through analysis of—
“Theme”
Main point
What the scriptwriter and director want to tell us
The controlling idea of the film
A generalized comment about life—a special understanding of human experience that has significance beyond the specific narrative and the individual lives of the characters.

5. Typical Thematic Concerns
Broad Human Concerns: love, beauty, death…
Life philosophies: success, failure, meaning...
Religious and Ethical Concerns: the original sin, redemption…
Historical Issues: Wars, Westward Movement…

6. Typical Thematic Concerns
Nations and National Characteristics: Cowboys, James Bond…
Social/ Cultural/ Technological Changes: Women Rights, Gay/ Lesbian Issues…
Social Problems: the dysfunctional family, criminality…

7. Auteur Theory French critics, Cahiers du Cinema, 1950s.
Auteur— a person who was able to stamp his own identity on a film despite the commercial restraints of the studio system.
Metteur en scene— the director for hire for whom directing films was a job.
gives directors a degree of artistic freedom and control that allowed them to make their own personal mark on their films and thereby raise cinema to the level of an art form.

8. Structuralism
is a method of analyzing phenomena that is characterized by constrasting the elemental structures of the phenomenon in a system of binary oppositions.

9. Binaries:
The Individual: Freedom Intergrity Self-Interest Solipsism Nature Purity Experience Savagery The West America The Past
The Community
Restriction
Compromise
Social resposibility
Democracy
Culture
Corruption
Knowledge
Humanity
The East
Europe
The Future

10. Feminism and Gender Studies
Feminism is a broad political and intellectual movement that seeks to analyze (social, political, or economic) inequalities between men and women and to take action against them.

11. Four Character Functions
Protagonist: usually male
Antagonist: usually male
Support: usually male
Romance: female, either a “prize” or reward for the protagonist, or to provide a “love interest”.

12. Conventional Female Roles:
Victim
Girlfriend
“angelic mother”
“Castrating mother”
Whore
Femme fatale

13. Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
“Male Gaze”: male as a looker and woman is the object.
The dilemma of the female spectator:
Identify with the male and thus deny or repress her femaleness;
Identity with the female and thus situate herself as the passive object of male attention.

14. Female Cinema?
Romantic films— the basic premises is that a woman’s love for a man is the peak experience of her life.
Female style— circuitous, discontinuous and fluid.
Thelma & Louise??

15. Gender Studies
Gender: sexual identity in relation to society or culture.
Masculine / feminine do not refer biologically but culturally and socially.
the “crisis of masculinity”, fatherhood, and the male spectator.

16. Psychoanalysis and the Spectator
Sigmund Freud
focuses on the dynamic interaction of different forces (conscious and unconscious) of the psyche.
Id, ego, and superego

17. Repression
The unconscious contains unacceptable desires (especially those relating to sex and violence) and disturbing personal memories (especially childhood memories).
The process by which these desires are transferred from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind is called repression.

18. The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Spectator
Jacquec Lacan
Mirror Stage: the child identifies with its own image in the mirror, recognizing an “I” that is coherent and bounded, which is, however, a misrecognition.
The experience of watching a film provided the spectator with an imaginary self-image, which is based on an imaginary and temporary sense of wholeness.

19. Final Exam:
1. Please watch the segment of Forrest Gump and answer this question: How do you understand the following quotations? Please give examples both from the movie and your life experience. a. “Life is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’re gonna get.” b. “Stupid is as stupid does.” 2. Please watch the segment of American Beauty and Legends of the Fall and answer this question: In her book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of American Men, Susan Faludi claims that the traditional ideal of manhood in the US depended upon four factors: (1) a frontier to be claimed, (2) a “clear and evil enemy” to be crushed, (3) an institutional brotherhood, and (4) a family to provide for and protect. Please analyze the manhood in Lester Burnham and Tristan Ludlow according to these four factors.

20. 3. Please analyze the following characters with a certain perspective:
Rechard Brown in The Hours— Pschycoanalysis
Tristan and Alfred Ludlow in Legends of the Fall– Structuralism
4. Please watch the segment of The Hours and answer this question: Alternatively, the female character will often be cast in a variety of conventional roles such as the victim, the girlfriend, the “angelic mother”, the “castrating mother”, the whore, or the femme fatale. Which one (or more) of these kinds does Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan each belong to? Explain your reasons please.

21. 5. Please watch the segment of Forrest Gump and answer the following questions: (1). How do you understand the roles of the two women— Mrs. Gump and Jenny— in Forrest’s Life? (2). Alternatively, the female character will often be cast in a variety of conventional roles such as the victim, the girlfriend, the “angelic mother”, the “castrating mother”, the whore, or the femme fatale. Please explain, according to your understanding, which kind Mrs. Gump and Jenny each belongs to.