Exam 1

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Question 1

Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Battleship Potemkin was a silent film released in 1925 as a tribute to the early Russians'

revolutionaries and is widely referred to as the masterpiece of the international cinema.

Principally, the film story gets based on Russian sailors' mutiny concerning their tyrannical

superior who boarded the Battleship Potemkin in the 1905 revolution. Their win was founded on

the attempt to convince the Odessa population to present a considerable coup. Instantly, the

Cossacks reached and stipulated waste to the insurgents, which drove away from the war and put

down a situation that would lead to communism in the 1917 revolution. Although agitation is the

core, Battleship Potemkin is an extraordinary cast film with pictorial beauty and a great form of

elegance. It is broken into five acts or movements.

First, there are maggots and men -which means the undesired mistreatments done to the

sailors by their officers. The second is Drama on the Quarterdeck, which indicates the real

mutiny plus the ship's arrival in Odessa. The establishment of solidarity of Odessa citizens with

the mutineers was done by Appeal from the Dead act. The fourth movement is The Odessa

Steps. It designates the citizen's massacre, which pushes Eisenstein and the film to the historical

eminence that both holds today. Therefore, it is the most known arrangement of its kind in the

history of cinema. Eisenstein portrays his fabulous ability to stipulate large-scale action acts.
Additionally, the baby carriage tumbling on a staircase cast has been re-casted in other films

like The Untouchables by Brian De Palma (1987). Meeting the Squadron  is the cast

that Potemkin in a brotherhood show got offered permission to get through Squadron uninjured. 

Through the enormous manipulations of filmic time, Eisenstein develops a powerful symbolic

meaning. It is relevant in the slaughter on the stone step in which many citizens find themselves

trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below. By the high score through

a German revolutionary Marxist, Edmund Meisel, Battleship Potemkin became so irresistible,

and it made Eisenstein most famous.

Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002)

On the other hand, the review of The Russian Ark film by Alexander Sokurov

(2002)  commences by conversing on the casting method. In the movie, we have one unbroken

shot that lasts the entire length of the film, and it is gotten when the camera glides through the

Hermitage, which indicates the Russian history and art in St Petersburg. Contrary to Battleship

Potemkin, the film contains a cinematographer named Tillman Buttner and used Steadicam plus

well-defined digital technology. There were like 2000 actors, and every mark in the cast had to

get hit with no fail. Contrary, there were two broken takes.

However, the film subject was written and directed by Alexander Sokurov. The camera

does not take us through well on the area of the cast, walls, and corridors, but witnesses many

visitors who came to Hermitage over the years. The cast got done on one precious day in which

we learn that Sokurov and his cinematographer, lighting, and sounding technicians and actors

utilized wisely. 

The movie starts with a dark screen with words I open my eyes, and I see nothing, then

the camera opens its eye, and we meet a Frenchman Marquis who wanders through the history
and art as we follow him. The voice we hear belongs to the never-seen Sokurov. In an exemplary

great opening-up, the camera gets to an open grand hall where we find hundreds of dancers.

Contrary to Battleship Potemkin,  the dancers are well bejeweled and costumed, and they dance

to the symphony orchestra, the camera float on air. It must have been placed on his Steadicam

and for Buttner for smoothy climb. 

Differences between Film and Digital Video

Generally, there are many differences between digital and film videos. However, to

armature video takers, it does not matter because they prefer lower costs and convenience.

Understanding the difference can aid in future debates with friends and proper choices on the

future of film. During the earlier centuries of movie casting, everything happened with the use of

film. A film is a celluloid material that possesses a light-sensitive surface and records lasting

images. Nonetheless, technology advanced, and digital film making commenced, which brought

a static threat to the film hegemony. 

Principally, we touch on film usage in casting. Most people prefer film since while

shooting 35mm film, a shallower depth gets offered. It means that choosing blurry focuses is

easier. Filmmakers love this ideology since it makes it easier to direct the attention of the

audience. Another advantage of film is the possession of exposure attitude. The film has a

broader exposure attitude equated to digital video. It means that the overexposed and

underexposed sections of the film are still rendered better. 

On the other hand, digital video is spreading so fast. The significant difference between

film and video is that video is high-speed, before the shoot. In the movie, the taker first has to

load the magazine in a light safe area. Then, the film has to get processed, developed, and

digitalized. On the digital video, you skip all these steps and record direct and save on SD cards.
Another specification difference between them is the price. Broadly, shooting a film is

expensive, but on a digital video, we collect on SD cards whereby countless projects can get

stored. 

Subsequently, from photographic experience and approaches, there is a technical

difference between digital and film, it is the imposed variability during shooting. The film,

through its processing, costs money while digital does not. However, every director prefers one

over the other, depending on his or her schedule. Digital videos can shoot more, but on the other

hand, a film can shoot a better-quality movie. A director artistic gets based on the abilities to

view what has got shot directly. Film tasks need editing and revising. During photography, we

must widely consider technicality and aesthetical specs. Generally, when the mechanical part

gets more attention, then the aesthetical one loses. From my observations, after the invention of

digital video, the aspect of the one who shoots more is the best got emphasized. The well-known

photographers seem to take thousands of shots per day. 

Works Cited

Serge Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0c4vEc5Is Reviewed 25 July 2017.

Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7gvag-F2Os Reviewed 20 June 2020.

Question 2

Annie Hall by Woody Allen (1977)

Postmodernism is a notorious and slippery term that, to some extent, has been

meaningless. Generally, this is appropriately ironic since meaningless is the primary concern of

postmodernism. From the internet, the term gets defined as the extent of piling together heaps of
crazy and wild décor. Others describe it as an example of values and standards weaknesses, and

others term it as resistance to categories sureness that is transgressive. Nonetheless, we can

cinematically try to define postmodernism by looking at a film by Woody Allen, Annie Hall cast

in 1977 in particular. Most of Woody Allen's movies revolve around the depression of the main

character, through the horrifying identification of the meaningless of life. 

Principally, in the film Annie Hall, Alvy Singer's mother takes him to see the family

doctor since he was depressed. Suddenly he could not listen to anything. He explains that he has

read that the world is expanding, and at times it will break, bringing an end to everything. Annie

Hall contains complication, exposition, plus something of a steadfastness but not certainly in

that order. However, in the first moment that the Alvy Singer, who is the protagonist and Annie

Hall, meet, is not the very most time we find them in this film. Annie Hall shows the rom-com

ideology as Annie and Alvy do not end together and happy in the movie, we learn this from the

very start of the film as Alvy breaks the fourth wall to idealize us. Therefore, the film is full of

postmodern coincidences, plus besides that, it draws the attention of the audience watching the

movie. It happens since the cast subtitles what the viewers think as they speak in the film. It also

brings up Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, to describe his work with the characters to the

audience. 

Nevertheless, plot-wise, the film captures a momentary, ultimately, and an arbitrary

insignificant section of the characters' lives. The ideology behind this is that art must not just tell

an essential story to be a vital art piece. Furthermore, postmodern films are less making a step of

making metanarratives, but they are idealizing on shunning them. Thus, the main list of

postmodern films revolves around the death of the hero and The Sisyphean cycle.  

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman by Nelson Pereira dos Santo's (Brazil, 1973)
 Generally, anybody antagonizing to understand the film How Tasty Was My Little

Frenchman has the right to get deep into it. The film is about eating a Frenchman, although that

is not all. It covers a modest gastronomic ecstasy which the moviegoer must have expected from

his celluloid cannibalism. In the Brazilian coast, a French soldier named Arduino Colasanti

dodges his officers only to get apprehended by the Portuguese men and after that by a man-

eating tribe of Indians. The Indians had mistaken him for their enemies, the Portuguese, and they

decided to kill him for his crimes and later feed on him. 

First, the man gets free relative time, he enjoyed a young Indian wife plus counseling the

tribal chief. Thus, this is the central segment of the film. It indicates postmodern since the man

knew the Indians would kill him despite getting some appropriate moments. How Tasty Was My

Little Frenchman means Brazil's future and past meditation - It is ironic, comic with mixed

Drama fixational signals with religious history, social and economic allusions. The film portrays

the Indians in great care through elaborating their village, which looks like the world superbly.

The movie incurs nudity from both sexes. Everyone in that segment is compelling but not the

convincing power to dissociate the Indian village in the 16th century from not having a good

time. From the last analysis, the movie seemed to be funny, but it is not the case. There is a part

that is more serious at the end in which the Indian woman describes to the French man the ritual

that is to be his death. The part portrays postmodernism. 

Effects of Postmodernism on the Films

In the film, Annie Hall, postmodernisms develop a great sense of sensibility, which

largely undermines the storytelling ideology. It is in a more ultimate, symbolic, and iconographic

design of its description construction. Adversely, it is a film that allows us to put on our
postmodern googles as we leave passivism at our doorsteps and become the main participants in

the text. 

Conversely, Annie Hall's film is full of ironical interfacing and signs of multiple personas

showing moral value. The reason is that it blends the character or narrator's interrelation to a

huge self-reflexive arrangement that is hard to differentiate systematically. An example is when

Allen plays the author part and the role of Alvy. It develops a tug-o-war persona dissimilar to the

filmmaking style. 

Nonetheless, through the application of the Freudian psychoanalysis tool in the narration

to reach a catharsis, the author designed a script that allows the spectators to set their ears on his

drunk-love narrative that gets inspired by his relationship in real life with Diane Keaton. Allen

offers his humorous childhood anecdotes, which explains why he suffers from courtship neurosis

as an adult. In these ways, spectators get allowed to phrase their minds in a steeling of Allen, the

narrator, author, and character without getting lost. All this gets demonstrated in the postmodern

spectator googles, the kind that applies self-reflection and interfacing that is ironical into matters

of the way irrational relationships appear.

Turning our insights on How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman  film, we find the more

significant idea that the film contributed to the political aspect of brazil. The film got cast by

Cinema Novo exponent. They argued that beyond the vast film focus on cannibalism, it

possesses a high level of relations brought in the high dimension of transnationalism and

hybridity absent in the Cinema Novo schedule.  

The film was highly regarded as pornographic and, in other times, lauded as innovative

by other reviewers. Those who hold the film with colossal regard and perception avoid further

exploitation accusations. It demands close attention plus construction of rhetorical readings of

viewer's scenario, the film portrays a romantic relationship between the Frenchman and the

Indian woman. Through postmodernism, they both know that he will get slain and cannibalized

by fellow other Indians. We see that when the woman catches the man freeing, she causes him to

have a second thought about releasing to reunite with his European counterparts. She then leads

him to slaughter, which is a shocking ritual. The theoretical description of How Tasty Was My

Little Frenchman captivates the viewers' cultural aspects plus dedicating a massive controversy

in the postmodernism perspective. 

Works Cited

Annie Hall by Woody Allen (1977)

https://time.com/4738433/annie-hall-1977-review/ Posted 20 April 2017.

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman by Nelson Pereira dos Santo’s (Brazil, 1973)

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/how-tasty-was-my-little-frenchman/ Posted 28 May 2007.