Aesthetic Of Astonishment Analysis

Children laughing showing the happiness that is supposed to occur in youth. Even the lack of sound in the movie theatre gives you the impression of contentedness as the crowd watches a film. All these sounds add emotional depth to the scene that cinematography

The American obsession with spectatorship is a phenomenon created by the inaccessibility of timely and relevant knowledge. This oddly leads to an increase in the demand and likeability of terror. In her piece “Great to Watch”, Maggie Nelson explores the origins of this fascination with horror and gives an

Therefore, contemporary theatre goers are able to completely realise the utter insanity of this scene through the exploration of the key themes. Essentially, the audience can understand the meaning of this excerpt through the utilization of the dramatic elements. This will, in consequence, gain the attention of contemporary society, forcing them to subconsciously ask themselves the decisive question of How much paranoia and abnormality can occur before something takes a turn towards

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can convey emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.” The written word and the moving image have always had their entwining roots deeply entrenched in similar narrative codes, both functioning at the level of implication, connotation and referentiality. But ever since the advent of cinema, they have been pitted against each other over formal and cultural peculiarities – hence engaging in a relationship deemed “overtly compatible, secretly hostile” (Bluestone 2).

The world of film is a complex web of discourses that try to understand, in a cinematic manner, the past without tarnishing it. Many films, especially historical films have tried to operate on a level that not only accurately tries to represent the past with all its intricacies, but to do it in a fashion that addresses real life truths and feelings that correlate with that specific historical figure, event or issue. While historical films may distort details about certain figures or events from a specific history, these films, however, reflect and expose truths that could be applied to the past. In the first two course films, Breaker Morant and La Grand Blanc de Lambarene it is clearly understood that the filmmakers are fictionalizing moments

This essay will discuss how the film uses these two techniques, in reference to the film, and to what ideological and political ends are the techniques used in the films with specific references from the film to support the argument. A Man with a Movie Camera is based around one man who travels around the city to capture various moments and everyday

[a] Boorstin’s “Three Eye Theory” is the theory that the common viewer watches every film three different ways at the same time. These three “eyes” are called the Voyeur’s eye, the Vicarious eye, and the Visceral eye. The Voyeur’s eye is the observation of the film; it is own mind trying to understand and interpret what we see. It is logical and reflective. It “sees” the logic of the film.

As has already been discussed in this essay, the central controversy surrounding Stage Fright is the opening flashback’s divergence form Classic Hollywood Cinema norms. In

Film takes photography to another level. Film, or the cinema “is objectivity in time.” For the first time with film “the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were”. Bazin argues "only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled- up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, are able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.

Baz Luhrmann is widely acknowledged for his Red Curtain Trilogy which are films aimed at heightening an artificial nature and for engaging the audience. Through an examination of the films Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby, the evolution and adaptation of his techniques become evident. Luhrmann’s belief in a ‘theatrical cinema’ can be observed to varying degrees through the three films and his choice to employ cinematic techniques such as self-reflexivity, pastiche and hyperbolic hyperbole. The cinematic technique of self-reflexivity allows a film to draw attention to itself as ‘not about naturalism’ and asks the audience to suspend their disbelief and believe in the fictional construct of the film.

Two films, although created years apart yet have a lot in common, including their content of it’s narrative techniques. Both films, even though black and white with strokes of genius of cinema offer a vast stretch for study. I will be looking at Sir Orson Welles “Citizen Kane” (1941) and Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” (1950). We see in Citizen Kane he values for the American life. The three abstract themes that constantly follow through Citizen Kane are Wealth, Power and Love.

1928 began a transitioning period from a cinema of “socialist emotions/feelings,” replacing the cinema of “concepts/abstractions that dominated the previous decade. There is a unique distinction between “feelings” and “emotion” in this psychology. Socialist cinema, according to Emma Widdis, worked to eradicate emotions using sensibility. Emotion was seen as a bourgeois antiquity which threatened the new order. This prospect was a cataclysm for the political superintendence of the sensory faculty.

From Lurhmann’s first film Strictly Ballroom these techniques were very prevalent and instead of out growing these brash techniques he actually evolved and developed his techniques. And thus resulted, resulting in the creations of very successful films. In this essay I will be discussing how Lurhmann has evolved these cinematic techniques beginning in Strictly Ballroom, continuing in Romeo and Juliet and finally in The Great Gatsby. Strictly Ballroom was made on a very limited budget but this did not stop Lurhmann using very audacious costumes.

In his book How to Read a Film, James Monaco introduces a discourse through the section “Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer”, explaining two opposing stances towards film-making, mainly by addressing Arnheim and Kracauer’s prescriptive theories on Expressionism and Realism. By contrasting the two stances on where the esthetics of film should lie on, Monaco concludes with a suggestion of a goal films should reach for. Monaco starts by giving a simple definition of Realism and Expressionism, whereas Realism underlines the actual reality that is filmed, Expressionism focuses more on the capability of the filmmaker in addressing and remodeling the reality. He continues by giving a brief history on reasons why Expressionism was more

Kant’s subjectivisation of aesthetics was brought about by his discovery of certain a priori elements which went beyond empirical universality. In both taste and in aesthetic judgment, there is a “supra-empirical norm”. Models of judgement help, but they, in themselves, cannot replace the experience of taste “In taste nothing is known of the objects judged to be beautiful, but is stated only that there is a feeling of pleasure connected with them a priori in the subjective consciousness” (ibid., 38). Aesthetic appreciation therefore, for Kant, is a free play of the imagination; a subjective relationship which equally has a claim to universality, and it is valid in itself. Taste is valid in the conception of Kant for two fundamental reasons: