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 the film deployment of a sense of genre, authorship and audience addresses. In addressing the 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.