hurt with Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, and Bill Murray in the comedy Caddyshack, and see life from the eyes of mob henchmen, Tom Hanks, in the crime and gangster film Road to Perdition. American cinema has used Alfred Hitchcock to create fear for many years like it was displayed in the horror film Psycho, has allowed us to sing in dance with the cast in the musical Chicago, and check out, momentarily, from reality in many science fiction films. American cinema has taken us back in time as we rode horse-back with our western heroes John Wayne and Clint Eastwood or put on the badge with the brothers of the law in Tombstone. Some of the greatest impacts from the world of cinema have been from films that covered war.
Hitchcock utilizes sound, camera work, MacGuffins, and plot twists to tell the storylines of the movies. Hitchcock understood the importance of camera work and sound because he began his career making silent films.12 It is why he uses many close up shots so the audience can pay attention to specific details and the emotions on the character’s face. He does not rely on dialogue to tell the story. He uses sound to help convey the message of a scene.
In many dystopian compositions, the characters In The Giver by Lois Lowry, Jonas, the receiver of memory chooses to return all the memories back to his communities so that they could have a life with emotions, color, and diversity. In The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street by Rod Serling, members of the street were being very paranoid because some aliens came to their community to raid them. They had played with the neighbors, which lead to false accusations on each other. Jonas and the residents of the community show paranoia because they were second guessing their peers, they were hoping that no false accusations happen on them, and also because they want to protect themselves and their loved ones so that nothing bad happens to them.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window has several themes. One major theme is relationships. The lead character, Jeff Jeffries, a photographer and committed bachelor, is involved in a relationship with Lisa Fremont, a model, although the relationship has some tension due to Jeff’s lack of commitment. When Jeff is confined to his apartment recovering from a broken leg, he begins spying through his rear window on his neighbors in a nearby apartment. Through her frequent visits, Lisa is drawn into this spying as well.
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
Rear Window Argues that people should mind their own business. Do you agree? Rear Window, a 1954 romance/murder-mystery by the renowned golden age director Alfred Hitchcock, is a film that explores a multitude of themes and genres through the voyeuristic gaze of protagonist L.B. Jefferies. Jefferies, or ‘Jeff’ as he commonly known throughout the film, is a middle-aged bachelor recently hospitalised due to his high-risk career as a photojournalist. This hindered condition serves as an important foundation on which the movie is built upon as Jeff’s forced lifestyle being in a wheelchair causes an abrupt stop in his usual high intensity way of life and causes him to quench his boredom in other ways, predominantly watching the other residents in his apartment complex through the ‘rear window’ of his apartment.
From Orwell’s novel, “1984”, it can be determined that his opinion on the most powerful means of control by the government would be the government’s use of fear to instill paranoia among the people. One powerful piece of corroboration for fear to paranoia would be Oceania’s obvious, and constant, use of technology to fulfill this goal. Take, for instance, the telescreens. Because of their existence in every buildings’ rooms and corners, they can be easily used to keep an eye on party members, and if need be, used to track their location and arrest them. Winston experiences the surveillance inflicted by the government during one of his daily workouts,as right when he stopped trying in order to ponder the conspiracies surrounding the party,
Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock is a fillm full of symbolism and motifs that provides viewers with a bigger meaning. It shows these rhetorical appeals through Hitchcok’s eyes that would not be recognized if not analyzed. Through these appeals I have recognized the window as being a symbol and marriage and binoculars as motifs. After understanding much more than what the eye anitially sees when viewing this film there is a fine line between understanding what is going on in the film and observing what the protagonist Jeff is viewing.
George Orwell's 1984 the idea of unity has been perverted into something horrible destroying the concept of families trust and community. The themes of 1984 are shown through paranoia, antanaclasis, and betrayal. The use of paranoia is key to fueling the conflict for Winston the area is always presented as hostile even if you're just walking to work you have to fear being overheard by the thought police “This was not illegal but if detected it was reasonably certain it would be punished by death” (1984 P6) leading to people acting extremely shady actions hiding from hidden microphones and cameras. This would lead to betrayal being a major problem to fear having even kids trained to report anyone to the secret police that they think to commit
Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) was voted the “best film ever made” by the 2012 British Film Institute, and for good reason. The plot is elaborate and intriguing and the cinematography is legendary. On top of this, the characters, like good characters should, all have their own needs and wants that are evident in the film. The needs of these characters affect each other and they affect the story and they all follow one common theme: control. Our protagonist, John “Scottie” Ferguson’s wants and needs differ greatly throughout the film, but his only constant is his yearning to get over his acrophobia, or fear of heights.
While technical definitions of the word “paranoia” are about a mental disorder, it’s the only word that fully encompasses the fear, mistrust, and suspicion demonstrated by the film JFK. This kind of paranoia is generally a suspicion of conspiracy, which can be anything from exaggerated stories about Freemasons in America, to a belief that the government faked the Moon Landings, to thinking that the American government conspired to kill the president so our country could go to war. Many paranoid conspiracy theories don’t do much of anything besides hold back the people who believe in them, but others, like in JFK, can cause harm or injustice to those accused. However, in the movie, Oliver Stone puts this kind of paranoia in a positive light, as if saying that conspiracy theorists are righteous seekers of truth and justice. Paranoia is a major theme behind the movie JFK, and shows how far some people will go to prove a suspected conspiracy.
In relation to the reading, The Surround by Fred Turner, the after-war period and particularly the 1950s are frequently a highly defamed, or at least misunderstood, time in American culture. I like the reading and it has interesting points. With this work, Fred Turner does much to adjust this observation as he demonstrates that it was a significantly more convincing point in history than researchers as much as readers frequently expect and, more particularly, how this time and the media shapes it brought forth arranged the ground for surely, and the radical sight and sound vehicles that directed the culture and sociopolitical messages of the 1960s. Turner thoroughly maps out the courses in which American intellectuals, psychologists, social scientists and artists, together with their European partners, attempted to think of new types of media what he calls ‘the democratic surround’ that would work as a reaction to Nazi propaganda techniques. Turner portrays these “surrounds” as varieties of pictures and words incorporated with conditions that their gatherings of people could enter openly, act suddenly inside, and leave freely.
Alfred Hitchcock 's Rear Window explores the lives of those who feel isolated within society. The 1954 film, set in the tenements of Grenwich village, depicts those who are incapable of fitting into society 's expectations, as well as those who feel isolated from common interaction with others. Moreover, Hitchcock displays how its human nature to seek comfort and deeper connection even with those who are surrounded by others. Despite depicting characters as lonely, the progression of the film illustrates how individuals can be freed from isolation. The director asserts the loneliness and struggle that comes from fitting into social mores.
Shutter Island, a psychological thriller, directed by Martin Scorsese incorporates techniques throughout to reveal the truth in Shutter Island. The film, based on a missing patient investigation, turns out as a cover up psychological experiment designed to bring Edward (Teddy) Daniels back to sanity concludes to be the truth. This essay discusses that by analysing certain scenes, including the opening scene, Teddy and Chuck addresses Dr Cawley, and whislt Teddy and Chuck interview the patients. These three scenes assist to expose Shutter Island through film techniques such as camera angle and mise en scene.
However, film critic, Robin Wood, argues that ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognised horror as both American and familial’ he then goes on to connect this with Psycho by claiming that it is an “innovative and influential film because it supposedly presents its horror not as the produce of forces outside American society, bit a product of the patriarchal family which is the fundamental institution of American society” he goes on to discuss how our civilisation either represses or oppresses (Skal, 1994). Woods claim then suggests that in Psycho, it is the repressions and tensions within the normal American family which produces the monster, not some alien force which was seen and suggested throughout the 1950 horror films. At the beginning of the 60’s, feminisation was regarded as castration not humanization. In “Psycho” (1960) it is claimed that the film presents conservative “moral lessons about gender roles of that the strong male is healthy and normal and the sensitive male is a disturbed figure who suffers from gener confusion” (Skal, 1994). In this section of this chapter I will look closely at how “Psycho” (1960) has layers of non-hetro-conforming and gender-non conforming themes through the use of Norman Bates whose gender identitiy is portrayed as being somewhere between male and female
