Thursday, February 21, 2008

The Rules of the Game

Last week, I watched a movie called The Rules of the Game (1939), a French film that criticizes the extravagant lifestyle of the bourgeois. So, it doesn't come as a surprise that this film wasn't very well received in the French public. The director of the film, Jean Renoir, appealed to a theme prevalent in poetic realism--moral relativism--a concept that questions moral authority (the existence of absolute truths) and points out hypocrisy.

In The Rules of the Game, characters illustrated this theme by making statements throughout the movie like, "What is natural?" (when the main character Christine justifies her choice to wear purple lipstick) or "The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." I also saw a deeper theme of the false illusion of morality...for example, twice in the film, two people mentioned that Christine and her husband had class, which is "a rare thing to find these days."

Yet, clearly in the movie, they had everything but class, at least with respect to their relationships (Christine's husband having a mistress, she trying to run off with someone else)...at the very end of the movie, a young lady named Jackie cries because she discovers that Andre, a man she loves, is dead, but she is then discouraged to show any display of public emotion when Christine tells her, "People are watching." Renoir seems to imply that the rich care solely about what people see. Trailer is below if you're interested in seeing it...

Sunday, February 17, 2008

They're here already - you're next...

I have to write a paper for one of my classes, the purpose for which is to take a film from before 1965 and analyze its extra-textual elements. So I decided to go with the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a low-budget but historically significant film that was made in 1956. 1956...if you remember what era the U.S. was in at this time, you wouldn't find it too surprising to discover that this film evoked the McCarthyism of Cold War America.

The film is about a city where alien vegetable pods land and possess human bodies, so that these bodies look like us and act like us, making it difficult or impossible to tell who is normal, who can be trusted. During the 1940's and 1950's, the double agent/mole concept was very prevalent, as Americans held this consistent fear and paranoia that there were Communist spies among them--and like the vegetable pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Americans likewise believed that Communist spies were difficult to identify...and so people began to think they could not trust anyone.

I've placed the trailer for the movie below--and if you notice it to be quite cheesy, remember this was the style of the 1950's...the last line in this clip, "They're here already - you're next" reflects the mentality of this time that it was widely believed that the Communists aspired to spread their ideology (in the form of propaganda and espionage) throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world...what's interesting is that this film itself could be argued as a form of propaganda.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

There's no place like home...

Yesterday, in my History of American Culture since 1945 class, I learned that films could be an interesting source of the study of society. The U.S. was envisioned by our forefathers to be a land of farms and small towns, so as America grew, and large urban areas began to develop by the 2oth century, Americans became uneasy and grew nostalgic for the life of small town America. The "city" became to be indentified as a place of danger, of crime and corruption and bad education. You can see this mentality in films like Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).

In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) is a young senator who leaves his small town to go to Washington D.C. only to discover a corrupt political system that is controlled by the people who own newspapers and radio stations. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy (Judy Garland) journeys from Kansas to a fantasy city "Oz" only to realize that you don't need a wizard and that "there is no place like home." Both of these films seem to reflect the common mindset at the time that small town America is the ideal America.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

My First Post

Hey everybody. I'm Huda and I'm a fourth year in biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm not exactly sure what to do after I graduate, but I'm pretty sure I'll shift away from the sciences and engineering. See, my first year here at UT I made a short 5 min documentary for one of my classes, and I enjoyed it so much that it sort of stayed in the back of my head for the past three or so years. So last year, I decided to stay an extra year to take classes related to film and complete this bridging disciplines certification program in digital arts and media. Well, one of the classes I'm taking for the program is Web Publishing, which brings me to this blog...it's the first time I ever made one, so I hope you all enjoy it!