A-Level Film Studies - Daniel Kallin

  Amores Perros:   Alejandro González Iñárrit u's hyperlinked canine triptych   Iñárritu's incredibly assured debut film, Amores Perros - hastily translated as Love's A Bitch in English which, in all fairness, does retain the general pun of the original, despite not being a great title - is a violent, tragic and dogmatically passionate anthology of three stories revolving around interconnected people in Mexico City, centering on a devastating car crash and a very powerful dog. The beauty of Amores Perros is that, in its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, it makes sure that everything and everyone is important; a sentiment which contrasts the disregard towards life within the film, with characters showing no compassion to their own family, or their own dogs. Mexico City is portrayed as a criminally violent dog-eat-dog world, and the biggest moments of love and compassion in the film are undermined by further context later on. That is, until the final moments of th...

  Cleo From 5 to 7: Agnes Varda's Superstitious Parisian Feminist Masterpiece Paris in the 1960s was a melting pot of groundbreaking intellectualism and cool rebellion, with the critics of the older generation becoming the forefront of the new generation, and using their love for cinema, which many developed as writers for Cahiers du Cinema , to put their existential views of the world onto film. Forerunners of this movement, come to be known as the Left Bank or French New Wave, were Jean Luc-Godard and Francois Truffaut, whose debatably pretentious musings on their resentment towards the older generation manifested itself into some of the most lauded films of all time, with films like The 400 Blows and Breathless defining a generation and pioneering revolutionary filmmaking techniques, such as shooting on location with barely any budget, or elliptical editing. Besides them, was someone who brought one of the most unique perspectives of the French New Wave: Agnes Varda. Someo...

-  Documentary endeavours to document rather than fictionalise - Ideas of representation and the 'real' - Reality and Realism - Art: Realism vs Impressionism - Produced with choices, with conscious and unconscious bias Bill Nichols: 6 modes or styles of documentary: - Observational - Participatory - Poetic - Expository - Reflexive - Performative Observational:  - Emerges in the 1960s with the rise of new production technology - Notion of the hidden camera and camera-person, aided by lighter and more portable equipment for being in the field - Hidden process of filmmaking - in order to observe 'real' life unobserved - 'fly on the wall' - Idea that reality emerges when it is not produced or re-created artificially - Examples:  100% White (2000), Sisters in Law (2005), The Family (1974) Performative: - Questions raised about knowledge - Material gathered from wide-ranging sources - Idea of knowledge and meaning as subjective rather than objective Poetic: - Document...

  Evaluate the usefulness of a critical approach you have examined, for an understanding of Sweet Sixteen . (20 marks) In Loach's Sweet Sixteen a Marxist critical approach is very useful for understanding the film, as it contextualises the reasons for Liam ending up selling drugs at only fifteen as a wider societal issue based on class, and therefore capitalism, leaving the working classes in poverty, without the proper support to leave it. These ideas are made apparent through the setting of the story, in one of the poorest parts of Glasgow, and through key sequences throughout, such as Liam's interactions with Tony, or the ending scene. The Marxist critical approach also allows Sweet Sixteen to be political, rather than humanist, and subvert narrative theories, such as Todorov's, by not allowing for resolution and a return to equilibrium. However, one shortcoming of a Marxist approach is its lack of focus on gender issues, something that a Feminist critical approach would...

  Sweet Sixteen (Loach, 2002) Considering the implications of language politics in social realist films: - Language can be exclusionary - use of jargon - Scottish dialect in Sweet Sixteen, clashes with white English - Sweet Sixteen given an 18 rating for foul language - Loach accused BBFC for 'class censorship' - Language reflects dialect of community, with the rating denying those being represented (teenagers) from seeing the film - Inverclyde council overturned rating and showed it at 15 in local cinemas - Eye dialect to differentiate people with "different" accents to RP dialects (the intelligent and wealthy one) PB = Queen, Liam = Oxford Pinball - One is passing dear Scullion some money Liam - I must conclude that they are going to receive this delivery. I feel elated because this is is going to create more assets for me. I am aware of the location of these illicit pharmaceuticals - we could obtain it without much exertion. Pinball - One is unaware of your meaning...

Within feminism, the 1990s brought about a fresh focus on intersectionality, establishing that the inequalities faced by women can be a lot more significant for those outside of the white middle-class, finally establishing a feminism that could represent everyone, even if such a thing still struggles to exist nowadays. Within Secrets & Lies, the character of Hortense embodies intersectionality by changing the typical white middle-class feminist for a black middle-class feminist, using that to assert that is it class that leads to the sexism and racism faced by women - Cynthia, as a white lower-class woman, faces more oppression within the film than Hortense by quite a margin (not that comparing oppressions is particularly productive). Hortense's character provides a rejection of typical feminine characteristics, replacing emotionality with rationality, in a way that not even Maurice could reach. This is seen through Hortense's flat, with everything being white and sterile, ...

What if all hole-punchers were storing up all the holes they were punching in order to eventually turn the world into a giant hole? What if dinosaurs never went extinct and they were waiting underground to return? What if the world was actually flat but was embarrassed because everybody thought it was round and it didn't want to disappoint everyone?  What if all films were the real world and we are actually all in a very long and boring film? What if every what if question that is asked comes true in an other world? A mad scientist is sitting in his lab. He is very depressed because all his experiments had failed and so he began to cry. As he cried, a tear fell from his eye and lands into a jar of a green liquid of some strange description, and, as the tear fell into the jar, the liquid begins to bubble. The bubbles spill over and begin to drip down the table and into the floorboards. The camera pans down below the floorboards and follows the bubbles down into the ground where sudd...