In Annie Baker’s The Flick, now on at the National Theatre, we watch people watching movies. The play begins in darkness, a point of light radiating out over the audience, the whirring of a projector the only sound. When it stops, and the lights are raised, we see rows of empty cinema seats staring blankly back at us.
For the next three hours, we follow snatches of conversation from Sam (Matthew Maher), Rose (Louisa Krause) and newcomer Avery (Jaygann Ayeh), three of the cinema’s employees, as they clean up dropped popcorn from between the aisles. They discuss their wages, their taste in movies, their star signs, and even – occasionally – heavier topics like their families or mental health. The three actors develop that particular silent intimacy that comes from spending many hours with someone, without actually sharing much about each other’s lives. The drama that unfolds seems both trivial and profound: from Avery’s dilemma over whether to join in with an illegal activity, to his letter to their boss asking that he keep using one of the state’s only remaining 35mm projectors. (Sam: “It’s like something someone would write in a movie.”)
…show more content…
In movies, we see the wave after wave of everything. In The Flick, we see even more of nothing – long, drawn out pauses, sometimes funny, sometimes excruciating, sometimes contemplative. There are several moments in the play that make me squirm (when Sam says of his brother, “He’s retarded”, and the audience laugh, what, or who, is the punchline?), but it feels the closest to real speech the stage can
Annie [played by Aileen Quinn] is a story written by Martin Charnin about a little girl who was left for the doorstep of an orphanage when she was extremely little and goes on to live a miserable life of working at the orphanage. Until one day a person named Grace Farrel [played by Ann Reinking] came along and invited one orphan to stay with her and Oliver Warbucks [played by Albert Finney]. During Annie’s stay Mr. Warbucks realizes how much he likes Annie and wants her to stay. In a way to tell her he gives her a new locket. Without knowing, Annie doesn't accept the locket in result of her own was given to her by her parents before she had been given up. With this knowledge a search is sent out with a reward of $50,000. With
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey states that, “Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.” (Mulvey 40). A woman’s role in the narrative is bound to her sexuality or the way she
Do the Right Thing is a dramatic comedic film that was directed by Spike Lee. The movie was released in 1989. Lee served in three capacities for the film: writer, director and producer of the movie, Ernest Dickenson was the cinematographer and Barry Alexander Brown was the film’s editor. For this film, Lee garnered together some notable actors and actresses, including Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Rosie Perez, Samuel L. Jackson, John Tuturro and Martin Lawrence. The setting of the movie is in Bedford-Stuyvesant; which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. This particular neighborhood is made up of several ethnic groups that include African Americas, Italians, Koreans, and Puerto Ricans. The movie takes place on a particularly hot day during the summer time. The extreme heat causes tensions between the different races in the neighborhood. In this paper, I will attempt to show how mise-en-scène, camera work, editing, and sound are used to convey “explicit” and “implicit” meaning in one scene in Do the Right Thing.
This play shows the importance of the staging, gestures, and props making the atmosphere of a play. Without the development of these things through directions from the author, the whole point of the play will be missed. The dialog in this play only complements the unspoken. Words definitely do not tell the whole story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY An Introduction to Film Studies Jill Nelmes (ed.) Routledge 1996 Anatomy of Film Bernard H. Dick St. Martins Press 1998 Key Concepts in Cinema Studies Susan Hayward Routledge 1996 Teach Yourself Film Studies Warren Buckland Hodder & Stoughton 1998 Interpreting the Moving Image Noel Carroll Cambridge University Press 1998 The Cinema Book Pam Cook (ed.) BFI 1985 FILMOGRAPHY All That Heaven Allows Dir. Douglas Sirk Universal 1955 Being There Dir. Hal Ashby 1979
Even though there is a great amount of audience participation, one really has to turn your attention to the actors in the movie. It takes a special kind of person to really understand the movie they are in.
It is a common mis-conception that films are merely entertainment, and serve no other purpose than to provide for the viewer a two-hour escape from reality. This is a serious under-estimation of the power, purpose, and potential of film, because film, upon reflection, revea...
Neill, Alex. “Empathy and (Film) Fiction.” Philosophy of film and motion pictures : an anthology. Ed. Noel Carrol and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 247-259. Print.
Movies have been one of the most popular pastimes for Americans for decades. They are the topics of conversation, a place for lovers to go on dates, and an industry that the general public seems to have a fascination for. However although we think of movies as another entertainment source, they were not always as socially accepted by the people. In 1904, Harry Davis opened the first freestanding moving-picture theater. Although he was met with much skepticism, his idea would have a lasting effect on America's culture. When they first opened, the people were not immediately accepting. Safety, cleanliness, and price were a few of the concerns the public had. After a few changes however, the "nickelodeons", as they were called, started booming. Flashing lights were put up wherever there was room on the façade of the buildings. Ventilation systems assured people that they were br...
Gunning, T 1993, “Now you see it, now you don’t” : the temporality of the cinema of attractions’, The velvet light trap, vol. 32, Fall, pp. 3-12.
Sitting in the theater, watching this movie for the first time, I heard static break in to interrupt the beginning credits. A newscaster, sounding serious, came on the screen in a special report. I sat up to pay attention. She was reporting a tragedy that had recently happened in some place called Verona. I was pulled in thinking it to be a true special report. Ah-hah!! It was a trick. A trick to get people to do just what I did. Trained are we to listen to newscasts, our life-line in present day society, where we receive a lot of our information. A trick, and I fell for it--so did everyone else--how clever. Then the sound of crying, chorusing angels screaming angry chants echoed around the theater (great surround sound effect). Images (clips from the movie) flashed sporadically on the screen. A dark, sinister voice retold Shakespeare's prologue given in the telecast moments before. The angels were still screaming, and then, silence. A big truck flashed on the screen and gave a hearty engine growl. The truck sped loudly down the road. Stringy electric guitars and booming drums thump a loud vengeful beat. The Montague bo...
Barsam, Richard. Looking at Movies An Introduction to Film, Second Edition (Set with DVD). New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Print.
All this and much more is forced down the audience’s throats by having one character just saying it straight to the camera. I wouldn’t call that a movie. I’d call it the next badly written book in the Twilight series. Did I accidentally watch the version of the film designed so that even the blind could experience the film’s agony to its fullest?
Barsam, R. M., Monahan, D., & Gocsik, K. M. (2012). Looking at movies: an introduction to film (4th ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co..
The difference between appearances and reality is also explored through the play-within-a-play, to particularly comic effect. The "rude mechanicals" completely fail to understand the magic of the theatre,