Kathryn Bigelow Research Papers

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Point break, Blue Steel, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty are a few of the films that filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow has directed. In 2009, she became the first woman to win an Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker in 2008. Known for her incredible visuals and heart-pounding action sequences, Kathryn Bigelow is one of today's most fascinating directors. Director, writer and producer Kathryn Bigelow was born on November 27, 1951, in San Carlos, California. Bigelow studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute after finishing high school. She was inspired by her father, who liked to draw cartoons. She won a scholarship and then moved to New York City to attend the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1972. Bigelow decided to change her focus to another visual medium: film. She earned her master's degree in film theory and criticism from Columbia University in 1979, and moved on to feature-length projects. …show more content…

Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people," Bigelow explained to Interview magazine. She made her first short film named The Set-Up, in 1978. The film explored the topic of violence, which would become a frequent theme in her work. In 1981, Bigelow made The Loveless, featuring Willem Dafoe. This film was partly inspired by her love of the 1954 classic, The Wild Ones. The movie got praised by critics, but she attracted more notice for her next film, Near Dark (1987), a vampire tale set in the American West. Near Dark is a thrilling example of how cleverly Bigelow can take a subgenre as over used as the vampire film and make it seem new once again. Bigelow finds a way to join two very different kinds of vampire stories: the seductive romance of the Dracula myth with its promise of eternal love, and the fang-bearing, blood-soaked horror

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