Swallowtail Butterfly, the film directed by Iwai Shunji, depicts the experience about a group of immigrants in Yentwon. These immigrants come to Japan with the dream to make quick money. At the same time, the main characters, Glico, Fei Hong, and Ageha, are also seeking their identities and home in Japan. The particular scene in this film that impresses me is the conversation between Ageha and Fei Hong about whether heaven exists or not on a rainy day. Iwai used mostly close-up shots, dull light and the sound of the rain for this scene to create a melancholic atmosphere for the conversation about death and heaven. It also implies that in the end, Ageha and Glico realizes that the home and heaven for them is the auto repair shop “ blue sky” near the Yentown. First of all, the shot sizes …show more content…
The next shot is a medium shot that depicts Ageha and the umbrella in her hand; then quickly switched to a closed-up shot shows Ageha’s face with sadness when she talks about her mother’s death. These two shots give a contrast that umbrella can be fixed when broken, while people cannot have a new life after death. Fei Hong then said that nobody has ever seen heaven because when people die and go up to the heaven, they become rains after they touch the cloud (Swallowtail Butterfly 1996). During his talk, there is a close-up shots about Ageha look up to the sky, which illustrates that Ageha follows the story of Fei Hong. Ageha almost have no facial expression, but her sagging mouth reveals that she was touched and really take the story of Fei Hong seriously. The following two close-up shot depicts that Fei Hong laughs awkwardly because Ageha took it too seriously. But immediately he look up at the sky with no smile on his face and said that if people end up in heaven, they we are in heaven (Swallowtail Butterfly 1996). After his word, there is
Kim, Seungduk. “Yukio Nakagawa: La Fleur De L’ame / Nakagawa’s Extreme Ikebana: The Life And Death Of Flowers.” Art-Press 297 (2004): Art Source.
The speaker in “Five A.M.” looks to nature as a source of beauty during his early morning walk, and after clearing his mind and processing his thoughts along the journey, he begins his return home feeling as though he is ready to begin the “uphill curve” (ln. 14) in order to process his daily struggles. However, while the speaker in “Five Flights Up,” shares the same struggles as her fellow speaker, she does little to involve herself in nature other than to observe it from the safety of her place of residence. Although suffering as a result of her struggles, the speaker does little to want to help herself out of her situation, instead choosing to believe that she cannot hardly bare recovery or to lift the shroud of night that has fallen over her. Both speakers face a journey ahead of them whether it be “the uphill curve where a thicket spills with birds every spring” (ln. 14-15) or the five flights of stares ahead of them, yet it is in their attitude where these two individuals differ. Through the appreciation of his early morning surroundings, the speaker in “Five A.M.” finds solitude and self-fulfillment, whereas the speaker in “Five Flights Up” has still failed to realize her own role in that of her recovery from this dark time in her life and how nature can serve a beneficial role in relieving her of her
The author begins the story with a strong statement, “I found myself in a Chinese funeral parlor because of a phone call I made to my cleaning lady” (Schmitt); it takes the reader right into the funeral parlor and draws the reader into the story: how she got to the funeral parlor and what she doing there was the question I had. She starts the story with some background about how she got to China. Then moves on to the funeral that was happening in her neighbors’ home. She describes how the family was grievously weeping as she was walking toward her apartment. She noticed what happened and wonder why they were weeping. “Do you know why the neighbors are very sad?” she asked her cleaning lady.
An important aspect of Dana Sach’s “if you lived here” is the trauma and recovery that characters like Xuan Mai go through. Trauma results from an event that is overwhelming to the person and causes symptoms that are a response to the trauma. Recovery is when the life narrative is pieced back together so that the trauma is, “part of the learning curve of the life narrative.” (Herman) The trauma and recovery of characters like Xuan Mai is important because the stage that the character is undergoing impacts their actions and attitudes toward key events in the novel. This is evident in how Xuan Mai’s attitude toward Shelley’s adoption of Hai Au changes based on what stage of trauma and recovery that she is in.
She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.
The “Butterfly’s Tongue” is a film directed by Jose Luis Cuerda that transports us to Spain during the Second Spanish Republic and draws a clear and authentic image of the years before the civil war and the transition to it. The main focuses of the film are education, the new generations, and the continual battle (first "civilized" and then violent) between two completely contrasting ideologies for trying to control these two fundamental social elements. Cuerda masterfully manages the scenic positioning of her characters in several of the scenes to demonstrate this ideological struggle. An undoubted demonstration of this is the arrangement where the little Moncho (Manuel Lozano) is in the midpoint, while Don Gregorio (Fernando Gomez) and the
Although imagery and symbolism does little to help prepare an expected ending in “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, setting is the singular element that clearly reasons out an ending that correlates with the predominant theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing a grim realism from the cruel world. Despite the joyous atmosphere of an apparently beautiful world of abundant corn and cotton, death and hatred lies on in the woods just beyond the sharecropper cabin. Myop’s flowers are laid down as she blooms into maturity in the face of her fallen kinsman, and the life of summer dies along with her innocence. Grim realism has never been so cruel to the innocent children.
The illustration shows an answer to the philosophical question, is there life after death? Death, as portrayed in this art reflects death as the end of existence in this life, but shows it continuing in another. When man dies in this world, he proceeds to another world. The representation of death and moving through a door to the afterlife is a strongly influenced by the Christian idea of what one can expect in the afterlife, if they have lived a good life. To be rejuvenated in a more youthful fo...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved swims like a garden pond full of minnows with thoughts and memories of days gone by. Each memory is like a drop of water, and when one person brings up enough drops, a trickle of a stream is formed. The trickles make their way down the shallow slopes and inclines, pushing leaves, twigs, and other barriers out of the way, leaving small bits of themselves behind so their paths can be traced again. There is a point, a vertex, a lair, where many peoples streams unite in a valley, in the heart of a pebble lined brook, and it is here that their trickles of days gone by fuse with each other, and float hand in hand until they ultimately settle to form the backyard pond.
For some people life may not be satisfactory. Life has many troubles including death, pain, and suffering. It leaves little hope. There are ways in which people can live to have a good life. This method of how a person should live is viewed differently thoughout the world. James Hilton represents this combination of ideas and cultures in the novel, Lost Horizon (1933). This novel tells the tale of four distinctively different people retreating from a war zone. In their retreat they are kidnapped and taken by plane deep into the Himalayan mountain wilderness. Little did they know that here in the confines of the mountains there is a paradise. This paradise is called Shangri-La and is a Tibetan Monastery and community in a place of splendid beauty. Surprisingly, the kidnapped group finds that they are considered guests in this elevated community. They are apprehensive of the cerebrated treatment that they receive, but soon accept and enjoy their "misfortune." Shangri-La is a paradise, but the guests become held prisoner to pleasure and happiness.
The prose of the Ise Monogatari was used to describe an amalgam of situations such as the glimpsing of love in two beautiful sisters while passing a hole in a hedge. Others include the affairs of married men and women, secret courters of the night, loss of love and despair, as well as the environment.(Keene 67-75) The prose then is used to adequately detail ...
Death, to the surrounding people, can often be seen as a horrible and depressing time in one’s life, while the same result may occur in the person going through the time period. One must remember, though, that no matter how the person has lived throughout their life, everyone must die eventually, for it is the circle of life. The playwright, Everyman, notes of the importance of having devotion and loyalty in Jesus Christ, for that is the only way to Heaven. Also, the play and The Sandbox greatly illustrate how a person near death is feeling and his emotions, while also describing the sympathy of others around him and their experiences.
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat highlights the various differences in Haitian culture from the American culture we grow up with by showing us various Haitian parables. The use of these Haitian parables not only gives a look into the values of another culture, but their usage explains earthly and unearthly things with an underlying meaning or a moral. By utilizing the parables and their interpretations, Danticat foreshadows a character’s death and reveals the metaphors for a deeper pain in life.
In Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf takes advantage of the liminal quality of the short story in order to highlight the suspended world that she creates in the garden. For Woolf, the lyrical short story’s subversion of traditional narrative structure allows her to focus on creating a world rather than a plot. Further, the short story creates a liminal space by the very nature of its form. Caught in a space where it is not considered a poem or a novel, the short story exists as undefined. The liminality of the short story, however, is both liberating and restricting. Woolf explores this feature in order to suggest the unsustainable nature of Kew Gardens. While Woolf utilizes the form of the short story to create a liminal, impressionistic space that eradicates the boundaries between human and nature, she also uses the transitory quality of the short story to suggest that such a space can only exist for a short duration due to the restrictions of the imposing outside world.
He wanted the readers to realize the importance of family, through morbid tales that make the reader appreciate what they have, or help them through a similar time. Japan is different from the United States in many ways, making things seem strange when looking at the differences between such similar tasks, but also such different methods, procedures, and outcomes. Death and the Flower is a good read and has many important lessons and realizations for the reader to discover about family and child