The Dressmaker, a film adaption of a novel by Rosalie Ham, is an Australian dark comedy-costume drama directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse (2015). The plot centres on the protagonist Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) returning to her hometown, twenty five years after she was accused of murdering a boy in her youth. As she has no memory of the event, Tilly wants to uncover the truth. Using her seamstress skills she transforms the dull fictional town of Dangatar and discovers the accusations against her were false. The town Mayor banished Tilly as he saw his son’s accidental death (which occurred in Tilly’s presence) as an excuse to ensure the town and his wife did not discover that Tilly was his love child, conceived through an affair. Audiences follow Tilly’s journey of self-discovery. She fights through the odds, mending the damaged relationship between her and her mother Molly (Judy Davis) and finding love with Teddy McSwiney (Liam Hemsworth). Moorhouse said in an interview with Women and Hollywood that she to the script due to the “strong …show more content…
David Stratton (2015) a Sydney film critic, comments that although the film was aesthetically appealing the narrative and emotional beats were jarring, the plot unrealistic and acting melodramatic. Peter Bradshaw (2015) from The Guardian and Tim Robey (2015) from The Telegraph share Stratton’s sentiments. Robey described the film as an “absurdly overripe melodrama” (2015). Although Moorhouse was drawn to the representation of strong female characters, critics failed to notice. Critics’ highlighted the film's weak narrative construction, which transcribes into the films ideological positioning. These commentaries point towards the melodramatic emotional tone of the film overwhelming the film's more nuanced character performance of Tilly. The length plot and melodramatic style of performance obscure representational practices, relating to the spectacle of
The only real way to truly understand a story is to understand all aspects of a story and their meanings. The same goes for movies, as they are all just stories being acted out. In Thomas Foster's book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”, Foster explains in detail the numerous ingredients of a story. He discusses almost everything that can be found in any given piece of literature. The devices discussed in Foster's book can be found in most movies as well, including in Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic, “Pulp Fiction”. This movie is a complicated tale that follows numerous characters involved in intertwining stories. Tarantino utilizes many devices to make “Pulp Fiction” into an excellent film. In this essay, I will demonstrate how several literary devices described in Foster's book are put to use in Tarantino’s film, “Pulp Fiction”, including quests, archetypes, food, and violence.
Academic colleagues like, David Greenburg, would have been exasperated, part from envy of McCullough’s ability in not only story telling but to sell and he would object to the approach of this book. The colleagues would tear at the lack of compelling rationale for an overused topic, as well as the scene setting, and meager analysis.
Braff himself has a warm, easy-to-watch screen presence. He can say nothing during the lull in a conversation, while the camera remains focused on his face, and it feels right. Portman and Sarsgaard are also genuine, each wonderfully relaxed in their roles. Production design is superb: details in every scene are arranged well, and the photography, by Lawrence Sher, is - like the story and the acting – unpretentious, never distracting, tricky or cute. This film never seems to manipulate us; instead it engages us, arouses our curiosity and amusement, bids us gently to care about Andrew and Sam and even Mark, leaving us entertained in the best sense. This movie is as confident, as secure in itself, as comforting, as a well worn pair of house slippers or your favorite reading chair. A splendid film. Grade: A- (09/04)
...stival) starring one of America's most acclaimed actors, Sidney Poitier. Despite the necessity of the brilliant and groundbreaking writing of Hansberry, credit must be given to the filmmakers for translating the stirring emotion of the play into something visually moving. A theater production lacks the creative license for close-up shots of actors' faces, and the composition of the stage comes off as contrived and stilted at times. Although carefully planned and choreographed, the frame composition of the film is a subtle and creative exploration of the emotional message of this play.
The Dressmaker is a film based on the novel by Rosalie Ham and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse that portrays the morals of the people living in the community of Dungatar in the rural Australia. The film mainly engages with the themes of bullying, isolation and grief and loss. The director’s unique and distinctive visual style that has focused on the strongest aspects of the conservative society of the countryside in the 1950’s explores the lives of people settled there. Moorhouse has used cinematic techniques of symbolism, cinematography and sound effects in the film to enhance the audience’s engagement.
“ It was the most beautiful and poignant love story I’ve ever read” ( Dir Darnell ). Love that is genuine is hard to come by on a daily basis, everyone is not meant to experience the marvelous wonders it has to offer. Not only is the subject matter cropped for modern day television, but the supporting characters in the novel are remade to fit Winfrey’s impression of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Males who would not perceive to be the typical sex to gossip, partake in many female characteristics in the movie. Janie’s character is broadcast to be a voice to be reckoned with in the screenplay as a vital denotation of women’s entitlement and place in this world as more than just a caregiver.
This analysis will explore these cinematic techniques employed by Pontecorvo within a short sequence and examine their effects on our understanding of the issues and themes raised within the film.
The characters are a crucial element in developing the narrative of a film. The characters in Breathless do not act the way one expects those of Hollywood cinema to act. The woman who distracts the police officer in the opening scene seems as if she may be important, but is in fact never seen again. This happens again in a subsequent ...
lassical narrative cinema. In Being There, the character and motives of Gardiner are made much clearer to the viewer through the imaginative use of mise-en-scene, as illustrated above. NOTES 1. Carroll. Essay The Moral Ecology of Melodrama:
Relations between sympathy-empathy expressiveness and fiction have become a significant issue in the debate on the emotional responses to the film fiction. Due to their complexity many scholars found it useful to diagram them. With his essay, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”, Alex Neill tries to develop new theory for analyzing the fiction and, especially, the emotional responses from the audience on it. The project of this essay is represented with an aim to show the audience the significant value of the emotional responses to the film fiction. From my point of view in the thesis of his project he asks a simple question: “Why does the (film) fiction evoke any emotions in the audience?”, further building the project in a very plain and clever way. Tracing the origins of this issue, he distinguishes between two types of emotional responses, sympathy and empathy, as separate concepts in order to understand the influence of both types of emotional responses to fiction. However, relying mostly on this unsupported discrepancy between two concepts and the influence of the “identification” concept, Neill finds himself unable to trace sympathy as a valuable response to fiction. This difficulty makes Neill argue throughout the better part of the text that empathy is the key emotional factor in the reaction to (film) fiction and that it is a more valuable type of emotional response for the audience.
By dissecting the film, the director, Jennie Livingston's methodology and the audience's perceived response I believe we can easily ignore a different and more positive way of understanding the film despite the many flaws easy for feminist minds to criticize. This is in no way saying that these critiques are not valid, or that it is not beneficial to look at works of any form through the many and various feminist lenses.
... shadow of his narration suggests the significant influence of Joe’s bias on the manner in which the film is portrayed. The writer claims to represent the voice of empiricism, promising to deliver “the facts…(and) the whole truth” before the story gets “all distorted and blown out of proportion”, but his personality overlays the narration and his supposedly impartial retelling of the series of events contains opinions, editorials, and literary references all too reminiscent of a Hollywood drama. Joe Gillis, being a writer of fiction with an intense personal investment in the story he is telling, cannot be expected to adhere to scientific impartiality. Instead, he illustrates an essential tenet of storytelling and Hollywood mystique, the subjective nature of facts when coupled with human interpretation. Joe Gillis shows how a road can be more than a strip of asphalt.
The American black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street directed by Martin Scorsese was released December 25, 2013 and stars the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie. While on face value The Wolf of Wall Street looks like a film about excessive cocaine binges, long evenings filled with men with cigarettes, large portions of alcoholic consumption, having many sexual escapades with various women and even dwarf tossing from time to time, the film is deeply rooted in perception gender within the genre of The Wolf of Wall Street. The word ‘genre’ is rooted into a similar category as
In this instance Molly blatantly confronts Tilly with the truth, which is attempting to change characters, and their perception of her through clothes, will not be enough to deter the hatred as they are incapable of change. Such as in the case of Gertrude whom Tilly transforms outer appearance, to be perceived the way she wishes to be. Thus, the appearance and power of a dress is incapable of masking a character’s true self, a notion which is pertinent to the human
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...