Film studies

Question ' The director is the most important creative influence on the production and content of a film '.     How far do you agree with this statement when applied to both of your chosen films ?   Films chosen: -Casablanca -Apocalypse now  Answer: I somewhat agree with this statement as Directors are seen as the lead role off-camera when a movie is in production. Michael Curtz (Director of Casablanca) and Francis Ford Coppola (Director of Appocolypse now) are the main reasons why both of the films recieved the attention and criticism it deserved.  An introduction to this point is the era of film making, 'new hollywood'. Links to our point as one of the most controversial films out of the 2 chosen was made in the middle of this era; Apocalypse Now (1979). In fact this film was released 1 year before 'New Hollywood' started to end, however it was in production for 3 years and it was set to release on Coppola's 38th birthday, April 7 1977. Compared to this, ...

 How did Wallace and gromit : The wrong trousers keep people engaged? One way the film kepth the audience engaged was through todorov's theory. In summary his theory had 5 steps which was; Equilibrium to Disruption to Recognition to Repair To finally a new Equilibrium. Now if we put this into example, the short film followed these rules in one of the final scenes where Wallace and Gromit are chasing the penguin around the house trying to capture it. For example Gromit is on the train at the back trying to get to the the penguin who is at the front and the penguin is shooting at Gromit, this is the first equilibrium. Then Wallace is on a train next to them and takes the gun from the penguin, however he is not looking and flies through the window onto a trolley, this is the disruption. Next the penguin is distrsacted by what happened and doesnt have a gun any more which gives Gromit a chance to make a move on him. However gromit gets the distracted by wallace trying to catch the vill...

 Coppola's creative signature always seems to create a powerful narrative, and its almost inevitable. We can see examples of this from, Apocalypse now, The Godfather trilogy and The conversation.  One of the tricks that Francis Coppola uses to create the sense of 'inascapable fate' is a technique called 'waiting the dolly' Francis stated in an interview that in the studio when he did film he would use this technique by using every sandbag in the studio and would lay them on the dolly as they did slow push-ins. This added an inertia to the camera movement and this also gave a great sense of gravity to the slow push-in shot. It give the shot a real sense of 'fate' when coming to an conclusion.A dolly movement is markedly different from handheld because it contains none of the camera operator’s small movements, their sense of humanity. This is neither good nor bad but is, rather, a stylistic choice on the part of the director. Some films use handheld movement t...