Sunday 1 November 2009
Hide and Seek
You can tell that this film is a thriller because the colours represent a Hellish, firey glow. The cover is dark but there is a verticle orange glow drawn down the centre which seems to light up the cover. There are only 2 names on the whole cover, Robert DeNiro and Dakota Fanning and they are the man and the little girl displayed on the cover. We can sense that the little girl is in some sort of danger because as she is coming down the stairs their is a fierce blaze behind her. All of the font is in white to stand out against the dark part of the cover hence there is no writting in the centre of the cover because the font wouldnt show against the orange. The title sounds quite childish but when we see the cover we automatically realise that it is not a kids game.
Premonition
Cold, grey, dim wintery colours are used to set a chilling theme. Again the focal point of selling this DVD is based on the main actress Sandra Bullock. Her ghostly image is placed in the centre of the cover and she has a solemn expression. She also appears to be looking over her shoulder. Her name is in capitals at the top in red to stand out. The title is in large capital letters to also stand out. Also like in the Secret Window DVD cover the use of trees and an isolated house are used to create a spooky atmosphere.
Font
The Font is in red and stands out against the dark colours therefore grabbing our attention. The Title is effective because it looks as though there is a shard of broken glass through the word window. On the cover is an extra close up shot of Johnny Depp. I think this is the main selling point and they're trying to sell the film based on the main character who stars in it. Also his is the only name on the whole cover. Johnny looks distracted or spooked and the impression it gives me is that he is looking around and afraid that something/someone scary is lurking nearby. Judging by the cover you can tell the film is a thriller because of the dark colours and also because there is a spooky looking house displayed in the bottom left hand corner. This house is isolated and although it has a gloomy, haunted, shabby look to it, we can tell the house has a resident as one light is switched on. At the bottom of the cover are the words "Some windows should never be opened" this intrigues people and therefore people become curious about the film and want to watch it and see what it is all about and what that sentence is referring to and why.
Monday 12 October 2009
Narrative Theories in film
Colin MacCabe was representative of the rising resistance toward ideas of classic realism, a resistance motivated by French Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, especially the work of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan.
One of the most important shifts in narrative analysis began in the 1960s with the French theorist Christian Metz, who built upon linguistic theory, including that of Ferdinand de Saussure, to bring structural analysis into film scholarship. Metz, along with Roland Barthes, set the groundwork for much of subsequent work on narrative, including the shift toward dialogue analysis.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many narrative theorists increasingly shifted from defining the narrative case to explaining the process known as enunciation. One influential linguist was Émile Benveniste. For Benveniste, story (histoire) tries to conceal its marks of communication, presenting itself in an unfriendly, objective manner.
French and British theorists as diverse as Jean-Louis Baudry, Colin MacCabe, Raymond Bellour, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Stephen Heath became increasingly troubled with the cinema's ability to "position the subject."
Narrative and spectatorship consequently became key concerns for feminist theorists. Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and Annette Kuhn in particular directed feminist attention beyond the narrative surface of patriarchal main-stream cinema. Issues of race, class, and gender went beyond categorization types of representations and were analyzed throughout the cinema's camerawork, editing, soundtrack, and plot structures.
While much of the theoretical legacy of enunciation theories of narrative, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies continues to thrive and inform film studies, it often reduces narrative analysis to serving as symptoms for larger social issues.
Moreover, the theorist and historian David Bordwell argued that enunciation theory remains too intensely obliged to verbal communication to be fully related to the cinematic experience.
Many narrative theorists refused to reduce spectators to passive, predetermined subjects, but rather posited active participants in the production of meaning. Bordwell argued for a cognitive-based investigation of film practice and found that Russian Formalism, with its precise attention to story, plotting, and style, provided a methodology that functions well with cognitive vocabulary to reveal how spectators perceive and process cinematic images and sounds to comprehend narrative.
Murray Smith enlivened the area of spectator identification, offering a highly functional grid to understand how films cue audiences to sympathize and identify with fictional characters.
