Chapter 4 Film and Philosophy

    I am a person that love Philosophy, so I enjoyed reading about the connection between film and philosophy. While in High School I took a lot of Philosophy classes but I never before learned about philosophy and its connection with film. While reading the chapter 4 I immediately thought about films that I have watched and that are connected with Philosophy. One example is the film the Seventh Seal from the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.

    This film was my on my to watch movies list for a long time until I decided to watch it. I have mixed feeling about the film, it is not my favorite one by I like it. The Seventh Seal is a film of a huge importance for the history of film. The film is considered as classic of cinema and as one of the greatest movies of all time. It is very unusual film which story focuses on the journey of a medieval knight Max and a game of chess that he plays with the Death who has come to take his life. 

    The connection between the film and philosophy is explained very well in this film. This film covers very complicated topics and philosophical issues such as the afterlife, the existence or hell, God, the religion, the place of God and religion in the human heart, whether the God is silent of the human suffering and death especially because of the Black Death in that period. In my opinion there is not another film that explained the issues of evil, philosophy of religion and existentialism better than this film. I recommend watching this film especially if you are someone interested in getting answers for philosophical problems and questions.

 Laura Mulvey Essay and the Male Gaze

    While writing this post I thought of how complicated and important this topic is and that you need to read a lot in order to write about it. In my opinion, the feminist theory and its focus on the male gaze is not something that you can write for in just a few paragraphs, it needs to be explored, summarized, and explained in a longer post or essay. Because of that I decided that I want to explore this topic more and that I am going to write my Fascination Project essay about the feminist theory and its focus on the male gaze in films by using examples from different old or contemporary films such as Vertigo, Blonde, etc. 

    I have studied about this topic before, but I have never read Laura's Mulvey Essay before. I am glad that I got the opportunity to do that in this class. I found her essay very interesting and informative. I like how she mentioned all of the important facts on the topic and how she focus on the importance of the feminist theory in film and the analysis of the meaning of the male gaze. Not only that I am a woman, and that I can relate with some of the things written there, but also because I am a film lover I can say that almost everything that Laura mentioned is correct and needs attention. 

    I agree that in many films and in the reality woman are portrayed as passive object of desire through a masculine lens. I like the explanation that she gives that the male gaze is not just about how they view women but also how they create the female characters. I also agree with her point that the most popular movies are filmed in a way to satisfy the masculine scopophilia. She also mentions the masculine voyeurism and that it tends to sexualize women for a male viewer, for the male world and the heterosexual perspective. Women are not objects to be looked at and to be used for the pleasure of the male viewer.

    In order to start exploring this topic more and to start thinking of how to do my essay, I found and watched this video on youtube. The video is very informative and it summarizes many of the things mentioned by Laura. 

 

Le Jette

    As I  have stated before I am not a huge fan of French film and I usually find them boring. Whenever I need to watch a french film I am kind of skeptical. I am someone interested in history, so I was curious to see this film because of that. The film in general I did not find it interesting, but I am glad that I got the opportunity to see this film because it is important for the history of film. 

    I think that Le Jette deserves our time and all film lovers should watch it at least once. I was fascinated of how the film was made and how much it covered for such a short film with only 28 minutes. I like watching old films so this film being from 1962 and in black and white was another reason that made me to see it. This film is the most unique one that I have watched because of the way that it is filmed. I find very fascinating to see how the film is made entirely from still photos. I have never before watched such a film. Le Jette is like some sort of animation. 

    It was interesting to see the plot in the film without stars without dialog and without movement in general. I still do not know how to classify this film whether it is a documentary or something else. I had a hard time of understanding the story of the film without reading on the Internet of what was going on. Despite that, I like the themes that the film covered as sci-fi, war, post-apocalypse, time travel, love, confusion. This film is even more fascinating if we thing that it was made in 1962 and how it gives a disturbingly realistic feel of everything portrayed. 

 Postcolonial Theory

    I find reading the Postcolonial Theory of chapter 3 very informative. I learned new things from it. This theory covers somehow problematic concepts. I have never before think about how this theory is applied in film. When we think about postcolonial theory we focus on the gaze in film and how black and colonized bodies in film are portrayed. Postcolonial theory focuses on the visual representation of other and it shows all of the stereotypes about cultural and racial difference.  Because of all of this, it is important to mention postcolonial theory in the film culture as well. 

    A lot of films cover themes of domination of colonies and colonial power and show colonial images of gender, race, and different classes. Not all of the films take this theory very serious and pay attention of how they represent the things. Whether if the scenario is fictional or documentary, whether if the characters are portrayed correctly or they are portrayed as savages, primitive and outside of modernity. This kind of films try to address the issues and effects of colonialism by involving and portraying historical events and representing marginalized groups.

    I cannot think about any postcolonial film that I have watched and because of that I did research on the Internet. I found the film Chocolat (1988) by the french film director Claire Denis as an example of the use of postcolonial theory in films. This is a film that explores the themes of power, desire, betrayal in colonial inter-relationships.

 Notes from Chapter 3

    I found chapter 3 in the textbook somehow hard to understand because of all the different concepts that it coverts. When we talk about ideologies, film is a good example and one form of ideology because of all images, symbols, and narratives that are covered in films. Films are ideology because every film offers to us some morality - positive and negative ways of behaving. Every film is different and is based on the film director's sense of what is right and what is wrong, so the audience get an ideological perspective of different characters, cultures, etc. 

    When we talk about movements and film. Every film follows a particular trend in cinema of its time. There are many different film movements classified by chronological order related to the history. Some examples are: French New Wave, Italian Neo- Realism, etc. The theory of structuralism is also connected to film theory because every film convey meaning through the use of codes and conventions that is similar to the meaning of language in communication. The film theory is important because it helps us to understand the films on a deeper level. Film theories help us understand different films by classifying them in different genres, years, period, place, etc.

    From this chapter, I found the most interesting the part when it talks about feminist theory in film. Feminist film theory coverts the problems with stereotyped representation of women in films. This theory was mostly influenced in 1970s and it pointed out how women are represented on the screens by myths about them and feminity in general. In this period a lot of criticism was addressed toward the portrayal of the female characters in film culture and diverse distinction between the male and female roles in film. In my opinion both genders are equally important in each career and in film too. There are wonderful women in the film industry and filmmaking. Women unfortunately still struggle to keep their place and we know how many women earned awards, Oscars compared to men. I believe in the future of women active in the history of film industry. I also hope that one day I will be one of that women who will work in film industry and maybe make her own films. 

 In this post I will mention my favorite women film director Sofia Coppola. She has 3 Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and she become the third women to be nominated for Best Director Academy Award. She has won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for one of my favorite films Lost in Translation.