FS3 Small scale research project
Auteur Powerpoints - helpful for small scale research projects
Film theory
FS3: Project ideas - Star performer: Harrison Ford
This montage of clips may be tongue in cheek - but the clip is extremely useful for examining star/performance issues on Harrison Ford - the repetition associated with his screen persona in similar film genres and and the meanings that he brings to the roles.
Just as John Wayne used to furrow his forehead before expressing his anger in his films, there is also the trade-mark look of angry surprise on Harrison's face across a range of films. It is shots like these that audiences "expect" and "want", whether they are always conscious of them or not, because they often derive pleasure from them. And, yes, Ford seems to be forever saving his wife! (Not withstanding Indiana Jones films in which he saves women who, had he married, could have been his wife).
An important aspect of Ford's persona, and one worth exploring, is Ford's representation of masculinity - in this instance, the protective husband. Some modern US critics and writers bemoan younger American heroes who lack the assured masculinity that the now ageing Ford and Clint Eastwood exude with ease.
For performance consider Harrison Ford's
Any aspect of the above can create meaning from performance as they can show his character's feelings about other characters. These elements can affect how audiences react to Ford at various points in a film's narrative.
Tim Burton's Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green's lolling vamp represents the perfection of a type Burton has long been trying to get right – from Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns, to Lisa Marie Smith's bosomy Martian in Mars Attacks!, to Anne Hathaway's White Queen in Alice in Wonderland.
Critics may be tired of the rest of Burton's directorial signatures – the ornate production designs, the seventies kitsch, the collaboration with Johnny Depp – but he's finally perfected his vamps: peroxide-blonde, big-chested, cinch-waisted, eyes like Bambi's.
All film directors have their types. Everyone knows Steven Spielberg for his suburban settings, alien visitations, and Godlike shafts of light, but equally consistent is his taste for hot moms in long T-shirts, cut-off jeans and morning-sexy hair: Teri Garr and Mellinda Dillon in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist, and Dee Wallace in ET (dressed as Catwoman for Halloween, she even sends ET into a swoon).
Scorsese scholars find rich pickings in the director's Catholism, his taste for violence, his bruisers, misfits and loners, but less so the women in orbit around them, whether sexily-damaged like Rosanna Arquette in After Hours and Illeana Douglas in Cape Fear, or spitfires like Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas and Sharon Stone in Casino, giving as good as they get.
To which we could add Tarantino's foot fetish ("He gave her a foot massage!"), Fellini's breast-love, the lifelong connoisseurship Michaelangelo Antonioni brought to women's legs, David Lynch's thing for misapplied lipstick, Darren Aronofsky's taste for brainy brunettes and David Fincher's love of skinny Goth girls viewed from the rear. As New York film critic David Edelstein concluded recently: "Fincher is an undies-and-butt man." You could be forgiven for concluding that the most enduring definition of an auteur is a film-maker who populates his movies with women he wants to boff.
The big guns of auteur theory are strangely silent on the matter. In his seminal essay Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962, the influential American critic Andrew Sarris determined that auteur status was conferred by meeting the following benchmarks: technical competence, personal style and something called "interior meaning", which he variously defined as a director's "vision of the world", his "attitude to life", and "élan of the soul." He said nothing about sexual pecadilloes.
Even though the two film directors hoisted highest by the French and touted as auteurist poster boys – Howards Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock – are famous for their taste in women, bequeathing us, respectively, the Hawksian woman and the Hitchcock blonde.
Extract from The Guardian - Click here for the full article
An important aspect of Ford's persona, and one worth exploring, is Ford's representation of masculinity - in this instance, the protective husband. Some modern US critics and writers bemoan younger American heroes who lack the assured masculinity that the now ageing Ford and Clint Eastwood exude with ease.
For performance consider Harrison Ford's
- Voice, intonation, accent, pitch
- Facial gestures and movement
- body movement and the idiosyncrasies he displays as a performer
- use of space and his phsyical presence and room he takes up in frames
- how all of the above represent his masculinity and the persona he projects on screen.
Any aspect of the above can create meaning from performance as they can show his character's feelings about other characters. These elements can affect how audiences react to Ford at various points in a film's narrative.
External links:
Auteur Theory in Film Criticism - Case Study: Tim Burton
http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A22928772Girls on film: how Tim Burton finally got his vamp right
You can't really be an auteur until you've got your type – and that's just as true for the women director
Tim Burton's Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green's lolling vamp represents the perfection of a type Burton has long been trying to get right – from Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns, to Lisa Marie Smith's bosomy Martian in Mars Attacks!, to Anne Hathaway's White Queen in Alice in Wonderland.
Critics may be tired of the rest of Burton's directorial signatures – the ornate production designs, the seventies kitsch, the collaboration with Johnny Depp – but he's finally perfected his vamps: peroxide-blonde, big-chested, cinch-waisted, eyes like Bambi's.
All film directors have their types. Everyone knows Steven Spielberg for his suburban settings, alien visitations, and Godlike shafts of light, but equally consistent is his taste for hot moms in long T-shirts, cut-off jeans and morning-sexy hair: Teri Garr and Mellinda Dillon in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist, and Dee Wallace in ET (dressed as Catwoman for Halloween, she even sends ET into a swoon).
Scorsese scholars find rich pickings in the director's Catholism, his taste for violence, his bruisers, misfits and loners, but less so the women in orbit around them, whether sexily-damaged like Rosanna Arquette in After Hours and Illeana Douglas in Cape Fear, or spitfires like Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas and Sharon Stone in Casino, giving as good as they get.
To which we could add Tarantino's foot fetish ("He gave her a foot massage!"), Fellini's breast-love, the lifelong connoisseurship Michaelangelo Antonioni brought to women's legs, David Lynch's thing for misapplied lipstick, Darren Aronofsky's taste for brainy brunettes and David Fincher's love of skinny Goth girls viewed from the rear. As New York film critic David Edelstein concluded recently: "Fincher is an undies-and-butt man." You could be forgiven for concluding that the most enduring definition of an auteur is a film-maker who populates his movies with women he wants to boff.
The big guns of auteur theory are strangely silent on the matter. In his seminal essay Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962, the influential American critic Andrew Sarris determined that auteur status was conferred by meeting the following benchmarks: technical competence, personal style and something called "interior meaning", which he variously defined as a director's "vision of the world", his "attitude to life", and "élan of the soul." He said nothing about sexual pecadilloes.
Even though the two film directors hoisted highest by the French and touted as auteurist poster boys – Howards Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock – are famous for their taste in women, bequeathing us, respectively, the Hawksian woman and the Hitchcock blonde.
Extract from The Guardian - Click here for the full article
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