Tag: cinema
Narrative Cinema, From the Modernity Thesis to New Digital Technologies: Traffic in Souls, Avatar, and Beyond
How do you feel about 3D cinema? About CGI, and other SFX? Touchy subject, right? But hardly a new one. Opinions about the development of cinema and even the changing technologies of cinema have been up for debate since the very beginning. As new technologies invade how we experience life more rapidly than ever before,…
Breaking the Fourth Wall: From Alfie to The Wolf of Wall Street
Ah, the fourth wall: that invisible barrier between the audience and the stage that allows us to suspend disbelief. Breaking the fourth wall – addressing the audience directly – is probably as old as theatre. After all, doesn’t Puck turn to the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to assure us everything…
(Mis)reading Film: Jaws and The Onion
I enter into evidence a biting satire of analysis run amok: The Onion has produced a range of very funny videos that provide pseudo-critical responses to popular films, which are as much parodies of their subject as they are satires of the nature of critical analysis itself. In this video from last year, The Onion…
The Big Bang: Cinema and The Bomb
Ever since the first use of atomic weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the idea of the effects of a nuclear war and its post-apocalyptic aftermath has been the subject of numerous film treatments. From giants ants, mutated by radiation fallout in the deserts of the American south-west in Them!…
Free to Play: E-Sports and the Gaming Revolution
Free to Play is a sports documentary in a familiar form; it follows the lives of a number of hopeful competitors approaching a huge tournament. These sorts of documentaries are a common method of celebrating a sport; they present an event as a humanised piece of history and offer a view into the world of…