History in Films

The films The Lives of Others and Persepolis differ greatly in the stories they tell and how they tell them. Persepolis uses 2-dimensional animation to tell the story of Marjane, a girl who grew up in a country ravaged by war and oppression. The Lives of Others tells the story of Wiesler, a Stasi captain in East Berlin putting a man under total surveillance. Despite the differences between the stories, they share common ground in critiquing oppressive governments that punish people for disagreeing with them and for essentially trying to run the lives of its citizens. Both movies end similarly with Marjane moving to France to escape Iran and with Wiesler protecting Georg from getting arrested by the Stasi for writing the article about the concealed suicide rates in the GDR. In both films, an innocent party is liberated from a government whose purpose is to restrict its liberties. Both films communicate the message of the necessity to be true to oneself when one's government and one's own personal beliefs conflict with one another, despite the consequences.

Marjane stays true to herself by resolving to never compromise her values at the end of the film in honor of her Uncle Anoosh, who is a representation of integrity in the film. In the scene where the students at her college are at a meeting and the women are being asked to where longer scarves and tighter pants, she speaks out against this new regulation, pointing out the contradictions the speakers made. We see throughout the movie Marjane is not afraid to speak her mind. In the scene where the nuns are complaining about Marjane eating out of a saucepan, one nun remarks that Iranians have no education. Marjane stands up for herself by angrily replying that all the nuns used to be prostitutes, losing her housing. Although speaking out against the nuns caused them to kick her out, she was still true to herself by not letting them insult her for her nationality. When Marjane wrongfully accuses a man of insulting her to avoid getting in trouble with the police, she compromises her integrity and disappoints her grandmother. In this instance not staying true to herself detrimentally affected someone else.

Wiesler stays true to himself by going against the Stasi to protect Georg and Christa-Maria. He is shocked when he discovers the reason Georg has been put under surveillance is so that they might be able to find some incriminating evidence to have him arrested so Hempf can have his lover Christa-Maria. Despite truly believing in what the GDR stands for, he understands that their motives for putting Georg under surveillance are not for the security of the state, and eventually ends up losing his job to protect Georg's freedom of speech. If he were to have continued doing his job the way the Stasi wanted him to, Georg would have been arressted; like Marjane, compromising his integrity would have detrimentally affected to someone else. Even when he interrogates Christa-Maria to find out where Georg's typewriter is and discovers its location, he goes over to their house to take it so Georg won't get arrested.

In the film Hate, Kossowitz portrays the Parisian suburbs as a place in which the three main characters, Hubert, Saïd, and Vinz, are able to move about more or less freely. They do run into trouble with the police, but it's not a serious problem. When the three go to Paris to meet Snoopy, however, they are met with much more hostility from the police, who also purposely keep Saïd and Hubert in captivity long enough for them to miss the last train out of Paris. They are all stuck now. While Paris may be a famous city bustling with life, culture, romance, art, wine, and all the other wonderful things people associate with Paris, it is only welcoming to those who are welcome.

Paris may not necessarily be a city of closed spaces that trap people in them, but to Hubert, Saïd, and Vinz they are because they are outsiders. In the scene where Hubert, Saïd, and Vinz are in the art gallery, they stick out like a sore thumb due to their attire, standing out from the well dressed, 'cultured' Parisians. It's very easy for someone who is in a city or in a social landscape they are not from to feel trapped by their new surroundings. For example, I come from Washington, DC, a thriving city I feel I can freely navigate through. My parents have a summer house in Piney Point, MD in St. Mary's County, a more rural area of Maryland. Although there is far more open space there, when I go there with them, I feel metaphorically trapped because it's not in an environment I'm accustomed to. I feel trapped by how far spaced everything is; it takes much longer to get from the house to shopping areas, about a half hour, which limits my ability to move around in St. Mary's County because the amount of time it takes me to get from certain places takes away from the spend I can spend at those actual places. I have a feeling someone who grew up in a rural area would also feel trapped in a way if they were to go to a city environment; however, I acknowledge that contrasting my situation with theirs is not accurate nor is it fair.

What Kossovitz is trying to communicate in his movie that an experience of a certain area is a very subjective one, no cities or environments are inherently better than others, and that they're not all or nothing. A person from Paris who visits the Parisian suburbs may view them as being very hostile to them, while a person who actually grew up there might disagree and counter that Paris is a very hostile place for them. It's not fair to say that one place is better than another because they all have their pros and cons, and different people will prefer different kinds of places based on the environment in which they grew up and their personality. Paris may be called the 'City of Love', but that doesn't necessarily make it so to others.

Is It All or Nothing?

Mike Leigh insinuates that Hollywood is a 'disease', keeping directors from presenting real life through cinema. The contrast between European cinema as Leigh describes it and American film is that European films are about the real lives of real people, whereas in American film there is a lack of reality. American film producers produce movies that will entertain the masses for the purpose of turning a profit, and American film producers know that social realism is not exactly entertaining. The stories they tell are very fantastic and unrealistic, obvious jokes are made to make the audience laugh, melodrama is exaggerated, suffering is glorified, colorful characters populate the film, and will usually include an all star cast to convince people that the movie must be good if all these celebrities star in it. One example that comes to mind is He's Just Not That Into You, which includes Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, Justin Long, Scarlet Johansson, Ben Affleck, Kevin Connolly, and Drew Barrymore playing major characters, and they make sure in advertisements that we all know this. The movie itself is also predictable, with relationship complications, miscommunication, the lighthearted humor common in romantic comedies, and the happy ending in which everything works itself out. Even when a movie is 'based on a true story', many thematic elements are added to the story so that it'll have a comprehensible plot with a beginning, middle, and end.

However, American film producers do have the capacity to create a film that represents events happening realistically, without added drama or an obvious motive for swaying the audience to think one way. The HBO film Taking Chance is an example.



This film is about Marine Chance Phelps, who died in the Iraq war, and the events surrounding his return to the United States and his burial. The film doesn't make it a point to heighten drama or poorly conceal a political message, but rather just tells the story as it happened.

Despite this, it's fair to say Hollywood is a disease. It diseases American cinema as well as American minds. If we grow up watching films that provoke emotional responses as opposed to thought, we will be accustomed to such films and demand them from Hollywood, hence completing the cycle. People do not expect the films they watch to make them 'think', so therefore Hollywood does not churn out one intellectual film after the other. What could potentially be a form of art turns into a business.

Many Americans, however, do have an understanding of what makes a film a really bad film. The best examples of this are the parody films created by the two writers from Scary Movie. The jokes they make in their films do not have much to do with the genre they're parodying anymore; they are just inserting jokes for the sake of putting them there, and the jokes are not very funny. Most people I have met agree that those movies are awful and insult their intelligence. The Hollywood disease can be contagious to the viewer, depending on their amount of exposure to Hollywood movies and how suceptable they are. Although it's clear not everyone has caught it, Hollywood still festers with it.

Rosetta and Dans L'Obscurite

The short film the Dardenne brothers did for the collective movie Chacun son Cinema and Rosetta are stylistically similar. In both films, handheld cameras are used to follow the action of the actors and create a sense of movement in order to set a mood for the audience, as opposed to using music. The quality of both films is less that stellar; this combined with a slightly shaky camera creates a continious dischord which sets the mood for both films. A they both use Émilie Dequenne. The main kind of movement in both films strongly contrast with one another. In Rosetta, Rosetta is often found running or walking very briskly, whereas in Dans L’Obscurite the movement is very slow and controlled. Also, in Dans L’Obscurite, there is no dialogue between the two characters, while in Rosetta dialogue is used; however, dialogue was unnecessary for the short film.

The films are also thematically similar. In the film Rosetta, Rosetta essentially steals Riquet’s job by telling her boss that Riquet has been cheating him. In Dans L’Obscurite, the man is sneaking in the movie theater to try and steal the woman’s wallet. The means by which they steal are different, however. The man in the short film is very deliberate in his actions, making sure that the woman does not catch him, and snatches his hand away when he suspects that she might see him. In Rosetta, Rosetta at first does not want to go with her boss when he confronts Riquet, but then follows him and shows him where the waffles are; she doesn’t care whether or not Riquet finds out she cost him his job. In Dans L’Obscurite, the woman notices that the man is trying to steal her wallet while keeping her attention focused on the screen. She never looks at him; she takes his hand and puts it against her face all while crying through the film. In Rosetta, when Riquet initially reacts, he is furious, as would be expected. Later, as Rosetta is walking around the city, Riquet follows her on his motor bike, making it a point to maintain eye contact with her to intimidate her. The message with the man trying to steal the woman’s wallet, the woman taking the man’s hand and placing it on her face, and Rosetta resorting to snitching on her only friend is that in times of desperation, people will resort to drastic measures to achieve what they need or desire.

Ricordati di Me: The Individual and the Community

The movie Ricordati di Me is an Italian film about an upper-middle class family whose bonds begin to disintegrate because everyone is so focused on themselves rather than on keeping the family together. Although being a foreign film, it has a powerful universal message that speaks to everyone. An interesting concept that is adressed in the film is that of the individual vs. the community.

We see in Ricordati di Me that the individual and the community are constantly at odds with one another, because throughout the film the community aspect of the family is lost; it is merely a group of individuals living together. In order for a family to stick together, it has to have one communal mind focused on strengthening their ties, which in turns means a sacrifice of one's individuality. In the Ristuccia family, the members place far more emphasis on their individuality than their community. With Carlo, he keeps his job which he hates to support his family, but when he finally quits his job and runs away with Allesia, we see he is finally happy. His family, the community, is holding him back from being an individual. He is unhappy with his family life. This can be interpreted to mean that we find our greatest happiness when we work on ourselves rather than when we work on one another.

At the end of the film, Valentina, Guilia, and Paolo all acheive their individual goals; Valentina is on TV, Guilia is acting, and Paolo has found a girlfriend and acceptance. In the final scene, when they take their family photo, we see that they're all genuinely happy. Carlo, however, has difficulty smiling for the camera; he feels he's once again tied down by family life, keeping him from acheiving his goals.

The director, Gabriele Muccino, portrays the necessity to be an individual in order to be happy. At the beginning of the film, we see the family cannot stand to be around one another, and they all have their own self interests and goals that are separate from a family communal mind. But we also see instances in which the community takes precedence over the individual, namely when Carlo is hit by a car, and his family is waiting for him and staying by his side. This could be interpreted to mean that tragedies are what bring communities together, because in times of distress people are rarely self-reliant.

The French New Wave

The French New Wave still influences directors today. The only movies I've seen by Quentin Tarantino are Kill Bill and Kill Bill 2, but it's clear to me what elements of the French New Wave were incorporated into those films. One similarity is the unconventional editing style. In Kill Bill, many of the scenes were out of sequence, such as in the beginning of the first movie we see Beatrix confronting the second person on her list of people to kill, Vernita Green, and it ends with her killing O-Ren Ishii, the first person on her list; a common characteristic of French New Wave films was a lack of continuity in the story line, but it worked well in order to tell the story the way the director meant it to be told. There are also many jump cut scenes in Kill Bill which are extraneous to the story, yet at the same time serve to tell the story fully. Another aspect the films share is the characters talking directly to the camera. However, a big difference between Kill Bill and Breathless is that in Breathless the dialogue was much more natural, but in Kill Bill, it was very eloquent and felt unnatural.

In both films, the villains of the stories died in similar fashions. When Michel is shot and Beatrix uses the 5 point palm exploding heart technique to kill Bill, music is played in the background to heighten the drama, and for both they walk to their death. When the villains die, the heroines of the films both appear to be somewhat underwhelmed, but we know that inside them, they feel closure because both their tormentors have finally died.

Elements of the French New Wave are also present in the film Amélie. The very obvious example is in the scene with Amélie in the movie, watching the French New Wave film Jules and Jim. Also in Amélie, Amélie looks directly at the camera and speaks directly to the audience, there are many jump cut scenes in the film, and some parts of the film can be enigmatic, such as Raymond Dufayel's painting. Like in the French New Wave, Amélie not only served to entertain viewers, but also to break norms of traditional filmmaking and convey a deeper message.

The French New Wave has a lot to contribute to contemporary filmmaking. With Hollywood pumping out one pleasant yet insipid romantic comedy and action-packed film after the other, there seems to be a dearth of movies with real substance that lies beneath the plot. That's not to say there aren't any really good movies out there, but that mainstream films are created solely to entertain and make money rather than being created to produce art. Going to the movies would be a much more enriching experience if current films were more unconventional and ended with more mystery.