After watching tonight’s film I had an interesting realization about the affordances of animation. Usually a director will have a solid amount of freedom and control to shape the movie and push it in whatever direction they want. The director can dress the characters,  have some say in what characters are chosen, they can choose the set and all of the things that go in it. Within the accommodations of our world the director can really do whatever they want. However I find it interesting that with animation the director can create a whole new world. They can take the image from their head and really create it in the film. I really saw this in the film we watched tonight, especially in the way some of the scenes were set up, for instance when her father was telling the story of how the Shah came into power and the world took a puppeteer and comical turn. I also liked the point that was made in the after-film discussion about how sometimes when the film is set in a dangerous or hard to film place, such as Iran was during the time this film was made, animation can be used as a substitute. I really got a first hand experience of the affordances of animation tonight.

We often associate animation with child content, which is why this very serious topic seemed to clash with the presentation style – until further examined. A lot of the themes covered in the film like war, isolation, being uprooted from your home country and being put somewhere where you don’t belong can make individuals feel as if they are helpless, almost like children. Portraying this story through animation helped convey this sense of helplessness, where the world doesn’t even abide by the laws of physics and literally anything can happen.

I felt that the black and white coloring also represented how difficult it was to tell two sides apart during war time. Mr. Satrapi mentioned how people had begun to forget what they were fighting for as they ended the war. If you aren’t even sure what side you are on, how can you tell you enemies from your allies? The black and white painted all people with the same coloring; they are all fundamentally humans. With black and white coloring, even racial lines are invisible. The only differences are the clothing, which is an artificial layer over their being. Ultimately, I felt a them in Persepolis was that all people are people and the lines we draw to separate ourselves aren’t visible.

Over spring break I saw Birdman (2014) which was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. I found the method in which Alejandro shot the movie was very interesting and unique. Each shot was very long and the cuts between shots were hard to recognize. This gave the film the feeling as if it was just one continuous shot. The camera also seemed to be mainly hand-held as it moved with the characters. It is an interesting filming method and definitely made the film feel less film-like and more realistic in a sense.

Recently I came across this video essay which depicts the importance of movement in a shot. The video talks about how movement tells a different story ,in itself or exaggerates the emotion in the film.It shows the power of movement be it the camera, the character, the nature elements(wind,fire,steam) or all of them.Its fascinating to see how use of many people in the frame and all of them giving the same movement, or expression,  magnifies a particular emotion.The video emphasizes the importance of cinematography and puts forward a satirical message that ‘a film without cinematography is the same as turning light on and playing a radio’.The video also states how movement depicts a story in itself that the movie no longer needs a lot of dialogues. I really enjoyed the  video.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

After The Graduate, we talked a lot about how water was used throughout the film to symbolize both Ben’s escape from reality, but also his feeling of being pressured in his life because he is “just drifting.” We payed a lot of attention to the scene where he is standing at the bottom of the pool in his scuba gear, but I don’t think that we brought up how this scene–and the major themes of the film–was actually foreshadowed at the beginning of the film during Ben’s first major interaction with Mrs. Robinson.

When Mrs. Robinson asks Ben to drive her home, at one point he nervously throws her the keys, only to have her toss them back at him. She misses by a long shot (obviously on purpose to flirt with him), but in doing so, ends up throwing the keys in the fish tank. This simple act is symbolic of how Mrs. Robinson interrupts Ben’s “drifting”  and adds a purpose/direction to his life (an inappropriate direction, of course, but at least she gets him to actually do something). But what is really cool, is, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the keys knock over a statue of a frog in the fish tank (it’s hard to tell, but it seems like it is wearing scuba gear of some sort), that bears a striking resemblance to the pose that Ben makes while he is standing at the bottom of the pool. The film uses a whole bunch of these little nuances through muse-en-scene, but I thought that this one was especially worth noting. Even from the beginning, the film was telling us where it was going.

One of the more interesting things about The Graduate was that it had many wide shots. The director chose not to zoom in on the characters face but rather have it seem the viewer was a bystander in the room. I found this very interesting since it allowed the viewer to watch what both characters were doing. I feel a negative effect of this, however, was that it did not allow the viewer to see the emotions the characters had at specific times. You can only read how they were feeling by there body language. However, the director did capture how the character was feeling if they were alone, like at the beginning of the movie when Benjamin in sitting there quietly. You can tell something is bothering him and in a way looks hopeless.

In the beginning of the film right after Benjamin has graduated college, he is very stressed out for he does not know what to do in his life.  Not to mention, due to his prior accomplishments, he has a lot of pressure to try and outdo what he has already done.  However, in Benjamin’s life before he graduated, he had a clear cut path in front of him of what he needed to do; he basically followed what was typical and what his parents wanted to do.  After graduating, he did not have this path, and was unsure of what he wanted to do.

However, once Benjamin started seeing Mrs. Robinson, his character changed.  He was doing something he wanted to do, not something that was typical or what his parents wanted him to do.  Due to this relationship,  Benjamin did not only “change” from a boy to a man due to the sexual interaction between the two, but because he was doing something for himself, and people recognized it;  his parents kept on bugging him about what he was doing at night and everyone at the hotel he consistently stayed at recognized him.  Not to mention at the end of the movie, Benjamin realized that he wanted to marry Elaine because he loved her, not because his parents wanted him to and definitely not because the Robinsons wanted him too.  Based on this, while the ending is unclear about what happens to Benjamin and Elaine, Benjamin definitely developed as his own individual throughout the film.

I’m not sure how many of you have seen it, but if you haven’t, I think that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an excellent film to watch, because it combines a variety of topics that we discussed in class. It merges elements from a  variety of film genres, from animation and musicals (it has two songs, one that I linked, and another one towards the end), to the hard-boiled cop crime film, and especially film noir (with its black and white flashbacks, cynical protagonist, and of course, its femme fatale). It is essentially a revisionist-hybrid of all of these genres and serves as a satire both for them and the animation industry as a whole.

I could probably write multiple posts on this one film, but I wanted to call attention to its use of the femme fatale character, Jessica Rabbit, because we spent a good portion of class today discussing the femme fatale archetype and its role in film. Jessica Rabbit has, in many ways, become almost a modern symbol for the femme fatale, as she is an incredibly mysterious, sexualized character who flirts with almost any male lead, while hiding her ulterior motives. I don’t want to give away too many details, because the film is definitely worth watching, but behind her overly sexualized look, she is an incredibly complex and manipulative character, a quality of the femme fatale character.

However, Jessica works best when viewed as a satire of the character trope, as her body proportions are extremely exaggerated, her dialogue is overly mysterious (she even pokes fun at herself), and her “dark side” seems almost forced upon her (noted through her line “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”). These suggest that the creators of the film were aware of the stereotypes associated with the femme fatale, in addition to how integral they are to a mystery plot, but wanted to put a new spin on the character.

Below is a link to Jessica’s famous scene in the film,  which pokes fun at, and references, a variety of other femme fatale scenes (it emphasizes how they are mostly viewed as sexualized characters, but also plays with their mysterious nature and relationship with the protagonist).

I apologize for the delayed post but today I would like to bring up a point mentioned in The Celluloid Closet (Epstein & Friedman, 1995) about the role of the “sissy” in cinematic history. The “sissy” was the role of a gay man that made “both men feel more manly and women feel more feminine by playing the role in-between,” and these stereotyped characters were mostly seen in films in the 1920s and 30s. Although we did not have the time to see the entire documentary in class, I think the idea of the “sissy” in film has definitely evolved from a male that was not overtly gay, but was seen as feminine simply through his actions, to male characters who flaunt their sexuality overtly on film.

Here’s what I mean… If you are to look at The Producers (Stroman, 2005) there is a scene where two Broadway producers are trying to create the worst play on Broadway, and in order for their plan to work they want to hire the most flamboyant director in New York. While Gary Beach’s character does not exactly follow the stereotype of the sissy because he is very confident in his sexuality and there is no restrictions towards conveying his confidence, I also think that Beach’s character is fulfilling the same purpose as the “sissy”,  to make the male characters in the room feel more masculine and the female characters in the room feel like females by placing an “in-between” character in the film.