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Film Genres Paper: Spring 2013
The world, and American society in particular, has never been an easy place in which to live. In the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s the world could be especially overbearing, frightening, and even absurd. The Great Depression, World War II, and the spread of urbanization into small towns in those three decades left American citizens wondering…
“Hello. I came to talk…” One Passage from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke
“Hello. I came to talk. I’ve been thinking lately. About you…about me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me…Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner…Perhaps later.” – Batman, in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke Since 1940, The Joker has brought crime and…
Animated Fuel for the Fire in Everyone: Sergei Eisenstein’s Fandom Views on Walt Disney’s Animated Works
I wrote this paper for Dr. Steve Rybin for a Film History class in 2015. Animated Fuel for the Fire in Everyone: Sergei Eisenstein’s Fandom Views on Walt Disney’s Animated Works As twenty-four individual frames move through a projector every second, films create the illusion of movement and life. In order to create this same…
Analyzing a Scene: The Carbon Freezing Chamber in “The Empire Strikes Back”
The Star Wars series of films is packed with memorable moments. I have many favorite scenes of my own from the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy (Palpatine’s story of Darth Plagueis told to Anakin at the opera runs a close second), but my absolute favorite is the scene in The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin…
Genre Analysis Project: Movie Trailers
All movie trailers have basically the same traits. They are short videos meant to advertise a film in the hopes that anyone who sees the video will then decide to see that film. They typically run from sixty seconds to as much as three minutes in length and are displayed either before a film…
Rhetorical Analysis of a Movie Trailer
Click here to view the high-quality trailer on the official Star Wars site. When Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, it was the first Star Wars film to be released in sixteen years. When George Lucas announced that he would be making new films set before his original trilogy of films, the world…
Gazing Upward: Casting a Critical Eye at Patriarchy and Religion
I wrote this paper for a Gender and Film class, taught by Dr. Lyndsay Gratch, in the Fall of 2017. Gazing Upward: Casting a Critical Eye at Patriarchy and Religion When Laura Mulvey posited the idea of the “Male Gaze” in Hollywood cinema, arguing that women until that time had been the “bearer, not maker,…
Rhetorical Analysis of a Podcast
“Reality” episode of NPR’s Invisibilia podcast Picture is by Marina Muun, pulled from NPR Since people in general are resistant to change, how would a podcast achieve the Herculean task of changing the way people interpret reality? National Public Radio’s “Reality” episode of its Invisibilia podcast series uses several techniques in its attempt to…
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