Break Down Cinema

The following is a slightly edited version of one of my pieces of written coursework from my undergraduate university studies. I have posted it here with a slightly altered title alongside my later works for the purpose of showing the development of my academic research and writing skills. I wrote and submitted the original version of this essay for university coursework in 2018. Introduction The screenplays of Charlie Kaufman typically impart a structural variation of the classical narrative form; some prime examples of this are  Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004), and Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008). In his essay ‘“Frustrated Time” Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman’, Chris Dzialo writes that “Kaufman’s films always have one foot comfortably within the Hollywood studio system, ensuring that major plot elements are always comprehensible” (Dzialo, 2009, p. 107). While Kaufman’s writing involves many non-classical...

The following is an edited version of one of my pieces of written coursework from my undergraduate university studies. I have posted it here alongside my later works for the purpose of showing the development of my academic research and writing skills. I wrote and submitted the original version of this essay for university coursework in 2017. INTRODUCTION Persona (Bergman, 1966) is an experimental arthouse drama film that Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman wrote, produced, and directed at the time of his experimentation with modernist filmmaking techniques. A key aim of this stylistically nuanced film is to create an intense and surreal atmosphere that reflects the intricate and profound psychological experiences of its two lead characters. The effect of Bergman’s stylistic choices is one of ambivalence about the intended meaning of the film, due to the emphasis on emotional expression and exploring the subjective mental states of its two lead characters. The techniques that are of the ...

My journey began around 2011. In my early to mid-teens, cinema became perhaps my greatest passion, a passion I had cultivated from multiple experiences. Chief among those experiences were my discovery of films widely considered to be among the greatest in cinema history - 2001: A Space Odyssey  (Kubrick, 1968),  Citizen Kane  (Welles, 1941), and  North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959), to name but a few - and when I began to follow popular film criticism, the work of Mark Kermode in specific. I began to consume films at a more sophisticated level than I had before. But I think what truly awakened me to the art of cinema, its global cultural significance beyond the popular entertainment I had known it to be before, was when I watched the Channel Four documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey (Channel Four Television, 2011) - and subsequently read the book on which it was based, The Story of Film (Cousins, 2004). What I found (and continue to find) compelling, in...