Essays
The following essays are distinguished
from their cousins on the In Depth page by
their more acadamic approach: generally they either are, or derive
from, things I wrote while at university.
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Originally published in Refractory, this is another
combination of my film writing with my background in urban planning.
This one looks at the classic American small town as presented in
various movies from the 1940s, and looks at the features that
distinguish our idealised communities from those that were actually
constructed in the great suburban boom from the 1950s onwards.
Life Reproduced in Drawings: Realism in Animation This is a slightly revised and
extended
version of
the essay originally published in Animation
Journal. It discusses the way in which assumtions about realism
that are applied to live-action film fail to translate when applied to
animation, and attempts to outline a model that will allow more
sophisticated discussion of realism in animation. This is derived from
my honours thesis at Melbourne University.
The
Least
Scary
Option: Blade
Runner and the
Future City
This essay loosely follows up
some of
the ideas and theories from
the two
essays below and is also unashamedly a reaction to the time I spent in
L.A.
in 1998. It looks at Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in terms of
its portrayal
of a city of the future, and argues that the strange mix of L.A. and
New
York imagery used to represent the nightmare future springs from a fear
of
portraying the suburban lifestyle L.A. represents as the true late 20th
century
dystopia. This was the basis of a much revised essay that appeared in The Blade Runner Experience, edited
by Will Brooker. (Click on the essay for more information).
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The
Enigma of
Rosebud: Citizen Kane and
the Critical Impulse A survey of some of the principal critical and theoretical approaches to Citizen Kane and the differing (contradictory) attempts to explain the meaning of the film. My first essay that deals in-depth with perhaps my favourite theorist (Noel Carroll), and also the last essay I wrote for my honours year, which explains the slightly flippant final sentence. I was done. Two Murders in Dallas: Documentary, Reality and Dubious Truth A look at two controversial
films
dealing with real life murders:
Oliver Stone's JFK and Erroll Morris' The Thin Blue Line.
The essay uses these two fascinating films to look at the arguments
about whether
documentaries can ever really claim to be "true."
Autumn Moon and Urban Bewilderment Chung King Express, Happy Together, and Postmodern Space These essays, which were
written
separately but follow on from one
another, are probably the most theoretical and pretentious of the
essays on this page. They are also the most eccentric, bringing in a
lot of ideas from my urban planning studies: they deal with the visual
representation of the city and postmodernist theory. The original
version of the Autumn Moon paper was fairly standard film
analysis, but my professor made me bring in a lot of the theory that I
only alluded to in the first draft. The second essay develops a
different spin on these ideas using two of Wong Kar Wei's films as its
base. Both papers are, I freely admit, pretty wacky; but I'm reasonably
proud of them and figure they only draw a slightly long bow. And I
finally got to bring in David Harvey - my favourite planning theorist -
to my film essays.
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Identifying
Heroes: The
Godfather and Pulp Fiction
A look at the ways in which
heroes are
used to create a two-tiered
address (for both the "naive" and "ironic" audiences) in two classic
crime films, though I never quite felt I explained the Pulp Fiction
end of this argument properly.
Rosencrantz
and
Guildenstern are
Missing: Adapting Classics
A discussion of whether film
adaptations of literary classics can have any
merit whatsoever, or whether they are inevitably just pale imitations
of the
original.
Action Games / Action Films Another angle on action, this time emphasising the influence that action films such as Aliens have had on the emerging computer game industry, and analysing the different types of action present in both the film and computer based action genres. |
