British Film Flashcards
What is causality and who defined it?
David Bordwell, the events of a film have a cause and effect relationship that create a clear sense of time and space
What is a causal agent?
Characters, usually protagonists
What does a Todorov structure focus on?
A character’s journey
What are the four stages of the Todorov structure?
Equilibrium
Disruption
Quest
Resolution
What is an open ending?
An unsatisfying or frustrating ending that rejects fixed, singular meaning and invite discussion
What is a closed ending?
The tensions are resolved, there is a winner or loser
What are binary oppositions?
A set of two concepts that are defined by each other, creating conflict and tension
Positions the audience to take a side
Universal, transcend their stories
What is formalism?
The overall shape and structure of a narrative, which may reveal something about the themes and ideas of the film
What are some narrative devices?
Flashback/forward
Voiceover narration
Asynchronous sound
Performance
Expositional dialogue
Ellipses
Who suggested the Male Gaze theory and where?
Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
What does the Male Gaze theory suggest?
The camera places the viewer into the position of a heterosexual male, so the female is usually an eroticised figure
What does Mulvey suggest is the cause of the Male Gaze?
Underlying gender asymmetry in society and politics
Who suggested the Monstrous Feminine Theory?
Barbara Creed
What does the Monstrous Feminine theory suggest?
There are two ways a heterosexual male camera views women, either as sexualised victims, or as monsters
How can women be framed as monstrous in cinema?
The Archaic Mother
The Monstrous Womb
The Possessed Woman
The castrating mother
The Vampire (vagina dentata)
The Witch
The Femme Castratrice
What is the importance of ‘The Mother’ in cinema?
Culturally, the idea of a woman as a mother is natural and fulfilling, cinema exaggerates this
Who created Queer Theory, what did she suggest about gender?
Judith Butler. She argues that gender is a sliding scale, not opposites
Anything that fits outside the social order of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is labelled as ‘queer’
What does Queer Theory suggest?
Queer identity is persistently used in cinema as short hand for ‘other’, therefore for deviance and villains
This positions heteronormativity as trustworthy and queerness as deviant
Using this representation for villains in cinema is known as ‘queer-coding’
What is the Oedipus complex?
A psychanalytical idea suggested by Freud that a boy desires his mother and feels jealousy or anger toward his father
What does Freud describe as the ‘Primal Scene?
A child witnesses his parents having sex, making him sexually aroused, upset and confused
What is the myth of Oedipus that Freud based his theory on?
Oedipus killed his father and had sex with his mother, and then blinded himself
Who directed Under the Skin?
Jonathan Glazer
What are frequent themes in Glazer’s work?
Alienation, isolation, the uncanny and emotional coldness
Who directed We Need to Talk About Kevin?
Lynne Ramsay
