Film and Writing (M.A)
Focus in Film: Adaptation from Literature, Horror Filmmaking Styles and Auter Cinema
Author of: "The Filmmaker's Guide" series
Twitter: @AnnieApprox
IG: @AnnieApproximately
Loneliness is when a person feels depressed, down and almost chronically stressed out of the situation of having no friends - whether that be in a close social group or a greater one. You may remember that I wrote an article that was about the difference between being alone and being lonely. I myself am alone, but I am not lonely. The fact is, there are some people who enjoy having other people close to them and then, even if they had a lot of people around them in their physical area, they can still feel lonely even though they are not alone in the literal sense. What I am going to investigate is the statistics of loneliness and the 'why' surrounding the assumed increase of loneliness. I want to get to the root of what is actually the main problem which causes people such as the 'incel' groups to exist as they are a simply products of the environment, the products of the social situations they had probably previously been in and some sort of social traumas they may have suffered.
In this chapter of ‘the filmmaker’s guide’ we’re actually going to be learning about literature and film together. I understand that many of you are sitting in university during difficult times and finding it increasingly hard to study and I understand that many of you who are not at university or not planning on it are possibly stuck of what to do, need a break or even need to catch up on learning film before you get to the next level. This guide will be brief but will also contain: new vocabulary, concepts and theories, films to watch and we will be exploring something taboo until now in the ‘filmmaker’s guide’ - academia (abyss opens). Each article will explore a different concept of film, philosophy, literature or bibliography/filmography etc. in order to give you something new to learn each time we see each other. You can use some of the words amongst family and friends to sound clever or you can get back to me (email in bio) and tell me how you’re doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmaker’s guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.
“Dark Victory” (1939) is a film you do not come across too often because the storyline is just so twisted. I remember sitting there thinking if this could potentially happen in real life and honestly, it could. In this film, Bette Davis stars as a beautiful young woman who falls from a horse, faints down the stairs and comes up very sick and, after falling in love with her doctor they decide to marry. When Bette Davis’s character is receiving treatment, the doctor tells her she is all better and by this time, they are engaged. Whilst a party ensues, the best friend of the bride-to-be notices something is uneasy and starts to question every single thing that the doctor is doing, she is rightfully concerned that her best friend is all of a sudden doing fine instead of having a sickness she was suffering so badly with. Once the gears start turning, the engaged woman discovers something absolutely horrifying and yet, cannot bring herself to tell anyone - just yet.
Ingmar Bergman directed one of my favourite films of the last decade. When I was fourteen, I watched “The Seventh Seal” for the first time and, not really understanding it I watched it again. Over the next decade, I watched it some ten to fifteen times and it still has the same impact as it did back then. It tells us that Ingmar Bergman is actually a very good storyteller, if not sometimes a little confusing and philosophically deep. This book also displays the similar aspects of his films in which it has these long moments of internalisation, long moments of introspection and long moments of just nothing physically happening in which the characters are shifted from the outside to the inside. It is something that Ingmar Bergman is very, very good at. But not only that, we get the existential concepts of human nature becoming something physical. Like death as a person in his movie, the book makes physical these strange existential and incomprehensible ideas. I love the way it is written because Ingmar Bergman has the most strange and almost celestial understanding of these concepts. “Sunday’s Children” is an incredible homage to his youth whilst displaying the knowledge he gained in his adulthood.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the newly founded Tik-Tok (of which I know very little about unfortunately) have become more and more of a part of our lives on a daily basis with the latter gaining popularity more rapid than most things I have ever seen. Before all of this though, there was MSN and chatrooms etc. these are the things that I spent an evening or two a week a part of - chatting with friends or even going on to chatrooms to talk about things I enjoyed such as: films, books and at that time I was also a massive Green Day fan. But, since way back then until now, I have noticed one, main thing: cyberbullying was around back then and it is still around (and far more rampant) now.
“The Man in the Red Coat” is possibly to this day, one of Julian Barnes’ greatest works. About the doctor, Samuel Pozzi, this book does not just tell us the autobiography of this man but also the surroundings, the people within his circles, the culture and the downfall of the fin-de-siecle belle epoch of France and England during this time. As someone who loves British and French decadent cultures, I got into this book very quickly as it starts off by simply giving us the surroundings, the atmosphere and the background of the novel and its non-fiction set up. The decadence is a bubbling pot of debauchery, drugs and intrigue. The courts and upper classes are filled with people who [as Barnes put it in a line of the book] are ‘ladies above scandal’. And yet, Barnes also tells us about how this culture was so set on its own self-serving patriarchy that there was absolutely no way it could have survived. It comes crashing down with the outbreak of the First World War.
In this chapter of ‘the filmmaker’s guide’ we’re actually going to be learning about literature and film together. I understand that many of you are sitting in university during difficult times and finding it increasingly hard to study and I understand that many of you who are not at university or not planning on it are possibly stuck of what to do, need a break or even need to catch up on learning film before you get to the next level. This guide will be brief but will also contain: new vocabulary, concepts and theories, films to watch and we will be exploring something taboo until now in the ‘filmmaker’s guide’ - academia (abyss opens). Each article will explore a different concept of film, philosophy, literature or bibliography/filmography etc. in order to give you something new to learn each time we see each other. You can use some of the words amongst family and friends to sound clever or you can get back to me (email in bio) and tell me how you’re doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmaker’s guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.
It is well documented that Britain does not have a good history with diversity. When I say 'history', I do not mean five or ten years' ago, I mean actual history. Imperialist Britain saw the rise of the Empire and then, the eventual fall. But the strength of the civil vs. savage argument is still there. The point of the Victorian stance was that if the British army went over to these particular countries (Asia, Africa etc.) they would be able to civilise the savages. Since then, there has been discussion of whether this is still going on without explicit movement. This rhetoric of what a 'good' immigrant is whether they be first, second or even third generation - some of the white-British make it clear that though you were born here you will never be one of them.