Annie Kapur
Bio
200K+ Reads on Vocal.
Secondary English Teacher & Lecturer
đLiterature & Writing (B.A)
đFilm & Writing (M.A)
đSecondary English Education (PgDipEd) (QTS)
đBirmingham, UK
Stories (2008/0)
Book Review: "The Following Story" by Cees Nooteboom
This was the last book I read of 2020 and honestly, it was well worth it. Itâs a fairly short book and possibly has no more than 100 or so pages. Itâs about a man who has an existential crisis when he cannot figure out what he was doing the night before as he wakes up with a woman that is not his wife or girlfriend in a place he does not remember being. In most aspects, this novel starts like a lot of novels do since the main character is seen in media res and does not know what to expect later on. However, the difference is that this character here cannot seem to remember who he is underneath. On this journey, we see him search on the outside and on the inside for who he really is. Exploring everything from details about his past to the deep philosophical questions in our own searches for the meaning to our lives. In the end, do we ever really get an answer or is it just more questions? Cees Nooteboom attempts to give you an ending that will leave you wholly satisfied but keep your mind turning about possibility. In this work, there are things that we can interpret as being the answers to identity - the question of what individualism really is poses a threat to the way in which we see ourselves as a part of a group - a family for example. This man here cannot seem to find his own sense of grouping and so, it may be that very individualism, the fact he is centred on himself, that is paradoxically holding him back.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
A Filmmaker's Guide to: Weimar Cinema
In this chapter of âthe filmmakerâs guideâ weâre 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 âfilmmakerâs guideâ - 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 youâre doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmakerâs guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
A Filmmaker's Review: "Oedipus Rex" (1967)
I've watched a couple of movies by this director and really, I am very, very impressed by the innovation considering the costume, set up and even the scripting being on line with this cross between melodrama and psychological violence. It's like a modern Shakespearean script whilst holding on to the way in which Shakespeare creates tensions through language. The film is based on Sophocles' Theban Plays and specifically "Oedipus Rex". We all know the story of Oedipus who's mother Jocasta was told a prophecy by an oracle in which her child will murder his father and marry his mother. However, Jocasta's response is to get the servant to take the child and kill it. But he cannot do it so gives it to a servant of the opposing city who takes it back and gives it to the king and queen. He eventually grows up and finds her way back - only for the prophecy to begin to play out. It has horrifying consequences.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
A Filmmaker's Review: "Bedelia" (1946)
Bedelia is a film about a woman who meets a man who knew her by a different name. When a portrait artist joins the picture, he seeks to find out her shady past before something horrible happens. As her happy romance begins to fall apart, it is evident that she has been hiding a great deal of her dark, and even criminal past.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
Book Review: "On Grief and Reason" by Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky has to be one of those writers that day by day, I am discovering more information about through his books. His writing style is often filled with descriptive anecdotes of times gone by, nostalgia in the form of an inability to let go and a beauty that only few writers of his time and age had. Through his text âOn Grief and Reasonâ he writes essays about not only his life as a writer, but the political, social and historical meaning behind some of the views he holds very close. A quite, pensive but open-minded human being, famously Brodsky rejected his native Russia in favour of Venice, Italy and since then, it has been a constant uphill battle between what is good and what is legal. With neither country being the face of political utopia in the 20th century, Joseph Brodsky makes a point that in order to believe in something better, you have to distinguish yourself away from the current forms, finding what is structurally wrong with the system and working to solve the individual problems within your own soul - put there by your environment. This is a beautiful book of both hindsight and futurism, it covers a wide array of social topics and Brodskyâs own views are woven into the fabric of the essay, sewn across the various wants for idealism and the requirement for a government that values its people for more than their output.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
A Filmmaker's Guide to: Experimental Film
In this chapter of âthe filmmakerâs guideâ weâre 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 âfilmmakerâs guideâ - 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 youâre doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmakerâs guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
The Loneliness of Our Society
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.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Humans
A Filmmaker's Guide to: The Kuleshov Effect
In this chapter of âthe filmmakerâs guideâ weâre 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 âfilmmakerâs guideâ - 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 youâre doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmakerâs guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
A Filmmaker's Review: "Dark Victory" (1939)
âDark Victoryâ (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 Davisâs 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.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
Book Review: "Sunday's Children" by Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman directed one of my favourite films of the last decade. When I was fourteen, I watched âThe Seventh Sealâ 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. âSundayâs Childrenâ is an incredible homage to his youth whilst displaying the knowledge he gained in his adulthood.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks
The Cyberbullying Problem
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.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Psyche
Book Review: "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes
âThe Man in the Red Coatâ is possibly to this day, one of Julian Barnesâ 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 âladies above scandalâ. 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.
By Annie Kapur3 years ago in Geeks