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A Walk With Linn By Liv Ullmann Liv Ullmann Linkpage Linn and I   go for a walk in Beverly Hills. We are the only ones who stroll in these streets. There is the smell of rain-drenched lawns and flowers. Bushes ripe with all the colors of the world. We talk about life- about men and women and children, about griefs and happiness we know and about strange dreams we have when asleep. Linn knows much more than I. She has a built-in wisdom that I never knew. We talk about responsibility, and she tells me that in fact she doesn’t need me: “You only decide two things for me: that I’m to fetch the newspaper in the morning and at what time I must go to bed. And you look after me and give me food. That’s all.” At this moment Linn and I are close. Walking on a street far from home talking about friends in Norway. About her father and the strawberries that at this very moment perhaps  cover the ground on his island. “What is life, Mamma?” Li...

On the 40th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange a new enhanced Blu-Ray Disc (BD) of it was released. It is the soundtrack that is particularly excellent in this edition. See trailer: Video is courtesy of The Independent of Britain. Read the article The film has gained a lot of publicity following its second release in 1999, the year its maker died. It was Stanley Kubrick (SK), who adapted this film in 1971 from a successful novela by the British author Anthony Burgess. Following death threats related to the movie's violent and sexual content he and his family had received, SK had to stop the screening of the movie. There were reports  of copycat crimes of rape and murder committed by teenagers who saw A Clockwork Orange which was initially rated X (just like porn) but later acquired the R rating. It might be a bit disturbing to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised! Summary Of Film Story A music-loving teen addicted to some drug which is sold as ...

Final Part Meshes Of the Afternoon This film was produced in 1943 by Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid in Hollywood. It was described as trance film, with both subjective and dreamlike qualities. Unlike The Sky Over Berlin , it seems difficult to provide a short summary about the film, since it has no standard story line to be told. However, we can identify some patterns and movements in the film that are based on small fragmented tales . One is that of a young woman, played by Deren herself, who is looking from a window at a figure in dark dress with its face replaced by a mirror. The young woman, however, can see also herself following the figure, and once more herself following the two! The second fragment is of a man who opens the door of the same flat, finds the young woman and takes her up the stairs. These two fragmented pieces of minimal story elements are broken with similar sub-fragments. All these pieces seem to evolve around each other while the identity of each actor ...

Essay Author: Hafiz Kheir Part Four From Poetic to Lyrical Films In the last two parts we looked into the main features of the cinematic language, from the angle of techniques such camera framing and editing and textual features, such as narrativity . In this part we aim to explore what we described as different levels of poetic language in work. Using some examples from two films we aim to further our definition of the poetic, in opposition to what we will call lyrical, language in cinema. The aim of these two case studies is to later compare the two features in question. We will be looking into two films that we consider being examples of these two types. The first is a film by Wim Wenders ( visit his site ) and the second is a Maya Daren's film. The Sky Over Berlin The film is set in the city of Berlin four decades after the Second World War. Two angels roam the skies over a city that is divided into two parts as a result of the war. Through the angels' me...

Part Three "Strangers on A Train" Notes on the Opening Scene     We suggested earlier in this study that language could influence the modes of signification in films. This case study of a scene from Hitchcok’s film Strangers on A Train aims to illuminate this issue.    There have been some considerable discussions on.how cinema can work, as a language of signification, on the expression of emotions and feeling. Hitchcock's cinematic style was particularly linked to this idea of "pure cinema." This idea is quite important for this study, because of the implied suggestion that cinema can have independent faculties which qualify it to speak purely in its own language.  As we suggested earlier, our stand is that this is not possible. Here we will give a textual example of how, in fact, this particular cinematic language is heavily influenced by natural language.   On examining Hitchcock's cinematic tools for delivering an inside look into...

      Part One cont'd The Cinematic Signifier: A History The study of signs and the developments in the field semiotics has given the critique of cinema a big leap ahead, although after more than seventy years of cinema’s birth, film studies as a discipline moved from the mere feature-like reviews of the journalist to the systematic study of film as a form of expression that needed fundamental understanding, as well as studying individual texts. The strong consistent flow of American genre cinema seemed to give the impression that cinema is indeed approachable through the systematic methods of text analysis driven from structural linguistics. “Semiotics promised to track down the units of representation in the aesthetic system [of the genre conventions, and structuralism] to account for the specific narrative shape of the values represented.” However, it seems that the disciplined approaches of linguistics to the study of sign in cinema proved to be t...