Filmmaking Assignment
1. As it was noted by Susan Sontag in her essay, it is essential to view Camp in the context of sensibility. Although Sontag points out that sensibility is a very broad description of the meaningful aspect of Camp, the matter of sensibility in art, including filmmaking, has been expressed in various ways. According to Sontag, Camp “is not a natural mode of sensibility” (Sontag 1964), but the essence of Camp is realized in “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (Sontag 1964). In that regard, All That Heaven Allows (1995) is one of the greatest representations of Camp in filmmaking. The entire film is composed of the events that are set for the pleasure of viewing, as if artificially established in the plot. The story line that explores themes of challenges of love, social bias, class segregation seems to be only playing a role of a prop for the aesthetical side of the film. The relationship between the main characters are visually unnatural; they communicate and act throughout the story in a way that wouldn’t allow them to cross the line of aesthetical superficiality and bring any sense of realism into the picture.
2. In her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ (1975) Laura Mulvey describes the aspects of cinema in its association with pleasure. As Mulvey notes, scopophilia, or the love of looking, characterizes the cinema and its impact on the viewer (Mulvey 1975). On the other hand, cinema is responsible for the development of narcissism in human character, as the visual aspects of the film focus on the human form, thus projecting the identification with and recognition of peculiar attributes of human body (Mulvey 1975).In Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) the viewer is exposed to an intimate story between man and woman that takes different turns making the dynamics of the relationships between the main characters very engaging. Throughout the film we observe how different personal aspects of the main characters’ lives come in clash in the episodes of conflict. Thus, the spectator is provided with “an illusion of looking in on a private world” (Mulvey 1975). In addition to that, for the aesthetical pleasure of the viewing the main roles are given to James Stewart and Kim Novak whose appearance and play we, as viewers, cannot disregard, and are able to be fascinated with.
3. As it was noted by Brecht in his works, the theatre and the act of performance can represent “the apparatus of education and mass communication” (Brecht 1964). According to Brecht, while the performance cannot be stripped of “the raw material of knowledge in all its variety”, it is still “free to find enjoyment in teach and inquiring” (Brecht 1964). In this way the art of filmmaking or theatre, or any other art related to performance and exhibition could be viewed in the form of a very strong tool that has an aim of bringing not only inspiration, but also knowledge and enlightening.Using …
