The goal of such an exercise is to bring the audience closer to a character, typically the main character. A film is driven by the audience’s connection to the plot and the main character, who is typically the driving force behind the narrative. Having an audience closer to the main character is advantageous to give the audience something personal to latch onto. Getting invested in a single character’s story is a tactic that most films use and while some use traditional filmmaking styles to narrate the film, some put in these subjective moments.
Most movies include a mix of objective and subjective scene; however, the vast majority of screen time is usually objective. Subjective moments are just that, moments within a film where the filmmaking is visually distinct from before in order to communicate the transition into a character’ subjective experience of reality. The process of using cinematic techniques: sound, images and actors to create emotion is the focus of the thesis. What specific techniques do director and other filmmakers use to create these moments from the perspective of a specific character? The research on this creative project included reverse engineering scenes to firgue out the technical specifications that the filmmakers use. What kind of lighting, cameras and sound design where employed? Why were those techniques chosen to represent a character’s subjective reality? And most importantly, why do those techniques evoke those emotions?
An analysis of the relationship between haunted house films and economic anxieties of different cultures and time periods.
An entire decade of films that emerged from the Hollywood system during the blockbuster era of the 1980s is often summed up as one marked by a “curious and disturbing phenomenon of children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults — films that construct the adult spectator as a child, or, more precisely, as a childish adult, an adult who would like to be a child.” If it is possible, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed, that “in recording the visible world — whether current reality or an imaginary universe — films … provide clues to hidden mental processes,” what are we to deduce about the mental processes of the American public who would pay to sit in a movie theater and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Rambo: First Blood (1982) for multiple viewings? In addressing this questions it may be helpful to turn again to Krakauer, who reminds us that a box office “hit may cater only to one of many co-existing [mass] demands, and not even a very specific one,” and that even if one could draw conclusions about the “peculiar mentality of a nation” by analyzing the “pictorial and narrative motifs” of box office hits, this “by no means implies a fixed national character.” This is a key insight because it implies a diverse national character composed of mass demands that remain unmet by the “children’s films” produced for adults which remain emblematic of Hollywood during the 1980s. In this thesis, I argue that the mainstream Hollywood film Beverly Hills Cop contradicts this notion because it employs sophisticated strategies to work as resistance against the dominant American cultural ideologies of the mid-1980s. I briefly contextualize the film in its historical and cultural setting. Then, I analyze three narrative aspects of the film. First, I begin with the various interactions Eddie Murphy’s character Axel Foley has with several “gatekeepers” throughout the film. Next, I analyze a scene in which Foley is assaulted by Sgt. Taggart of the Beverly Hills Police Department. Finally, I analyze Foley’s relationships with the supporting characters Mikey and Jenny. Beverly Hills Cop is one of the most popular and successful American films of the 1980s. Its subversiveness suggests the possibility that a host of other popular films from the decade are similarly sophisticated. This points to the need for a reexamination of a decade of American cinema that has been cast as “children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults.”