Month: March 2016
Looking Good, Looking Great: Clothing, Power, and Identity in “The Last Laugh” and “The Marriage of Maria Braun”
(Author’s Note: This was originally written for my German Cinema class.)
In response to a rather myopic comment about a purse, Doug (Rich Sommer) shoots back, “Fashion is not about utility. An accessory is merely a piece of iconography used to express individual identity.” Much about this costuming and construction of identity is discussed in the 2006 adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, but this idea of creating one’s own form of iconography through accessories is exemplary in FW Murnau’s The Last Laugh – where the clothes seem to literally make the man – and in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun – where, in spite of economic strife, the lead exerts her power through clothing. Read the rest of this entry »
The Devil’s Work: Faith, Humanity, and Hope(lessness) in The Exorcist and The Exorcist III
(Author’s Note: I wrote this for my Horror Cinema class. It was fun.)
Max von Sydow battled an ideological “monster” before he encountered the Devil. Perhaps “monster” may or may not be a stretch, but the objective of his opponent was not dissimilar. While he, wearing chainmail and a sword on his side sat to sit opposite his opponent, Death (Bengt Ekerot), donned a black cloak and a white face, ready to reduce humanity’s greatest battle into a gamely metaphor. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) would force von Sydow to reconcile with a system of belief, and, as with any of Bergman’s film, he landed with a kind of ambivalence about the place that theologically based ideology would have in his life. Perhaps somewhat ironically, it would not be the Bergman film that would make this reconciliation with faith and ideological perspectives visceral, but a horror film fourteen years later, and a sequel of that film nearly twenty years later. Read the rest of this entry »
I Like Things That Look Like Mistakes 