Category: Media Studies

Kukuli (Movie) – Summary, Analysis

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Summary: 

Kukuli, a young llama herder lives a simple life with her grandparents high in the Andean mountains of Paucartambo, in the countryside of Cuzco. She leaves to attend the annual Feast of Mamacha Carmen in the town of Paucartambo. On the way she meets Alaku, a mestizo who has lost his land. He seduces her, and they enter into servinakuy (trial marriage). Continuing their journey to Paucartambo, they consult a sorcerer with a llama skeleton hung outside his house. Reading the coca leaves, the sorcerer notes Alaku’s lack of a home and declares that death accompanies them. Fleeing in fear, the couple reach Paucartambo where, during the fiesta Alaku is killed by the Ukuku, a legendary figure, half man, half bear, who also abducts Kukuli. In death, the lovers are transformed into llamas: one white and one black; and they fall in love again. 

Analysis: 

Kukuli is one of Peru’s rarest feature . . . Read More

Kolya (Kolja) – Summary, Analysis

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Summary: 

In the summer months before the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution of 1989, the 60- something František Louka (Sveˇrák) augments his meagre income as a politically suspect cellist in a funeral ensemble by touching up the gold leaf lettering on Prague gravestones. He begins an affair with the singer Klára (Šafránková) and also agrees to marry a Russian woman, Nadeˇžda (Livanova), so that she and her five-year-old son, Kolja (Chalimon), can come and live with her aunt in Prague. He agrees to the sham marriage for a fee that allows him to buy a car and settle some of his debts. Nadeˇžda absconds to West Germany and her aunt is soon hospitalised, leaving Kolja in the crotchety Louka’s care. The confirmed bachelor and the young boy struggle to understand each other at first but eventually develop a strong friendship despite police attention and disrupted seductions. The Velvet Revolution comes, Nadeˇžda returns for Kolja, Louka is . . . Read More

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Summary & Analysis

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Summary:

Francis tells in flashback the story of how he and his friend, Alan, had competed for the love of Jane. He recounts the way in which he and Alan saw Dr Caligari and the somnambulist, Cesare, at a carnival in Holstenwall and how Cesare accurately predicted Alan’s brutal death. In the story Francis tells, we then see Cesare being sent by Caligari to kill Jane. But Cesare is overcome by her beauty and carries her off pursued by the people of the town. Still in flashback, at a nearby asylum Francis finds that the doctor in charge is none other than Caligari, who has been responsible for a series of murders. Finally, in a twist, the extended flashback ends and we find Francis is a patient in an asylum run by a doctor who looks like Caligari. 

Analysis:

Watching The Cabinet of Dr Caligari the audience, confined in the world of someone classified as insane, sees what the madman sees: distorted . . . Read More

Jamon, Jamon – Synopsis & Analysis

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Synopsis: 

José Luis is an executive at his parents’ underwear factory where his girlfriend Silvia works on the shop floor. When Silvia falls pregnant, José Luis promises her that he will marry her, most likely against the wishes of his parents. His mother is determined to break her son’s engagement to a girl from a lower-class family, and hires Raúl, a would-be bullfighter to seduce Sylvia. 

Analysis:

Early on in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 film The Flower of My Secret, a melodramatic novel by the film’s main character is thrown away in disgust. Surprisingly for the author, it turns up later in the film: as the screenplay for a much later work by José Juan Bigas Luna, director of Jamón, Jamón. Is this a knowing joke by a filmmaker well known for his tendency to recycle old movies and stories, including his own?1 Or is it a bitchy suggestion that Bigas Luna’s films steal their best ideas, . . . Read More

It Happened One Night (1934) – Summary, Analysis

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Summary: 

In his book about Hollywood screenwriters, Talking Pictures (1975), the critic Richard Corliss suggested you could summarise the plot of this film in a single headline couched in the style of its reporter-hero: ‘Star Reporter Trails and Nails Heiress – for Life’. On the run from her wealthy father (Walter Connolly) who disapproves of her marrying a playboy aviator, King Westley (Jameson Thomas), Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) has hopped on a bus to New York to be united with King, but, in so doing, she inadvertently occupies the seat of a brash reporter, Peter Warne (Clark Gable), who has just been fired from his job. Warne quickly sizes up her situation, but promises to help her if he can report her story exclusively and win himself back into his editor’s favours. As the journey proceeds, they fall in love. 

Analysis: 

If the plot is slight, the film, thanks to the . . . Read More

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956): Summary & Analysis

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Summary:

A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates. 

Analysis:

As both a tale concerning invading alien pods and a stark critique of small-town America, Invasion of the Body Snatchers stands as a significant US film; whether it is considered merely a low-budget science fiction B movie, a fantastic story that serves as an allegorical warning or an accurate portrayal of suburban life in the 1950s, the film continues to challenge modern audiences.1 This is a taut mixture of conspiracy narrative and contemporary fears; a film noir tale (Booker 2006: 59), as told by its main protagonist, Dr Miles Bennell, of the ‘outsider’ as threat to a supposed tranquil American idyll. David Seed rightly places the film within its cultural contexts, stating that 

“A cluster of films from the mid-fifties . . . Read More

Kings Of The Road (1976): Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

In a pre-title conversation between Bruno, a travelling film projector engineer, and the elderly de-Nazified owner of cinema, the film cuts to Robert, a newly separated depressed paediatric psychologist, who is driving his iconic Volkswagen Beetle at high speed into a West German border lake. Surviving the half-hearted suicide attempt he hitches a lift with Bruno, who is heading from Hof to Luneburg through the Zonenrandgebiet area along the border with East Germany. Following the border, they encounter a recognizably seedier side of life with derelict cinemas and morally derelict characters, overshadowed and overwhelmed by the post-war German history. The two men separate at an abandoned Border post, when Robert departs while Bruno sleeps. At a nearby railway station Robert meets a small boy who is writing a notebook of everything he sees. Robert swaps his sunglasses and his suitcase for the notebook, and boards a train. The ending . . . Read More

If… (Movie) – Summary, Analysis

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Summary: 

Travis, Knightly and Wallace routinely defy the traditions and Establishment values of their public school. In an attempt to bring them into line, they are beaten viciously by head prefect, Rowntree. This triggers an increasingly surreal series of episodes culminating in an attack from the rooftops with automatic weapons on parents, dignitaries, and boys gathered for the annual Founder’s Day service. 

Analysis: 

Being firmly located within the public school environment If … announces itself clearly as a British film and yet the use of this quintessentially national institution as a metaphor for society means the film has much wider resonance. The school system has a clear hierarchy of power and authority maintained by ritual and physical discipline. New boys, like Jute, are indoctrinated into this quasi-society with frightening aggression by those just above them in the pecking order, . . . Read More

Idioterne / The Idiots – Summary, Analysis

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Summary: 

Following a chance encounter in a local restaurant, a lonely woman named Karen (Jørgensen) meets a group of people known as the ‘idiots’, a collective whose aim is to challenge bourgeois social norms and to expose middle-class pretensions and hypocrisies. The group members undergo a procedure known as ‘spassing’ – in which they mimic the behaviour of mentally disabled people – in order to make contact with their ‘inner idiot’. Although initially resistant to their methods, Karen is increasingly drawn into the idiots’ community, and begins to find an unexpected sense of peace through ‘spassing’. Cracks eventually appear within the group, and several members leave the community after its self-appointed leader Stoffer (Albinus) urges them to take their ‘spassing’ to ever greater extremes. The film’s unsettling ending sheds new light on Karen’s emotional trajectory and brings into focus the distinction between . . . Read More

In The Mood For Love – Summary & Analysis

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Summary: 

In Hong Kong, 1962, Su Li-zhen, Chow Mo-wan and their respective partners rent rooms in adjacent flats. The two gradually become aware that Li-zhen’s husband is having an affair with Mo-wan’s wife and begin to seek solace in each other’s company. They work through their shared pain by roleplaying scenarios, such as imagining how the affair began or confronting the unfaithful other half. Mowan eventually declares his growing love for Li-zhen but the terrifying prospect of gossip splits the two, with Mo-wan leaving for a new life in Singapore. 

Analysis:

Obsessed with passing time and infused with a romantic vision of a vanished past, In the Mood for Love is a typical Wong Kar Wai film. However, by dispensing with the hitherto characteristic use of voiceover narration, Wong instead finds alternate routes into his characters’ inner lives that widen the potential of cinema to investigate memory, . . . Read More