Summary: Set in the Po Delta, Ossessione tells the doomed love story of a handsome vagabond and a frustrated wife. When Gino stops in Bragana’s roadside gas-station restaurant for a meal, he meets the owner’s young spouse, Giovanna. Inescapably attracted to each other, they soon begin a passionate affair, and eventually Gino agrees to help…
Category: Media Studies
When A Woman Ascends The Stairs – Summary, Analysis
Summary: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a careful character study of Keiko, a widowed bar hostess in Tokyo’s fashionable Ginza neighbourhood. At age 30, Keiko faces three life choices: to remarry before her society regards her as too old to do so, to become a kept woman of a wealthy business owner, or…
Once Were Warriors: Summary, Analysis
Summary: Jake is an alpha male in a man’s world who engages in domestic violence as easily as he does a pub brawl. By reconnecting with her Maori roots his wife, Beth, finds the strength to break out from the cycle of violence and take her children away from Jake, but not before their teenage…
On The Waterfront: Summary, Analysis
Summary: After he is used to unwittingly set up Edie Doyle’s brother to be murdered, Terry Malloy begins to see those who run the longshoremen’s trade union for the thugs they have always been. He falls in love with Edie, and through her and Father Barry has his eyes opened to the injustices of life…
Om Shanti Om – Summary & Analysis
Summary: Om Shanti Om tells the story of Om, a junior artist in the Bombay film industry of the 1970s, and Shanti Priya, a big star in a secret marriage with a film producer, Mike. Om is in love with Shanti. Om witnesses the brutal murder of Shanti by Mike because he wants to marry…
The Colour Of Pomegranates (1969) – Summary & Analysis
Summary: At the narrative centre of Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is a biography of the Armenian poet-troubadour Arutin Sayadan (1712– 1795), known as Sayat-Nova, or The King of Song. The film traces different events in Arutin’s life, from earlier years till his death. Paradjanov structures his film as a set of narrative tableaux that…
Nosferatu (1922): Summary & Analysis
Summary: In the town of Wisborg, a demented estate agent called Knock sends his employee Hutter to a remote Balkan castle on a mission to sell a vacant property opposite Hutter’s house to the mysterious Count Orlok. In an inn, a book titled Nosferatu that warns of supernatural perils is left for Hutter by an…
Black Girl (1966 Movie) – Summary, Analysis
Summary: A young black woman in newly independent Senegal accompanies her employers to France to work as a governess. She imagines she will enjoy the comforts of bourgeois French society. Instead, she discovers her second-class status as an exotic outsider, leading to a crisis of identity and, ultimately, suicide. Analysis: Black Girl (La Noire de…
The Insect Woman – Summary, Analysis
Summary: Born in 1918, Tome is the daughter of an economically poor, dysfunctional family in early twentieth-century rural Japan. While working as a servant to the owners of the land her family tends, Tome is raped by the landlord’s son and falls pregnant. After the war has ended, leaving the child behind in the care…
Night Of The Living Dead (1968): Summary, Analysis
Summary: When the recently deceased begin to rise from the dead to feast upon the flesh of the living, a small group of embattled survivors attempt to stave off destruction by taking refuge in an abandoned western Pennsylvania farmhouse. They face the ghoulish threat of the living dead from without, but also increasing tension from…