Summary: Set in 1930s Fascist Italy, Il Conformista tells the story of Marcello Clerici’s desire for conformity. Sexually repressed Marcello is tormented by the memory of a homosexual encounter during his childhood with his family’s chauffeur Lino, whom he believes he killed after Lino attempted to seduce him. Having suppressed his homosexual leanings, believing them…
Category: Media Studies
A Man Escaped – Summary – Analysis
Summary: A man involved in the French Resistance to German occupation during the Second World War, Lieutenant Fontaine, is captured and imprisoned in Fort Montluc in Lyon.1 He carefully and meticulously plans his escape, seeing the achievement of each stage along his journey towards freedom as a personal victory. When Jost, a young teenage prisoner,…
Like Water For Chocolate – Summary and Analysis
Summary: The film is set in rural Mexico near the border with Texas during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. It is ostensibly a romance, a tale of love thwarted by rigid tradition. Tita, the youngest daughter of Mama Elena, is prevented from marrying her true love, Pedro, because it is her destiny to care for…
A Clockwork Orange: Story Summary and Analysis
Story Summary: In A Clockwork Orange’s Britain, the thugs who roam the streets raping, pillaging and murdering at will are at once both the savages from whom the civilised need protection, and the protectors themselves. Alex’s psychotic droogs flip from outlaws to guardians of the establishment with the merest whiff of state power. Analysis: It…
Citizen Kane – Story Summary and Analysis
Summary: The rich, powerful media tycoon Charles Foster Kane meets a lonely demise in the vast empty rooms of his palatial home, Xanadu. A reporter sets out to uncover the meaning of his final words, interviewing people who knew him well, including his second wife and his closest business associates. Through their eyes we see…
Cinema Paradiso: Summary and Analysis
Summary: On hearing that his old friend Alfredo has died, famous filmmaker Salvatore ‘Totò’ Di Vita looks back on his childhood in the fictional Sicilian town of Giancaldo. His flashback begins shortly after the Second World War when, as a small child, he fell in love with the world of movies. Alfredo, the avuncular projectionist…
Spring Silkworms – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Spring Silkworms depicts the plight of Chinese silkworm farmers against the backdrop of imperialist incursion and a weakened rural economy. Living in a village in Zhejiang province, Old Tongbao and his family go into debt acquiring a large quantity of mulberry leaves to ensure the healthy growth of their silkworms. When they finally succeed…
Chocolat (1988 Movie): Summary and Analysis
Summary: As France, a French woman in her thirties, returns to contemporary Cameroon, she encounters an African American father and his son who think she is a tourist. She gets a ride from them, and a long flashback begins focusing on the woman’s childhood in colonial Cameroon in the 1950s. France’s father is the chief…
Chinatown (1974 Movie) – Story and Analysis
Story: Los Angeles, 1937: Private Detective Jake Gittes specialises in marital work. Hired to discover whether Horace Mulwray – Chief Engineer at the City’s Department of Water and Power – is having an affair, Gittes finds himself enmeshed in a struggle over the future of Los Angeles. Mulwray opposes to the construction of a new…
Central do Brasil / Central Station (Movie) – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Based around the search for a father by a child who has never met him, Central do Brasil tells a simple story, ‘yet one that is full of nuances and resonances’ (Ruffinelli 2000: 690). The film relates two main quests: one by a boy, Josué, searching in the heart of Brazil for a father…