Summary: Strike is set in Russia in the years before the 1917 Revolution. A factory worker pushed to the edge by management hangs himself and this is seen as the final straw by his fellow workers who go on strike. At first there is joy as they are able to experience the pleasure of being…
Category: Media Studies
Singin’ in the Rain: Summary & Analysis
Summary: Singin’ in the Rain opens at the 1927 premiere of The Royal Rascal, a costume drama starring above-the-credit silent film stars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont. On the red carpet, Don tells the adoring crowds about his training in the arts of high culture, framed by the motto, ‘Always dignity’. A montage shows us…
Seven Samurai: Summary & Analysis
Summary: Japan 1587, during a period of chaotic civil war, a group of marauding bandits makes plans to rob an isolated village as soon as the harvest is in. One villager, hiding on a woodpile, overhears them and the farmers go to their elders for advice. As they have nothing to offer but food, he…
House of Flying Daggers – Summary- Analysis
Summary: China 859 AD, the mysterious House of Flying Daggers leads a rebellion against a corrupt government. News reaches military captain Leo that one of the members of the House can be found in a local brothel. Hatching a plan to capture the rebel, Leo sends one his men, Jin, to the establishment. This leads…
The Goddess (1934 Film): Summary, Analysis
Summary: A devoted mother supports her child through prostitution. Despite being domineered by a gangster called ‘the Boss’, she squirrels away part of her earnings in order to give her young son an education. Gossip about the mother’s profession soon begins to spread around and, despite the kindly headmaster’s protests, leads the school board to…
The Searchers: Summary, Analysis
Summary: Ethan Edwards’s brother, his sister-inlaw and their young son, are killed in a Comanche attack on their homestead. Two of his nieces are carried off by the Indians. One is quickly killed, but Ethan and Martin Pawley, who as an orphan was adopted by Ethan’s brother, continue to search for the other girl, Debbie….
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Film) – Summary – Analysis
Summary: A rebellious, hard-living factory worker juggles relationships with two women, one of whom is married to another man but pregnant with his child. Analysis: Released in 1960, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is rooted in the new cinematic and literary movements of its day. Its screenplay, written by so-called ‘angry young man’ Alan Sillitoe,…
Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango) – Summary – Analysis
Summary: The film takes place in the isolated and dilapidated Hungarian countryside sometime at the end of communism. The locals spend their days drinking, dancing, and quarrelling with each other, or just sitting around doing nothing. A few of them decide to steal whatever little money the community has left and leave the village forever….
Sankofa (Movie): Summary, Analysis
Summary: While on a photo shoot in the site of a former slave castle, a self-absorbed African American model is magically transported back to a Jamaican plantation where she experiences the realities of slavery first-hand. Having experienced a slave revolt and joining a maroon colony, she returns to her present-day life with a deepened connection…
Silences of the Palace – Summary – Analysis
Summary: Alia is the illegitimate daughter of Khedija, a servant in an old Ottoman royal palace, Tunis. Her presumed father is Prince Sidi Ali, one of the last beys (Turkish governors), now a puppet of French colonial rule during the mid-1950s, when the movement for independence is growing violent. Khedija is beautiful, she works in…