Summary: Pulp Fiction is structured around three interlinking story segments which are told in non-chronological order. Vincent and Jules, two hitmen working for the gangster Marsellus, retrieve a briefcase of money belonging to their boss which had been stolen by a group of minor drug dealers. While carrying out this job they accidently shoot one…
Category: Media Studies
Psycho (1960 Movie): Story Summary & Analysis
Summary: After stealing money from her boss, Marion Crane drives out of town and stops at a motel off of the main freeway. There she meets Norman Bates, the young owner of the motel. Marion decides to return the money but is murdered before she can do so and Norman disposes of her body. Marion’s…
Il Postino (The Postman) – Summary, Analysis
I’ve ranged the far-famed seas, the nuptial stamen of each island, I’m a great paper seafarer, and I ran, ran, ran, to the uttermost foam Pablo Neruda, El Canto General (1950) Summary: In the 1950s, in a fishing port on a small Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea, Mario, illiterate and unemployed, dreams of a…
Ashes and Diamonds: Summary & Analysis
Summary: The action of Ashes and Diamonds takes place over the course of a single day: the 8th of May 1945, the final day of the Second World War. However, for Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), two soldiers in the outlawed Polish Home Army, the hostilities are not over. The pair has been…
The Piano (1993 Movie): Summary, Analysis
Summary: It is the mid-nineteenth century. Ada is a mute who has a young daughter, Flora. In an arranged marriage she leaves her native Scotland accompanied by her daughter and her beloved piano. Life in the rugged forests of New Zealand’s South Island is not all she may have imagined and nor is her relationship…
Persepolis (Movie): Summary & Analysis
Summary: An animated feature film based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comics about her coming of age in revolutionary Iran. The film begins just before the 1979 revolution in Iran, and unfolds from the perspective of Marji, a precocious 10-year-old girl from an upper-class, Marxist intellectual family. The story follows Marji from childhood to early adolescence…
Pépé le Moko (Movie): Summary, Analysis
Summary: Directed by the prolific Julien Duvivier, Pépé le Moko is based on a pulp crime novel written by Détective Ashelbé, a pseudonym for Henri La Barthe. It tells the story of a charismatic and glamorous master thief Pépé le Moko, played by Jean Gabin in one of his iconic roles, who has fled from…
Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road): Story Summary & Analysis
Story Summary: In the lush Bengali countryside the struggles of everyday life for the Ray family unfold through the stories of its members. The long-suffering mother, Sarbojya, is subjected to the ignominies of life so common to the poor, while her daughter Durga, a clever, often naughty girl who is tragically bereft of horizons, languishes…
The Passion of Joan of Arc: Summary & Analysis
Summary: A chronicle of the trial of Jeanne d’Arc on charges of heresy, and the efforts of her ecclesiastical jurists to force Jeanne to recant her claims of holy visions. Analysis: The poet and proto-feminist ‘H.D.’ (Hilda Doolittle) wrote about her experience of watching this film in 1928. She describes feeling nervous to the point…
Fight Club: Story Summary, Analysis
Regarding Fight Club there are two camps: those who consider it a disturbing celebration of homoerotic brutality, and those who have actually seen it. Ostensibly, it’s a movie about the creation of a ‘fight club’, where guys beat the crap out of one another bare knuckled so they can feel real again. Fight Club is…