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…
La caza / The Hunt – Summary and Analysis
Summary: José, Paco and Luis – three friends who share a common history – get together for a day of rabbit hunting and invite Enrique, Paco’s brother-in-law, to join. The land on which they hunt, owned by José but maintained by his tenant Juan, was the site of many deaths during the Spanish Civil War…
Casablanca (Movie) – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Against the backdrop of refugees fleeing the German advance in Europe during the early years of the Second World War we follow three characters involved in a love triangle. Victor Laszlo (Henreid) is a Resistance leader who has escaped from a German concentration camp. Accompanied by his wife, Ilsa (Bergman), he has reached Casablanca,…
Caché / Hidden (Movie): Summary and Analysis
Summary: Hidden is an art-house thriller which focuses on Georges Laurent, an arts journalist living in Paris, whose family comes under an unexplained threat with the arrival of several videotapes. These are anonymous surveillance tapes of the exterior of the family’s apartment, an unfamiliar Paris street and the farmhouse where Georges grew up. The investigation…
Pandora’s Box (Film): Summary and Analysis
Summary: Lulu is a beautiful woman with a mysterious past. Raised by the drunkard Schigolch, a pimp and possibly her father, she becomes the mistress of a wealthy and respectable newspaper editor, Dr Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner). Schigolch introduces Lulu to Rodrigo Quast, who offers her a role in his variety show. Dr Schön gets…
Brief Encounter: Synopsis and Analysis
Synopsis: Laura (Celia Johnson), a housewife, and Alec (Trevor Howard), a doctor, both happily married to other people, happen to fall in love with each other, quite by chance and apparently without calculation, after he removes a piece of grit from her eye. Friendship develops into romance, and the couple meet in town once a…
Boudu Saved From Drowning: Summary and Analysis
Summary: After losing his dog, the tramp Boudu tries to drown himself in the Seine. He is rescued by a Parisian bourgeois antiquarian bookseller, Lestingois. Insisting Lestingois is now responsible for his welfare Boudu is brought back to the Lestingois apartment. It is not long before Boudu’s anarchic behaviour clashes with the prim and proper…