Alex Ross Perry And Thomas Pynchon's Queen Of Earth

In Ava DuVernay's first feature films I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere, her directing takes a large turn. Her narrative decisions make for many underlying meanings in the latter, while the former shows a much more ametuer approach to storytelling than we are used to from the Oscar-nominated director. The differences between I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere illustrate the large and necessary changes this director made to earn her first award nomination, and skyrocket to notoriety shortly thereafter.

In a 1977 interview with Steven Spielberg, the young filmmaker mused, “I think in a way I’m two different people; my instincts always commandeer my sensibilities, or my intellect is always beaten down by my instincts” (36). Spielberg’s prognosis is accurate – Spielberg’s creative instincts and business sensibilities balance each other, laying the foreground for his present prominence as both a postmodern constructor and postmodern auteur. 40 years later, today, Steven Spielberg remains one of the most highly-recognized, prolific directors in Hollywood. I argue that Spielberg is both a postmodern constructor and postmodern auteur, but

As they tell their story, we, the viewers, traverse the boundary between Self and Other as we watch the Angulo brothers share their more than unconventional experiences growing up in New York City and their love for film with the camera. Like us, the Angulo brothers have watched movies all their lives. Unlike us, the Angulo brothers have seen around ten thousand movies and meticulously recreated some of their favorites, all from the confines of their sixteenth story apartment. Michael Atkinson, a reviewer for Sight and Sound, a London journal, recognizes these themes and writes, “the Angulos' developmental Otherness, terribly odd to us and yet immersed in the pop culture we all know just as well, is the film's primary allure” (Atkinson 2015). Their interaction with cultures of the world (not just America) through film allows different cultural norms to permeate their

“All my life I’ve been a lonely boy.” Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 is a peculiar, surreal film to analyze. As a semi-autobiographical work, Buffalo 66 greatly exaggerates the events in the film and makes the viewers suspend disbelief on more than one occasion. Yet despite this, the main focus of this film is a broken Billy Brown’s emotionally raw journey seeking revenge but instead finding unconditional love through Layla in the end, and the formalist film techniques used here enhance this. Through the deliberate use of photography, staging, and movement, Buffalo 66 works as a formalistic classicism film, a predominantly classicism film with strong elements of formalism, on the style continuum.

In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.

The art of storytelling is a primary foundation for human communication and understanding. Whether it is through myths — Greek, Roman, Egyptian, you pick — or wives tales or even Grandpa telling his old war stories, stories have power. Through technological advancements in the last 150+ years, there are multiple mediums to tell stories; film being the most potent medium used. Film has the power to not only entertain but enlighten too. Filmmakers have the ability to challenge and manipulate the power of the story through creative resistance; by exploring other elements of storytelling: location, voice, color, angles, rhythm, language, filmmakers can create dramatically different films out of the same story.

Being one of the world’s most popular art forms, it was inevitable that these archetypes would find their way into film as well. In this essay I will argue that the

Billy Wilder’s work today remains masterful and memorable. From his skilled screenwriting to his directing, Wilder holds a key position in cinema history. Wilder’s stylistic and thematic elements are recognizable and give off a complex reflection of his American and European cultural influences. I think that Billy Wilder should be considered an “auteur” even if he is not already considered one, for his personal film style and the mere fact that his cynical vision allowed him to create many admirable films across a number of genre boundaries throughout his career. However, film critics tend to disagree and believe that Wilder was too cynical, while also complaining about the lack of

Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).

‘There are…two kinds of film makers: one invents an imaginary reality; the other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, criticise it…and finally, translate it into film’

Her father’s skill may have contributed to her passion and enthusiasm for the same line of work. However, his fame does not take away from her autonomy as both a skillful filmmaker and as an auteur.

For those that have been following the career of 31-year old filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, "Queen of Earth" is in many ways the film that we were expecting/hoping he would deliver soon: a movie that establishes him as an auteur. Right out the gate with his super low-budget film "Impolex" (2009) the director established himself as an unabashed cine-phile with heavy concepts, and several clear influences (Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Vincent Gallo, etc.), just perhaps not with the prowess he desired. Then, last year saw the release of his film "Listen Up Philip" which was his most high-profile work to date (featuring big-name actors, and more film-circuit exposure), and it was met with large critical acclaim, yet ultimately was still a bit derivative to mark him as an auteur. Now, with his latest film, "Queen of Earth" (which premiered at The Berlin Film Festival last January), Perry has giving us a stark and mesmerizing film that comes off as his own concoction, even if it may still be chiefly a "homage".

In the world of Saul Bass, letters walked, and roses turned to raindrops; analogous correspondence between unrelated objects was a way of life. He was a master of presentation and communication. He extracted simple and unassuming moments in time, raising each to the level of great art. With his great knack for exposing a magic meld between image, typography, and motion, he held seasoned filmmakers in awe as repeatedly he captured the naked essence of a two-hour feature-length film and condensed the emotion of the drama into a brief title track of two minutes or

Auteur Theory is based on three premises, the first being technique, the second being personal style, and the third being interior meaning. Furthermore, there is no specific order in which these three aspects must be presented or weighted with regard to a film. An Auteur must give films a distinctive quality thus exerting a personal creative vision and interjecting it into the his or her films.

Booker, M. K. (2013). The Twenty-First-Century Fantasy Film Explosion: Redefining a Film Genre. In M. i. Booker (Ed.) , Contemporary Speculative Fiction (pp. 231-245). Ipswich, MA: Salem