Sunday, 27 February 2011

Film Review

Film Review of 3 Short Films by Jan Svankmajer and A Woman is A Women.

The 3 Short Films by Jan Svankmajer the genre being a drama, were a surprise to me as the  two previous films I found very pleasant to watch, especially A Woman is a Woman (Une Femme is Une Femme). With both films having a language barrier being Jan Svankmajer’s film’s where silent apart from sound effects and, A Woman is a Woman is being in French with subtitle’s gave them both a different feel as you didn’t quite know what to expect.

I found Jan Svankmajer’s films really quite funny with also a touch of disturbance. The fact that three faces were practically being cannibals, and eating each other till they turned into clay models and exploding at the end, to me gave a foreign feel. With the fruit being destroyed and the knives and forks being bent it was disturbing yes, but also quite funny and almost enjoyable to watch. It’s the whole feeling of bringing still 2D pieces to life and making them 3D and giving them a sense of movement.
The other short film that stayed in my mind was the piece involving the tongues. Where two heads where being childish at first and sticking there tongues at each other, a sense of childlike humour but then it turned into a rather more strange piece. When the toothbrush was sharpened with the sharpener, the pencil was wrapped in shoe laces and the shoe was covered in toothpaste, it felt like a touch of humour but also quite gruesome in a way. But you could also take it in a way that maybe with the childish humour, they way things were matched up incorrectly was like a child making a mistake when little? However I found them amusing and told the plot of these films to my family. An exhibition like these films is the Shadow Catchers at the V&A. The use of camera less photography was like these films with the fact they didn’t have a diegetic voice.

A Woman is a Woman is the other film I found amusing to watch, as this woman went about life happy and floating around yet she seemed to know what exactly she was doing. Anna Karina playing the main Woman, Angela, is desperate to have a baby with her boyfriend.
One of the most iconic shots for me is when she flips her fried egg and it lands on the ceiling, then continues with her phone call outside in the hall, then goes back to her egg which falls perfectly on her plate when she gets back. This I found brilliant by the fact that she lives this way, and wants a child, however the hypodermic needle model injects the audience with the feeling that she would in fact be a perfect mother.   
The sound in this film is very different to anything I have heard before. Another iconic shot is when Angela is walking down the street to work, and there would be diegetic sound of the street cars, people talking and general life, then there would be no sound at all, then non-diegetic parallel sound to the image we were watching. This I found interesting as most films I’ve watched have never had this mix of sound in one scene.

Both films I found had the use of humour added in, with the political use of cannibalism is Jan Svankmajer’s films, economically both films I felt would have had a small budget however they where made incredibly well. There was a social side to A Woman is a Woman as it involved her friends, but then it was a film talked about a lot after the film. To me both films have a cultural aspect as Jan Svankmajer’s films, even though 30years old now are still talked about and watched in there glory, and A Woman is a Women shows how society was then and its still a bit like it now.


(I hope you like this film review, its a long time since I wrote an essay for Media! Also sorry thats its over the word limit by 100 words it couldnt be helped!!!!)

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