the groundhog day project

I've already pointed out how the musical offers "the greatest illusion of spontaneity and effortlessness" (Feuer, 1995, p. 447). Additionally, it offers timelessness, even in the midst of its story. The stage version of Hedwig , I've heard, is set during a single show, with the asides and flashbacks (and I hope animations) drawing on that. This film version offers several different shows and a linear plotline that covers probably less than half the film, with the flashbacks and asides and animations adding to that plotline even as they pull away from it. Flashbacks as memory--they don't exist in the past, they exist in the present. (I remember in my Media Theory class last quarter, we were talking about Groundhog Day , which happened a few times, and whether or not it was "Classical Hollywood Cinema." The professor had a problem with the nonlinear structure, but I argued that the film is actually quite linear. Phil's story is linear. It's just ...

For the record, I would have rather had more research and depth for yesterday 's entry. Given the short time frame I've got to research stuff for this blog, I just couldn't find a good source about queer coding in cinema. Found a few sources talking about how certain characters in, say, 1950s' films can be understood as gay even though their films could not really have them be, given the Hays Code. But, they just didn't get into details about what aspects of a character demonstrated coded homosexuality. Unfortunately, the topic proved more complicated than I had hoped. But, life--and this blog--goes on. The starting point today is a bit from Ebert's (1981) review of the film. He tells us that "the film doesn't like women [and so] its sex scenes all create fear and hostility." I got into this a bit the last two days , and I must at once both agree and disagree with Ebert's sentiment. On the one hand, I do not believe the hostility and fear t...

Freud will have to continue a little bit for a couple reasons: 1) there is bit more to say about Freud before I inject some Lacan and 2) I realized that Mulvey doesn't include Jung, so in terms of my paper not being a research paper but an analytical piece based around the supplied readings, I shall leave Jung out of it... even if there may be useful things to say; for instance, much of what Mulvey is trying to argue about how Freudian psychoanalysis connects with common cinematic representation fits with the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious . Effectively, however much a filmmaker intends to put psychoanalytic concepts into a film, they go in anyway. And, even divergent concepts, arguably, exist within film not necessarily because a filmmaker may deliberately be trying to diverge from the norm but unconsciously. But anyway, Freud... Another Freudian idea central to our experience of film, according to Mulvey, is scopophilia , looking as a source of pleasure. The voyeu...

From a psychoanalytic point of view, we can find Freudian, Lacanian and even Jungian imagery and narrative elements in Moulin Rouge! . That's an okay topic sentence, but I think I need an introduction. Most of the following entry will be part of my upcoming media theory paper if it goes well, so I've got to worry about structure and formal content a little more than usual. Still, I will interrupt if I need to, and just cut these parts later. Anyway... Figuring on maybe looking at Moulin Rouge! in terms of psychoanalysis (which I will work on during this viewing), as a populist film and... probably queer theory, since I;m working on a presentation on queer theory for performance studies, or as an auteur film (except we're not expected to do research outside the readings we had for class, so that one might not be so doable. Our class defines musical as a genre even if I do not, so I could go with that. Whatever I end up using, the following should be a bit of what I'l...