From the Paper
"In Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs the pathology of the serial murderer Jame Gumb is slowly, suspensefully, revealed by a combination of hints from the mad psychiatrist Dr. Lecter, the memories of Lecter's patient Raspail, the deductive reasoning of the FBI characters, and sections of narrative that feature the actions and thoughts of the Gumb character. A brief outline of his "case" precedes critical analysis of the description of the disorder and a discussion of the author's theoretical bias as it emerges in the novel in the presentation of the disorder and the description of its causes. Harris' sources for the case of Jame Gumb appear, however, to range over news accounts of numerous cases, to touch on various psychological approaches, to try to incorporate pop-psychology about the beast within us all, and to include far too many different types of behavior to create a..."

From the Paper
"INTRODUCTION
Black films from the 1930s and 1940s were produced by black filmmakers for a black circuit and were rarely seen by white audiences. So-called blaxploitation films from the late 1960s and early 1970s were produced by white filmmakers for a largely urban audience, and these films were shaped for white audiences as well as black. The black films from an earlier era showed a wide range of subject matter, with the mass of films emulating white genres such as detective stories, westerns, comedies, domestic dramas, crime dramas, and so on. The blaxploitation films of the 1970s were much more limited, being primarily crime and action films featuring drug use, violence, sexual situations, and so on, creating an image of blacks that was limited and, in the eyes of many critics, degrading. It would be wrong to argue ..."

From the Paper
"Italian neorealism developed under onerous circumstances and became a form by which Italian filmmakers could express themselves in a new way. Essentially, the early neorealist filmmakers were doing what they could with the tools at hand and doing it under the watchful eyes of an antagonistic ruling class, From the tensions this arrangement produced, they created something distinctive, allowing them to develop ideas and to do so in a new cinematic style. At the time, Italy was ruled by fascists, who viewed art as valuable only to the degree it was useful. Yet, these films were not made in service of fascist ideas but as a counter to them. The forces that helped shape these films, the style that was produced by these tensions, and some important examples demonstrate the vitality achieved by Italian directors as World War II ended."

From the Paper
"Films make a number of assumptions about gender based on audience beliefs and expectations, and these are derived from the social structure prevalent at the time the film is made. A given film may present different images of gender roles through different characters. In both Fatal Attraction (1987) and the 1992 version of Cape Fear, there are gender roles based on the nuclear family that are held up as preferred or "normal" roles, and these are countered either by the actual behavior of some family member or by an outside force representing a different sexual energy, a different gender role. The films deliberately contrast what the filmmakers see as "normal" gender roles and deviant gender roles, and in both cases the deviant sexual energy threatens the family unit to such a degree that the outside force has to be killed to restore order to the family."

From the Paper
" The gangster genre in film encompasses a number of different forms, and the range can be seen in a comparison of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, two films which make use of conventions of the gangster film while extending those conventions into very different territory. The gangster genre in American film is primarily an urban phenomenon, while Bonnie and Clyde has a rural setting in keeping with a specific criminal history from the 1930s. Breathless draws its inspiration from American crime films of the 1940s and uses the conventions found there to express a different view of the urban criminal landscape and of the way a film should be structured. In some respects, the Penn film is more conventional in structure, but it as well reshapes the genre in service of a more mythic expression of American freedom and rebellion."

From the Paper
" The film A Clockwork Orange presents a vision of deviance in a future society, a society extrapolated from the growing urban crime problems of 1970 when the film was made. The exact year in which the film is set is not indicated, but it is likely somewhere around our current era. The film creates a sense of menace from the first, and yet at the same time, it uses strong imagery and high stylization to turn its dark vision into a black comedy. The concept of deviance by which sociologists try to explain aberrant and anti-social behavior, or behavior that goes against the norms of society, explains the delinquent activity in A Clockwork Orange, though the film undercuts a strict interpretation of crime as deviance by developing the idea that some crime is an expression of personal preference and inner freedom."

From the Paper
" Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal is a work of stark and powerful imagery, with one strong image succeeding another to build a whole, not unlike watching a medieval tableau whose scenes are intended to teach a lesson. Underlying this film is a strong sense of the theatrical. In a sense, this is true of any great film, but in the case of The Seventh Seal concepts of drama and the theatrical are inherent in the structure of the work and in the way the director shapes the material, as if moving from one scene in a play to the next, and all the while doing so by drawing attention to the theatricality as a way of enhancing the meaning of the whole. The film is a philosophical work in which ideas are embodied in human actions, in symbolism, and in the dramatic elements of the film. In this sense, the filmmaker is developing his philosophical ideas out in.."

From the Paper
"Two recent films feature the same black actor as star--Denzel Washington appears in both The Crimson Tide and Devil in a Blue Dress. Race is a factor in both films. It is used more subtly and less openly as a motivating force in Crimson Tide, while it is viewed as central in the historical context of 1940s Los Angeles in Devil in a Blue Dress. Both films are examples of a strong and popular film genre, the detective film in one case, the techno-thriller in the other. Devil in a Blue Dress is a detective film with a deliberately different attitude from most, while Crimson Tide hews more closely to the accepted elements of the techno-thriller while doing so in a field of more richly developed characters than is common in this sort of film. Both films make use of conceptions of race, community, and selfhood in developing characters and analyzing their behavior."

From the Paper
" INTRODUCTION
The frontier held an important place in American history, both in its reality and as a heroic image that would outlast the frontier itself. The idea of the frontier helped shape the American character. The frontier became a place to which settlers journeyed and a place they had to tame. This created a certain ambivalence in how the frontier was viewed. On the one hand, the frontier was natural and so somehow ideal, celebrated as such by James Fenimore Cooper in the Leatherstocking Tales. On the other hand, the frontier was something to be challenged and beaten. These tensions have been apparent in the popular image of the Wild West, and as a film genre, the Western has developed around this conflict and has shown the frontier both as a place of savagery and a place of beauty, the West as a place to.."

From the Paper
"Martin Scorsese achieved critical acclaim with his feature Mean Streets (1973), a film which also began his long collaboration with actor Robert De Niro. The film was an independent production in an era when that meant something different than it does today. It first meant that the film was low budget, and director Scorsese overcame this with strong performances and creative and powerful visuals. The film was also produced in the early 1970s when this sort of socially relevant, dramatically developed film was more the norm than it is today, and independent films had the aura of a counter-culture statement even when they dealt with more mainstream subjects. This film shows how a filmmaker could take what actually was a mainstream subject--the gangster film--and recreate it as a character study that extended beyond what was normal for this..."

Abstract
"In the film The Basketball Diaries (Scott Kalvert, 1995), the subject is not sports but drug abuse and the way a young man descends into the hell of drug use on the streets. The main character is a member of a winning high school basketball team, but more and more his life comes to center not on the basketball court but on the streets where he can make money to buy drugs.

From the Paper
"In the film The Basketball Diaries (Scott Kalvert, 1995), the subject is not sports but drug abuse and the way a young man descends into the hell of drug use on the streets. The main character is a member of a winning high school basketball team, but more and more his life comes to center not on the basketball court but on the streets where he can make money to buy drugs. He dreams at first of being a basketball star, but soon he no longer dreams and only seeks to escape through drugs. The film makes use of a number of themes related to rugs and drug abuse in developing its image of the downfall of this one young man, though the film is not fully successful and only presents its story without really developing an explanation or tying the themes to the world at large.

The primary message of the film is that drugs are bad and ..."

Abstract
"Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) has long been a favorite movie of many film lovers, and revivals of the film from time to time draw in new generations. There are a number of aspects of this film which would militate the continuation of such popularity, yet the film overcomes them and continues to be a favorite.

From the Paper
"Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) has long been a favorite movie of many film lovers, and revivals of the film from time to time draw in new generations. There are a number of aspects of this film which would militate the continuation of such popularity, yet the film overcomes them and continues to be a favorite. Many filmgoers resist older films as a mater of course and concentrate on what is current and popular, but Gone with the Wind seems to appeal to many of these viewers as to older ones. The subject matter is the Civil War, also not a subject with wide appeal, and the treatment of black characters in the film in particular has been much-criticized but does not seem to dim the popularity of the film as a whole. The movie remains popular in part because of the romantic element, which ..."

From the Paper
"By the end of World War I, the Arab rebellion against foreign domination had become widespread, and this fact was reflected in the film depictions of the region, though with an inherent Western bias that made use of Arab stereotypes to promote the view that the people of the West were a cultural force for civilization while the Arab was a more primitive throwback to an earlier era:

Thus the colonial film was born and became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. This kind of film glorified the skills of the colonizers. . . and what were known as "peacekeeping" operations. . . Its heroes were the legionnaires and soldiers of the colonial armies, and the villains are the "recalcitrant" Arabs (Fahdel 26).

The "good" Arabs are those who choose to join the colonial forces ..."

Abstract
"John Grierson (1898-1972) made very few films but was one of the most influential figures in the history of documentary filmmaking. As the leader of governmental film units in Britain and the founder of the National Film Board of Canada Grierson's belief in the potential social impact of documentary films set the course for documentary themes in English-language films.

From the Paper
"John Grierson (1898-1972) made very few films but was one of the most influential figures in the history of documentary filmmaking. As the leader of governmental film units in Britain and the founder of the National Film Board of Canada Grierson's belief in the potential social impact of documentary films set the course for documentary themes in English-language films. His other major innovations were the decision to rely on institutional backing, governmental or private sector, rather than depend on box-office returns and to employ "nontheatrical distribution and exhibition" (Ellis 398). Although Grierson himself abandoned directing early on, his Drifters (1929), the remarkable beginning of the documentary movement in England, remains a vital and interesting piece of work even today and, while showing how well Grierson fulfilled his mission, raises..."

Abstract
This paper is an examination of examples of interpersonal communications, using the relationship between mother and daughter, M'lynn and Shelby, in Herbert Ross's film of Robert Harling's play, Steel Magnolias.

From the Paper
"This paper is an examination of examples of interpersonal communications, using the relationship between mother and daughter, M'lynn and Shelby, in Herbert Ross's film of Robert Harling's play, Steel Magnolias. This film provides several excellent examples of the ways in which human beings interact, verbally and nonverbally, and the ways in which these interactions change the nature of complex, long-standing relationships. Although this is a fictional portrayal, the film remains effective because it portrays accurately many of the subtleties involved in the communication process.


M'lynn Eatenton (Sally Field) is a well-to-do Southern woman and the married mother of three. She is somewhat repressed, very dignified, and concerned with appearances. Her oldest child, and only daughter, Shelby (Julia Roberts) is a strong contrast to..."