GWL3 - Critical Responses

People watch films for different reasons, it all depends on what the audience wants from the film and this all depends on the genre of a certain film. If you wanted to watch something that made you feel on edge and tense you would most likely watch a horror or thriller, if you wanted a happy, upbeat, sing-a-long film you would watch a musical or if you wanted a heart-warming but comical film you would choose a rom-com (Romantic Comedy). As well as the genre you have to think about the narrative of the film you are watching. A narrative is the storyline, for example the first narrative we usually hear is from bedtime stories or the stories you hear in primary school. They usually follow the narrative of light and dark, good and evil and the battle against one another.

The Silence of the Lambs is an award winning film about a young F.B.I. cadet who must confide in an incarcerated and manipulative killer to receive his help on catching another serial killer who skins his victims. It follows a linear narrative which means that its starts with a beginning, follows with a middle and ends with the end of the story. It was directed by Jonathan Demme in 1991, Demme is also known for his work on Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate and Rachel Getting Married. This film follows the structure of a Thriller genre, giving you a tense feeling and making you sit on the edge of your seat. The film stars Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling) known also for the films Panic Room, Elysium and Inside Man. Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford) known for Hannibal, Fishburne and Man Hunter. And Antony Hopkins (Dr. Hannibal Lecter) who also stars in Hannibal, Red Dragon, The Elephant Man and Thor.

The film itself follows the codes and conventions of a Thriller genre, it has a battle between the protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist being Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and the antagonist being Buffalo Bill (Ted Levin). Even though in a way it goes against the structure of the protagonist being a female it still follows the code and convention of the thriller genre. It involves an exciting plot, about Buffalo Bill being a man who wants to be a women turning into a transsexual creating a suit for himself out of women’s skin. Also the fact that Clarice and the police are using a Cannibal (Dr. Hannibal Lector) in this race against time, they have 3 days to save a young girl that he has captured in his house. During the film there are many scenes where they use ‘low key lighting’ to create the suspense of the situation, the main situation that comes to mind is where Clarice is looking for Buffalo Bill in the pitch black in his basement and she is unaware that Buffalo Bill is behind her with night vision goggle on and is an inch away from her. At this point you’re asking yourself whether she will realise he’s there and what he is going to do to her if he does grab her, it causes tension and suspense to the audience watching but also the non-diegetic sound in the background is causing these effects as well.  Another thing that you are thinking about at this point is whether the other officers are going to get to Buffalo Bills house in time to save Clarice and Katherine (The girl who he has been holding hostage). There is a large variety of cinematography throughout this scene which include the close ups of the protagonist to show the emotion. Other sections of the film that comes to mind where they have used cinematography really well is where a pen has been left with Hannibal Lector and they use a zoom shot for this, at this point people are thinking ‘what could he do with this pen?’. Also when Clarice walks into Buffalo Bills house and it shows an eye-line shot (reaction shot) of what Clarice can see, the cotton and a moth flying about and this is when Clarice realises this is Buffalo Bills home. The iconography in the film matches the genre also as it includes weapons, police officers and FBI agents.

The order of how a narrative lm is set out is structured by a well-known historian and philosophers Todorov, the order that this order goes like this:

1)    A state of equilibrium – All is in order

2)    A disruption of the order state by an event

3)    A recognition that a disruption has taken place

4)    An attempt to repair the damage of the disruption

5)    A return to some kind of equilibrium. 

If you look back into the story line Silence of the lambs follows this structure very well, Firstly the state of equilibrium that happens is Clarice, she is training to be an FBI agent, to work for Jack Crawford and take after her late father. The disruption of the order that takes place is Crawford makes Clarice stop training and asks her to go and interview Hannibal Lector as Buffalo Bill has killed another women. A disruption that has taken place would then be Buffalo Bill kid napping Katherine. Then it comes to the attempt to repair the damage of disruption, The FBI and Clarice go to find Buffalo Bill, this causes a tense moment as when Clarice gets to the front door and knocks on it goes to the FBI knocking on a door. You then see Buffalo Bill open the door but you are unsure who is there, is it Clarice on her own? Or is it the FBI? In fact it is Clarice at his door so then it draws the audience in to what’s going to happen, are the FBI going to realise they are at the wrong house? And is Clarice going to go into the house? The last part of Todorov theory is a return to some kind of equilibrium. This is at the end of the film when Clarice graduates and becomes part of Jack Crawford’s team following in the footsteps of her late father.

The three act structure is another way of defining a pattern in a narrative structure. This broken down starts with Act 1, this is the set up and exposition, where all the major characters of the story are introduced in this case our characters include Clarice and Jack Crawford. Also in act 1 it will also include an inciting incident which occurs to bring the audience in, In Silence of the lambs the incident that appears provokes changes with the protagonist’s routine. Jack Crawford asks Clarice to come to his office, in the office we see newspaper articles of Buffalo Bill and so again another character is introduced, the antagonist is then part of the film and begins to follow the hero and villain idea. Clarice gets sent on a mission to see Dr. Hannibal Lector (Another very important character) Act 2 is the longest part of the film its where all the raising action is taking place, it involves plot complications, getting things back to normal and making characters into better people. Typically the protagonist will attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first point but only to find themselves in a worsening situation, this relates to the FBI going to find Buffalo Bill when in fact the house that Clarice ends up in is actually his house, this becomes clear when Clarice spots a moth- this specific moth has been found in all the suspects that Bill has killed and she also a sewing kit, the whole reason he is kidnapping these women is for their skin so he can make a suit. This then leaves us with act 3, the resolution of the film and the final action. The climax, denouement and enigma of the film begins to increase Clarice is alone with Buffalo Bill and there is a huge possibility of her being in danger. The denouement of the storyline is coming to an end and loose ends are tied. Clarice is focused on saving Catherine, the young girl Buffalo Bill kidnapped and in the end she does. The enigma is then whether Clarice will catch Buffalo Bill, in the end she does indeed catch him and kill him. And the storyline ends with Clarice becoming an official FBI Agent as she dreamed like her late father. 

Vladimir Propp noticed that folk-tales were very similar to each other in the way that they were about the same situations and struggles; he then published ‘Morphology of the Folktale’. His theory is that characters have a narrative function in the text and that they are there to help provide a structure for a certain text. There are 8 different characters that you can relate to, comparing his theory with Silence of the Lambs; firstly the hero would be Clarice Starling as she is the one Jack Crawford relies on to help catch Buffalo Bill with Dr. Hannibal Lectors help. If it wasn’t for Clarice finding information out then they would never have caught Buffalo Bill and he would have then skinned Katherine Martin for her skin. Clarice is the central protagonist throughout the film. The villain is Buffalo Bill as he is the assaulting women; killing them and then skinning there body to make a suit out of. The donor is Dr. Hannibal Lector, he doesn’t give Clarice specific information where Buffalo Bill is but tells her hints and clues to where she could find him. The Dispatcher is Jack Crawford, as he is in charge he is the one who dispatches Clarice to help find out where Buffalo Bill is. The helper within the film is Hannibal Lector, without him they would never have found Buffalo Bill as easy as they did, he was giving suggestions and clues to Clarice to where she could find him and why he was kidnapping the young girls. The false hero is Dr Clinton, He acts as if he is the one in charge but in fact he wasn’t and within the whole film his input was not important. He was more interested in flirting with Clarice and taking her out but then when she declined he turned into a vile, rude man who just wanted the gossip in why Clarice was there to speak to Hannibal. The princess was Katherine Martin as she was the one that the FBI and Clarice was trying to find and in the end when they found her it put the whole story together. Then lastly the father figure would be Jack Crawford he takes Clarice under his control and believes that she is able to find out where Buffalo Bill is, which in the end turns out that he had made the correct decision to believe in her.

  

The representation of gender in Silence of the lambs is very sexist and discriminating towards the female gender. In any films, TV Programmes or any media context women are typically shown for their beauty and physic. When looking at any Hollywood films a stereotyped female would be blonde, big breasted, thin waist and long legs. They are just there to be an object of beauty. Women are usually represented as being a fragile, soft and emotion character within a film but Silence of the Lambs don’t follow these stereotypical character representations. Clarice is shown as a strong independent women and shows how women can be a strong, determined FBI agent not just there to look good. She is represented in a positive way to the audience but within the film it shows the male characters looking at her in a negative way. One very main scene for me to show this was when Clarice enters the lift on her to way to Jack Crawford’s office, she is the only women in the lift (as you can see in the picture below). This shows the whole theme of the film and by looking at everybody’s facial expressions you can see how they actually feel about Clarice. All the men are in a strong powerful colour (red) and Clarice is in a grey plain jumper, this again suggests how the males are more important and powerful than her. The man to the right to her is looking at her with no facial expression and as all the men are a lot taller they look over powering compare to her. This is why she looks nervous and uncomfortable. Because of this throughout the film you’re wanting her to achieve what Jack Crawford sets out for her. Silence of the lambs involves a lot of different representations within the film and it’s all about gender representation with being feminine and masculine.

Another huge part of the theme of gender representation is Buffalo Bill and his transgender. Although now in recent times this is normal to us when the film was realised in 1991, this wasn’t something that many people understood. Bill was born as a man wanting to be a women and the whole storyline is trying to catch him as he is kidnapping women and skinning them for his suit he is making from their skin.

This film has so many different aspects to how the male gender put Clarice down just because she’s a women whether it’s with Dr. Chilton who is only interested in her when he thinks he could take her on a date and says she’s being sent to Hannibal just because she’s a ‘young pretty thing’. Clarice is determined to get the respect she deserves and this is why her character wears big baggy clothes, no makeup or bright colours. It shows how she doesn’t just want to be a sex object.

The ending of the film is when Clarice is shown to be the brave, strong, determined women she is when she becomes an official FBI agent.

Pulp Fiction starts off with a couple sat in an American diner planning a robbery. At this point you think that this film is going to be based on these people, but as the scenes change you begin to realise this film is not as simple as you’d think. Pulp Fiction follows a non-linear narrative. This means that the film is not in chronological order. So instead of starting at the beginning of the story which would be when a child ‘Butch’ receives a watch of his father’s friend (who he was in the war with), instead this is shown a third away through the film. The whole film is based from this point, as the film is an alternative film meaning that only a specific type of audience will watch the film for a certain entertainment value, someone who enjoys working out what’s going on and enjoys the way a non-linear film is set out. The ending of the film is when is when John Travolta and his partner stop the couple from robbing the diner and walk out with the brief case (even though we never find out what is in the brief case). But this scene is actually the middle of the story. If we were to put the whole film in chronological order then the real ending would be when Butch realises his girlfriend has forgotten the watch and goes back home to get it. On his way home he ends up killing someone, watching a grown man (Marsellus) getting raped, killing people that rape Marsellus and then runs off to collect his girlfriend and they run off together.

  

Pulp Fiction is a postmodern film, post modernism is when you can mix different artistic styles and media from different years. In Pulp Fiction it is set in the 1990’s but has aspects of it being set in the 1960’s. The bricolage is references to a mix of different genres within one shot; an example out of the film is when Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega are eating out in a diner after Vincent had been told to take his bosses wife for dinner, first of all the ladies are in provocative short dresses, Short dresses were not acceptable in the 60’s and were more fashionable in the 1990’s so straight away by the clothing that the people are wearing it sets a certain year. When you look at the characters in the diner, if it was based in the 60’s mixed race would not be allowed to be sat with white people so this makes you question what year this film is set in. You also see a women dressed as Marylyn Monroe walking about which obviously gives you the ideas of The film Seven Year Itch (1955) directed by Billy Wider, so then this takes us back to the 50-60’s vibe, it’s also a technique called pastiche, which is when something imitates another piece of work. This happens in the film when the young girl dressed at Marylyn Monroe copy’s the very famous scene of the dress blowing up from The Seven Year Itch. Another main example of bricolage is the drug taking in the toilet. Mia goes to the bathroom to ‘powered her nose’ and in this case she does. She openly takes cocaine in the middle of the bathroom with all the women around her finding this normal. Where as in the 60’s it probably did happen but not in an open way. In this scene it shows all of the features of a postmodernism, this film has many intertextuality’s relating back to other media texts such as Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Botham), Seven Year Itch (1955, Billy Wilder) and Grease (1978, Ronald Kleiser). Each part of the film has a section of one of these movies, examples would be the dance off on stage with Mia and Vincent, it happens in Greece and Saturday Night Fever and Marylyn’s skirt blows up repeating the very famous scene of the film from Seven Year Itch. Parody is where it copy’s a media text in a humorous way, in Pulp Fiction they have done this by making John Travolta ( Vincent ) dance in a ridiculous way, even though he is best known for his dancing. So by making him dance in a ridiculous way creates humour towards the audience. The last 2 techniques are Reflexivity, breaking the illusion of the 4^th wall showing that the film is not real. This happens when Mia draws a square with her hands and it appears on screen and the last one is Self-preferentiality, this basically means when a producer of the media text or actor references to previous work. As I said before when Vincent is dancing on stage it’s like a parody of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, using similar types of dance moves.