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Gold Diggers and M

Dominic Mayhall Gold Diggers and M          This week we were shown a glimpse of the golden age of Hollywood and the overwhelming number of movies that were produced in just a couple of decades.  Movies seemed to grow at a rapid rate and in a short amount of time. In that short slide of all those movie titles passing by, it looked like more than a couple hundred movies were made in just one to three years. And I see a production difference in two movies that came out only two years a part.           Comparing these two films, Gold Diggers and M, is like water and oil. These movies are acted and written polar opposite to one another. One is German and the other is an American film. Both have different feels for their own genres, and you can see the differences that are portrayed in Germany and America. The movie M had pretty much no music in it, you could just hear the static or the wind in the backgrounds of every shot. The things you could hear where objects people were using. Like th

German Expressionism

 Dominic Mayhall German Expressionism          Film without expression would be a pretty bland form of art. People like to see the reactions and gestures of other people, it's what makes us human. And like all things, film has evolved to show us different emotions through close ups. Which is what I think German Expressionism does well.           I watched two movies, the one you requested to watch, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and one of the suggestions, Nosferatu. I know of Nosferatu through pop culture, specifically a SpongeBob episode. On season 2, episode 16, they had an episode called "Graveyard Shift" and at the very end there's a shot of Count Orlok standing in the doorway flipping the light switch to scare them. I didn't know it was from a film the first time I watched it. Being a kid and all, I just thought they threw him in there to be scary. I find out a couple years later when I was rewatching the episode with my parents that they knew who Nosferatu wa

Birth of a Nation and it's Legacy

 Dominic Mayhall Birth of a Nation and it's Legacy     In the early years of film, it was mostly experimentation to see what works. People got to see what worked and what didn't, but they were the pioneers of the whole film industry. In earlier films you can see some aspects of these films that have carried into today's modern cinematography. And in David Wark Griffth's epic "The Birth of a Nation" he uses angles and practical effects that could still be used today. But there are a lot of practical effects and acting that would be too ridiculous to use today.      This film has it's good and it's bad when it comes to today's standards in both film and in politics. Most of its bad comes from the depiction and actions of some of the people during this time period. Actions and depictions of mostly African American people during this Civil War era were overly exaggerated to the extreme. Which politics wise, can be seen as a form of propaganda. And as t

Beginning of Film History

Dominic Mayhall Beginning of Film History     There have been many important inventors and visionaries to come and work on videography or film as a whole. Some of which are more important than others. And a couple of these inventors contributed more to the development of film making than some. I'll be ranking who I believe is the most influential, from first to last.     For my number one most important film figure I have to go with Eadweard Muybridge and his invention of the zoopraxiscope. He really started it all with "motion picturing." All by putting those pictures on a clear disk, then using the zoopraxiscope to have it spin around giving the effect that it's moving. And from this he held the first public motion picture exhibition. Which later on Thomas Edison, who I'm not fond of, would take inspiration from to help create the first motion picture camera.      In my number two spot I'm going with the Lumiere brothers. Their invention of the Cinematograph