musical assiment

The musical film genre came about with the transition from silent film to sound film and also a natural development of the stage musical. A musical is in which several songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative. The directors used the songs to advance the plot or develop the film’s characters. The performers would often treat their song and dance numbers as if there were a live audience watching, by looking directly into the camera and performing to it. They used to be very popular but then had a fall out, though they are coming back again.

The 1930’s, 1940’s, and the 1950’s were often considered the golden age of musical film. That time was also by far when the genre’s popularity was at the top. The first so called “musical” was The Broadway Melody; it won the 1929 Academy Award for best picture. Another early musical, The Gold Diggers of Broadway, remained the highest grossing film for a decade. By the late 1930’s audiences had been oversaturated with musicals and studios were forced to cut music from films. Director Busby Berkeley brought musicals back though. He began to enhance traditional dance numbers with ideas drawn for the drill precisions that he had experienced as a soldier. Other directors followed his style and many more great musicals were made like Singing in the Rain, Over the Rainbow, The Wizard of Oz, and The Band Wagon. But yet again in the 1950’s musicals declined again in popularity. There was only one reason to explain this…the culture change in music to things like rock and roll and the freedom and youth associated with it.

Through-out the decades directors had been avoiding musicals by using popular music at that time as back ground music and then sell sound tracks to the film. Certain films began to make though; there were musicals made about actors, dancers or singers, and children’s animated movies. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) has been widely credited with revitalizing the musical genre and setting the stage for films such as Chicago, Rent, and The Phantom of the Opera. The film was an instant success, in limited release it grossed $185,095 in only 2 theaters opening weekend and when it expanded to over 2,500 theaters it made $14.2 million in its first weekend. Eventually Moulin Rouge! grossed over $57 million domestically and made over $120 million internationally. It even broke box office records in Australia and won an Academy Award. Another big “new age” musical was Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002). It won six Academy Awards, including best picture. The film was the first musical the win the Best Picture Oscar since 1968’s Oliver.

I think the upsurge in the popularity of musicals happened because there had not really been any good ones for a couple of years and people wanted something different for a change. It shows that to in the amount of awards and money that was come from the newer musicals.

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was a British director and producer, who fittled with many relatively new techniques for his time in the suspense and thriller genres. Through out his six decade career Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films ranging from the silent era, to talkies, to the color era. People begin placing him in the auteur category because all of his films were shot and acted out practelly the same.

Hitchcock became famous for is expert and largely unrivaled control of pace and suspense through out his movies; how his movies draw on both fear and fanesty; and the cynical view of tradional romance the most of his films took on. Many of his early movies created the techniques that he would end up using through out his film career. Blackmail was his tenth movie and introduced the tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences. The 39 Steps(1935) brought about the ‘MacGuffin” concept, a plot device around which a whole story would revolve in. Those are just a couple of examples that I have picked up on in the Hitchcock movies that I have watched. Many other directors have been placed in this category too, like Sara Allgood, Cary Grant, Vera Miles, and Annie Ondra.

horror assiment

The horror genre was designed to elicit fright, fear, terror, disgust, or horror from the audience. The plots use evil forces, events, or characters to come into the every day world. “Horror” characters include: vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, goasts, and many other fright-full things. The horror genre is nearly as old as film itself, with the 1st film in 1890. Most of the early horror films came from characters and stories from classic literature such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The two most influencal films, that set the tradition of horror movie setups, were Nosferatu and Frankenstein.

Nosferatu has been said to be the most enduring horror film of 1910’s and 1920’s era. The film was a German Expressionist film shot in 1921 and released in 1992 by F. W. Murnau. Murnau got the idea for his film from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This was the first and last movie from this company because they had to file bankrupency for being sued for copyright infringement. Nosferatu was meant to be destroyed but there were too many copies; and thank goodness for that because it ended up being one of the greatest movies of the vampire legend. The director ended up establishing one of the two main techniques of horror movies. It is called the “Nosferatu-type”, which is a living corpse with rodent features (such as long fingernails and incisors), associated with rats and plague, and neither charming nor erotic but instead very repugnant. The victims usually die too. This technique is still very much alive in new age movies, TV. shows, music, and video games. In 2000 several episodes of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command featured a recurring villain NOS-4-A2, which was a robot that feeds off of any thing mechanical. Nosferatu even made a cameo appearance on Sponge Bob Square Pants, became inspiration to music groups, and even a dark magic spell in video games.

In the 1930’s Universal Pictures Co. became known for horror films, bringing a series of successful gothic features. One of the best known was James Whale’s Frankenstein(1931). This film was very loosely based on the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and was heavily influenced by the 1920’s German expressionist films. Frankenstein was known for the “Dracula-type” techniques. The Dracula –type is basically a charming aristocrat adept at seduction and whose bite turns his victims into new vampires. It was such a success that Universal Pictures Co. made a series out of the film; Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. The film even influenced The Blair Witch Project (2000) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988).

Charlotte Warder