Place and Travel in The Painted Veil Friday, Aug 22 2008 

Drama and Focused Essay and Narrative Analysis and Period Piece and Thematic Analysis nwbartel 5:14 pm

The Painted Veil presents a story of redemption in such a captivating and gorgeous way that its scenes and characters all too easily take up residence in the mind, quietly, only to reassert themselves at odd intervals with a surprising insistence, causing a mood of reflection that while not unwelcome is nevertheless often distracting to whatever task is at hand.

It is a rich film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Somerset Maugham. (1) Like any great story, there could be any number of ways to approach it. One of the more obvious avenues is through place and travel. As Kitty, the main protagonist, moves from London to Shanghai and finally to a remote Chinese village, she is stripped of the social conventions and artifice through which she had previously related to the world, and is forced to negotiate a new and more authentic understanding of herself and her relations to others. (more…)

 

The Lives of Others: Art and Authentic living Friday, Aug 22 2008 

Character Analysis and Drama and Focused Essay and Foreign and Narrative Analysis and Thematic Analysis nwbartel 1:28 am

The Lives of Others follows a playwright, Georg Dreyman, and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, as they struggle through life in the authoritarian state of 1984 East Berlin. The government maintains tight control of artistic activity, blacklisting or otherwise silencing artists who are critical of the political system.Dreyman’s plays are sympathetic to communism and he is generally liked or tolerated by those in power. When even he comes under full surveillance, however, he achieves in his life what the censors will not allow him to achieve on the stage; he touches the soul of an audience he doesn’t even know he has, and opens that soul to possibilities it had never before conceived.

Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler is the stazi (secrete police) official tasked with spying on Dreyman and Christa-Maria. As the movie unfolds, Wiesler’s naive idealism and belief in the communist project is challenged on the one hand witnessing the blatant corruption and hypocrisy of powerful party officials, and on other hand by a growing sympathy with the targets of his surveillance. (more…)