Movie Meditations

Italian Neo Realism and New Realism Italian Neo Realism was a new form of film starting in the 1940s that was made to rebel against the typical Hollywood "Blockbuster Movies". It brought about a new way of filming and character connection with the audience. In these New Realism films, the audience saw the world as it was, instead of a glorified, flashy version of life. Directors often took people off the street to act in these movies instead of real actors. In the film, Bicycle Thieves , the film was shot on real locations in Italy, not on a set in a studio. In that movie, we see life as it is for Italian people in the 1940s. The main conflict of the movie was a simple, relatable problem that made us feel for the main character; he needs a bike. That was it. And through that relatively small problem, much more problems are created. The main character in these films did not have to be good people. There didn't have to be a "good guy". The conflict co

Arrival is a science fiction drama film about a linguist (Amy Adams) and a mathematician (Jeremy Renner) that attempt to communicate with alien life forms that have visited Earth for a mysterious reason. The two experts need to figure out what that reason is. The movie is set up in the beginning to convince the audience that the rest of the film is the a new chapter of the main character, Louise Banks', life, when in reality, it actually takes place in real, present time. The inciting incident of this movie is, of course, the arrival  of the beings from space. This causes extreme panic and tension around the globe and the nations of the world, so the U.S. government turns to Louise to help with understanding the aliens and their language. This is one of the most obvious inciting incidents that I've seen in a movie, it being an actual event affecting the world, instead of a thought or idea of a person that the audience has to dig emotionally into to understand.

When I searched up this film, I was shocked by the length of it but I clicked on it anyways and started to watch. As it started, I noticed the the camera was not moving at all the it was adjusted to show the layout of this single room. I also noticed people walking around the room and talking. At this moment, I thought "Maybe I should skip ahead to see if anything changes". So i skipped 5 seconds, and nothing had changed that was obvious. The camera was positioned in the same corner, in the same room, directed at the same window. What I did realize after skipping ahead about 3 more times was the difference in pitch. There was this ringing sound playing in the back of the audio and it would slightly get higher and higher every single time I skipped into the future. I also became conscious to the fact that the camera was zooming in at what seemed to be the same rate that the pitch was raising. The pitch got so high, I began to constantly wonder if it was even possible t