Tanya's Blog

Betrayal & Burning Trees Burnt By the Sun was directed by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1994. The film is the story of one day in the life of a family in a Dacha, and serves as a commentary of the destructive nature of the Soviet revolution in Russia. In the film, there are two men who represent the struggle between commitments to the ‘big’ soviet family, and to the personal family. Mikhalkov favors Kotov, as that character is not only played by the director himself, but is someone that Mikhalkov- given his own history- would have more easily identified with. Kotov is shown through various filmic techniques to be the ‘protector’ of the Dacha family, while Mitya comes in as a destructive force of the NKVD. Mikhalkov makes Kotov’s character the more sympathetic of the two even in the end, by going to his own death with continued faith in Stalin. While Mitya becomes cowardly remorseful, and takes his own life. While neither of the two men are completely evil or completely innocent, it ...

Stanley Kubrick “All of Kubrick’s cinema is about a brain that malfunctions.” Stanley Kubrick directed his first film in 1953, already challenging the form and style of films coming out at that time. While his first film is his least well regarded, it introduces one important theme that can be easily seen throughout the rest of his career- madness. Not a madness shown in man from birth, but a madness that slowly or quickly consumes, and changes the outcome of a life. The films that I will focus on are Fear and Desire, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita and A Clockwork Orange . All of these films feature a character whose mind degenerates, and causes their downfall. In two of the films, there are steps taken to reverse this, but to no avail. Kubrick loves the concept of human error, the madness that drives men to their downfall, and even in his last film, Eyes Wide Shut , it is something as simple as a mask lying on a bed that cracks the facade covering Bill’s madness and despair over th...