Intro to Film 2025 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

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  • Andre Bazin and the Documentary

    Andre Bazin and the Documentary

    Many, many weeks earlier in the semester, we had discussed alternate forms of editing. In this discussion, we briefly learned about French film critic Andre Bazin, and his idea of “The Myth of Total Cinema”.

    In this idea, Bazin believed cinema strives for an objective and authentic capturing of reality. In other words, the goal of cinema is to portray reality as is, in a 1:1 representation. According to the film critic, reality would be captured through mainly long takes and deep focus. Though this idea itself is labeled as a myth, one of the reasons we haven’t obtained this goal yet (said by Bazin) is lack of technology to do so. As we make further advencements in tech, humanity will get closer and closer to total realism in cinema.

    Still from The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2013), a documentary I am currently watching.

    After learning about documentaries a couple months later, I began to wonder: What does Bazin think of documentaries? This genre of film is meant to provide an objective view of reality, depicting actual events to educate the audience. In theory, would Bazin then prefer every film made to be a documentary?

    Though documentaries do embody Bazin’s idea of Total Cinema by showing real people/places/events and placing the audience in the place of an observer or fly on the wall, there’s still a caveat.

    As discussed in class, someone still needs to make the documentary. Each documentary requires choices, such as framing, editing, or point-of-view. No film in this genre can be truly objective, as Bazin intends. Some documentaries can also be completely false. For example, Nanook of the North, a documentary we watched in class, showed an Inuit man’s life in the Arctic. In reality, the entire film is staged. There is no Nanook, just a character played by a Inuit man. The costuming is staged as well, along with multiple scenes throughout the “documentary”. Though documentaries seem like the genre that aligns best with Bazin’s ideas, personal choices and views are still projected onto these films and affect them whether we know it or not. Including or not including just one cut could change the entire lesson we take away from the film.

    Though documentaries demonstrate our power to capture the world as it is, it does not meet the goal of Bazin’s Myth of Total Cinema. Documentaries are still riddled with choices that shape it’s message and meaning. What matters more is the filmmaker’s respect for reality and their attempt to keep their film as close to reality as possible.

    If you’re interested in this topic like me, here is some further reading from Bazin I found: https://www.mccc.edu/pdf/cmn107/the%20evolution%20of%20the%20language%20of%20cinema.pdf

    Please let me know if you agree or disagree!

  • Reading ideology through visual form in Do The Right Thing

    Resource: John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-4LwAuTw7k&t=1381

    For this week’s theme of ideology and critique I turned to John Berger BBC series Ways of Seeing, something I watched in middle school and never forgot. Even though it came out more than 10 years before Spike Lee’s movie, Berger’s central argument (that every image embodies a way of seeing) helped me understand the film not just as a narrative about a neighborhood but as an ideological construction that challenges how we read images, bodies and power on screen. 

    This first episode focuses on painting and photography but its core message applies directly to cinema: images are never neutral. This also reminds me of a second youtube video I watched as I searched something for this post that said “Every single film is political”. Images reinforce values, hierarchies, ideological assumptions of the society that produces them. Berger shows how perspective, framing, and even “realism” itself are cultural choices shaped by power. He says that every image contains an argument, as in Do the Right Thing Lee uses visual form not just to tell a story but to reshape the viewer’s way of seeing race, space, and conflict in America.

    Berger also talks about how images can be manipulated or recontextualized to change meaning — a point that immediately reminded me of the Wall of Fame in Sal’s pizzeria. The photographs are curated, selective, aspirational, and ideological: they reflect Sal’s claim to cultural authority in a space that is not culturally his. When Mookie pins the photograph of Malcolm and Martin at the end, it functions exactly the way Berger describes the “reframing” of images: it shifts the entire power dynamic of the space. A wall that once reinforced Sal’s control becomes a site of resistance, a new way of seeing public/private space through a Black political lens. 

    Beyond that, I found that  the cinematography and mise en scene of the movie do a great job together by creating such aesthetically pleasing images in a way that deepens its politics. Berger argues that style is never separate from meaning. The saturated reds and yellows, the symmetry of the block, the theatricality of the heat, the way the camera moves like it’s part of the neighborhood’s rhythm — these choices aren’t ornamental. They construct a world where tension is visible in the color palette.

    Finally, Berger’s insistence that viewing is always shaped by context made me rethink how Do the Right Thing ends. The film leaves us with two quotes — Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — that embody two different ideological “ways of seeing” violence and resistance. Berger would say that Lee is showing us the impossibility of a single, stable interpretation. The film, like an image, changes depending on where you stand. That ambiguity isn’t a flaw; it’s the film’s political strategy. This movie is an intervention on how we see American race relations,

  • “Do the Right Thing”: Interviews with cast and crew

    While searching for relevant sources, I encountered an article that interviewed both the cinematographer Ernest R Dickerson and Giancarlo Esposito (who plays Buggin’ Out in the film). https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jul/22/how-we-made-do-the-right-thing-spike-lee

    I found myself wondering while watching Do the Right Thing how a film is shot in one location and the challenges that accompany that. Dickerson answers this question in the interview, which I thought was really interesting:

    “I knew our biggest challenge was going to be shooting over eight weeks and making it look like one day. We looked for a street that ran north-south. Since the sun travels east to west, one side would always be in shade. That way, when we had to shoot on cloudy days, I could just make it look like we were in the shaded side of the street. That really saved us, because the first two weeks we had a lot of rain. Some shots where it looks sunny – you can actually see rain if you look really hard.”

    Dickerson also talked about the films that inspired him and Spike Lee in the making of this film: The Third Man (specifically for the canted angles), Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Red Shoes. The final three movies were all worked on by cinematographer Jack Cardiff whose use of color inspired Dickerson.

    Canted angle in The Third Man
    Canted angle in Do the Right Thing

    On the other hand, Giancarlo Esposito speaks on the attitude of the film industry regarding race during the time of filming:

    “My background is half-Italian and in those days, being a lighter-skinned black man, I couldn’t get cast as a white person or a black person. So I was playing Spanish roles. This follows me to this day: a lot of people are shocked to realise Buggin’ Out and Gus Fring [from Breaking Bad] are the same person. So Spike gave me the opportunity to play black.”

    I thought this was particularly interesting as the film is about racial tension in two specific demographics but this highlights tensions and stereotypes beyond that.

  • Spike Lee Over the Years

    Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1988) garnered critical acclaim and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. As such, I was curious about the director behind such a celebrated movie. It was brought up in class that he made commercials for the Air Jordans before he made Do the Right Thing, so I found one of them, titled “It’s Gotta Be the Shoes”.

    This Nike Commercial (1991) stars Michael Jordan and Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon, a character from another of his movies She’s Gotta Have It (1986). In it, Mars asks MJ what makes him the best player in the universe, eventually concluding, “It’s gotta be the shoes!” It’s a question of why Spike Lee, a director primarily concerned with critiquing cultural ideology, made these types of commercials in the first place. Was it money? Exposure? Whatever the reason, Spike Lee’s commercials were credited as the main reason Nike and Air Jordans became so popular, with millions of dollars in shoe sales. One such article tells a fun anecdote about Lee’s time working with MJ: https://www.basketballnetwork.net/off-the-court/when-michael-jordan-called-spike-lee-an-mfer-in-1988

    Spike Lee founded a production company called 40 Acres and a Mule, and is still active in the film industry today. He has made several documentaries and a TV show called She’s Gotta Have It (2017-2018) based off of his earlier movie of the same name. He also taught a filmmaking course at Harvard in 1991, later joining NYU/Tisch as part of their faculty in 1993. He was appointed as Artistic Director in 2002, and still works there today a tenured professor in the graduate film program.

    Spike Lee’s Production Company/Main Source Used: https://www.40acres.com/new-landing/about/

  • Conspiracy Theories in Bugonia

    During class today, we discussed the idea of ideology and how present it is in every aspect of our lives. Directors have, and will continue to voice their own ideologies and opinions through their films.

    There were two things I wanted to talk about today, both stemming from this morning’s conversation. We also touched on conspiracy theories and how, though extreme, they can reinforce current beliefs or stem from past experiences.

    Spoiler warning for Bugonia.

    Bugonia, which I watched last week, is a movie oozing with ideology. Teddy, a rural bee farmer, manipulates his mentally disabled cousin, Don, into helping him kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO. He believes the CEO, Michelle Fuller, is an Andromedan alien sent to destroy Earth.

    At first, I felt Teddy’s methods were outlandish and cruel. He was so insistent that Fuller was an alien, he went at lengths to prove it. For example, he shaved her head and even lathered her in antihistamine cream to prevent her from “communicating with the mothership”.

    But as the film goes on, we start to understand where he’s coming from, and even sympathize with him a little. We realize that Auxolith, Fuller’s company, was developing a medication to fight opioid addiction. Teddy’s mother was a voluntary test subject for this product and was sent into a coma as a result. Multiple other childhood incidents are mentioned throughout the movie offhandedly, often through a single line that never gets addressed again. Teddy mentions how he and Don have been “chemically castrated” by Auxolith while talking with Fuller. The town sheriff (also Teddy’s childhood babysitter), Casey, continuously tries to befriend Teddy, apologetically referencing a sexual assault he had committed against Teddy as a child.

    All of this childhood trauma acts as a weight on Teddy’s shoulders. As far as we know, he never sought any assistance for his presumably unstable mental state. Trying to figure out why all these things are happening to him, Teddy turns to the internet. He falls into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and because of internet algorithms, finds himself in an ideological echo chamber. This echo chamber feeds him more and more conspiracies, ultimately turning him into the man he is today.

    What’s interesting to me is as weird as this film’s premise is, Teddy’s conspiracy theory transformation happens to people every day on a smaller scale. Because of past experiences and their interactions with other people, people’s worldviews change (albeit usually not as extreme as Teddy’s).

    Bugonia’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, even talks about this himself in this interview (https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/bugonia-interview-2025) with film critic Roger Ebert. He says how he’s ” always interested in the ways people’s interactions with themselves or others affect their nature.” He also says this about Teddy: “…he’s someone who has created a story, which is, by the way, not entirely untrue–but I think he’s someone who, like a lot of us, has not been told a better story that’s true from the powers that be…He’s been abused by the system that keeps talking without doing anything–or at least doing anything that’s helping him in some way.” This film could also be Lanthimos heeding us a warning about the slippery slope of politics, and how one can easily find themselves in an echo chamber and alienate themselves from the other side of the political spectrum.

    All-in-all, Bugonia is a wonderfully bizarre film about how one’s past can shape their current worldviews. It satirizes the modern internet-conspiracy culture and is hilariously unpredictable at times.

  • The “Heat” that never cools

    Racial discrimination in the United States didn’t end with the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, black communities in New York were still confronting systems shaped by earlier eras of racial segregation. Just as significant was the relationship with the police, unequal treatment happen everyday. Life carried a sense of vulnerability, where dignity and safety were never guaranteed.

    Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing isn’t just a film, but rather it is a whole environment that you step into, the African American neighborhood. Also, it is a movie based on real violence. In 1986, Howard Beach, Queens, NYC, a group of white man chased three Black man onto a highway, and one of the Black men, Michael Griffith, was hit by a car and killed. This incident, plus the many many police violence happening in New York, pushed Spike Lee to create this film about what happens when racism, heat, and everyday disrespect happens to people just living across the street.

    Me knowing the social context afterwards does not change how this film give me feelings. It is not an abstract racial tension being filmed in the studio, but rather a compression of the actual thing happening everyday in Brooklyn. The heat is the pressure that made everything cook up and explode in the community. A small argument about the wall of fame arises into a violence fight and people dying in the conflict. None of the things actually seem matters, but Lee shows how they absolutely do when the happen on top of years of ignorance and violence.

    Lee doesn’t let anyone off the hook, including the audience. So this is why Lee put the two quotes at the end, one of MLK Jr. and the other one of Malcolm X.

    “Violence ends by destroying itself. “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by destroying itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

    AND

    “I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”

    That’s why those two quotes appear at the end—Martin Luther King Jr. arguing for nonviolence, Malcolm X defending self-defense. They’re not an answer, but rather they’re a contradiction the film refuses to resolve for you.

  • The Writing Process of Holy Motors

    This interview, linked here is a discussion with Leos Carax about his own process developing the twisted ideas behind Holy Motors. Leos Carax described his emotional state when entering the writing process of Holy Motors as “rage”. Having been unable to develop, fund, or shoot a film in years, Carax found himself questioning filming location, language, and methods of funding for future films. That is why, when beginning to write Holy Motors, he found himself writing unconsciously, which I think is very clear in the viewing of the film. As the movie progresses, the viewer gets the feeling that there is an accumulation of something, although its hard to figure out what. Each different “appointment” is separated, yet we feel like each is somehow building on eachother to reach some sort of accumulation. He described writing it as “you don’t react to what you’re doing, you just do it”. For example, he talks about how he initially wanted to play the part of the man with the birthmark in the car, as he was the “director”. However, as the film came together, Carax realized that that character was in fact not the director, but some looming professional, dictating the flow of art, therefore being closer to a producer. Therefore, he replaced himself as the actor with Michel Piccoli. This is a good example of Carax reacting to the film as he creates it, just as he does with most of his films, starting them with combinations of images and seeing what feelings those images invoke.

    Carax goes on to say that Holy Motors stands alone in his filmography, meaning it was not inspired by any of his other films. He views the film as a representation of reality and what it means to be alive, and therefore didn’t want it to have any aspects of a replication of something else. This is a concept I think is extremely interesting, since most directors at least develop some strand of style that stays consistent throughout their films. He goes on to further examine the films themes of performance for performance’s sake and the disappearance of physical film in cinema history, but I interpreted the interview as Carax saying that Holy Motors is about life and how we choose to live it and how difficult it is to be authentic in a digital age.

  • Leos Carax in the short “my last minute”

    After watching Holy Motors today, I had to see what else the director, Leos Carax, had out there for me to watch. I found that, in addition to notable feature films like Boy Meets Girl and Annette, he’s also known for his shorts. I watched “my last minute,” which is a 1-minute short film commissioned by the Vienna Film Festival.

    CONTENT WARNING FOR GRAPHIC AND SHORT DEPICTION OF SUICIDE AND DRUG ABUSE: I will also be discussing this content in the blog post.

    A defining factor of underground film is the lack of sense or characterized motivation for a character’s actions. In this short, the character depicted lights a cigarette, then immediately goes to his laptop, which is on an open Word document, and types “tonight, I stop smoking.”

    Then, he puts out his cigarette, and quickly opens a drawer at his desk, grabs a gun, and shoots himself in the head. This is also a seemingly uncharacteristic, or at least absurd, action. The scene moves quickly in this small minute, and the character moves without hesitation. What I found most interesting and relevant to Holy Motors is the final thirteen seconds of the short.

    It’s a quick sequence of a toddler, presumably the character when he was much younger. The child has its mouth open, we hear static, the frame zooms in on the child, and then black. This reminded me of Holy Motors a lot because of its quick transition time. In our class feature, it was sometimes hard to tell what was true to Oscar’s life and what was an appointment. With this short, we can see Carax’s tendency for quick, sensational directional choices with the character’s spontaneous actions. Additionally, we see a tendency for playing with graphic quality of his images in both, controlling colors as well as clarity to influence the viewer’s experience.

  • Interpreting Realness in Paris is Burning

    Realness is a theme within ballroom culture depicted in the film Paris is Burning. To “walk real” means to embody the look, attitude, and guise of a person you are not; oftentimes in the context of the film, a white, straight, well off man or woman. Fundamentally, this gives you the legitimacy of being acceptable by society, and many critics upon Paris is Burning’s release hailed drag culture as proof of identity fluidity.,

    But others pointed out the “realness” is questionable, because it illustrates standards set by a dominant class and culture. In other words, identity fluidity isn’t truly the case because people “conform” to the social norms established.

    While doing research for Paris is Burning, I came across two articles that have very different takes on the film’s interpretation of realism: Phillip Brian Harper’s “The Subversive Edge: Paris Is Burning, Social Critique, and the Limits of Subjective Agency” and Chandan Reddy’s “Home, Houses, Nonidentity: Paris Is Burning” Both take a stance criticizing the virtue of “realness” portrayed in the film, but they differ in the perspective in why people in ballroom culture use it.

    Harper argues that realness in the context of the film is manipulated and controlled in a way that maintains a strict social hierarchy. When people enter the ballroom and “walk real,” they are emulating identity rather than creating identity; thus adhering to the “white, straight, and wealthy” ideals that are strived towards. As such, Paris is Burning gives an appearance of being empowering, but it is the very thing that keeps people disempowered.

    Reddy takes a different approach; rather than what “realness” limits, he is more interested in what realness reveals and how it is used in ballroom culture. He argues that ballroom culture is aware of the social construct of “realism,” and instead emulation exposes how fake “realism” is; how a social hierarchy is nothing more than an act. In this way, ballroom functions as a way of cultural expression rather than cultural assimilation.

    I think these two interpretation speak to the nature of the documentary itself; both can be true. Jennie Livingston, the film’s director, is a white woman, which comes at contrast to ballroom’s black and hispanic roots. The film is made for white audiences; ballroom is presented as a new concept, and much of the film covers topics people within ballroom culture would be very familiar with already. As such, the discrepancy between the white filmmakers and the black, hispanic, and queer community creates different interpretations between the creative choices used and even the nature of the interviews given. In other words, the dream to live up to “white” expectations shared by many in the ballroom community may not be as pronounced as the film presents it to be. I think that its impossible to explain a culture and its significance through media; you have to actually live it.

  • Fashion Beyond Status

    In the film, Dorian Corey explained that in a ball, “you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive. And therefore you’re showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity, I could be one. Because I can look like one.”

    Throughout Paris Is Burning (1990), the idea of complete replication, or “blending in,” is emphasized, with individuals receiving perfect scores when they completely embody the role they present in the ballroom. One of the main ideas in the film is how the ballroom community uses fashion and voguing to inhabit roles that society usually denies them. When participants walk in categories such as “Executive Realness” or “Town and Country”, they are not simply showing off clothing, they are performing access to power, wealth, and respectability. These performances revealed that fashion is never just about what someone wears, rather, it is about who has permission to appear legitimate while wearing it. Given this, at first, I believed drag was an act of imitation (a way to blend into a higher social class) with emphasis being placed on fashion’s power coming from the privilege of the wearer rather than creativity itself. However, throughout the film, my interpretation changed.

    In the film, a participant can look like a Wall Street executive, yet outside the ballroom, society still views them as poor and queer. Their outer fashion appears convincing, yet it does not grant the privilege attached to that image. This highlights the “normalized” idea that the value of fashion depends on who wears it and the access that person holds.

    What makes Paris Is Burning interesting is how this dynamic is transformed. Within the ballroom, fashion no longer depends on external validation. Fashion now becomes a language of self-definition and freedom. As Corey explains, “In the ballroom, you can be anything you want.” The act of performance turns fashion into something liberating rather than aspirational. Drag emerges as a form of expression that contradicts the belief that fashion requires social status to hold meaning. It demonstrates that confidence and creativity, not privilege, give style its significance.

    I explored this idea/theme further through reading a piece by The Criterion Collection titled “Paris Is Burning: The Fire This Time” written by Michelle Parkerson. Parkerson writes that the ballroom is “a world in which style becomes survival,” and within this space, self-presentation operates as a “radical act”. The balls create an alternate reality where individuals excluded from the hierarchy can redefine beauty, gender, and success. Fashion, detached from wealth or whiteness, becomes a language of resilience, artistry, and self-identification.

    The ballroom community and drag as an art show that fashion holds value when it becomes a tool of identity rather than a marker of privilege. Drag transforms clothing into language, movement into protest, and presentation into truth. Through performance, individuals claim visibility and power in a world that refuses to grant it. Fashion in this context no longer depends on wealth or position. It becomes an act of existence.

    Source: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6832-paris-is-burning-the-fire-this-time?srsltid=AfmBOornHPZpxL81P94ZA5YgxfPWpz2L8nkkNcF_IdYNO5G8XHxtyQJe