Intro to Film 2025 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

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  • Inside Out 2

    Over the last weekend, I watched Inside Out 2 again with my family. Inside Out 2 continues the exploration started in Inside Out into the internal states of mind that are anthropomorphized as characters. New emotions (such as Anxiety, Embarrassment, Nostalgia, and Boredom) are added to the core emotions from the first movie. They are more complex and in conflict with older emotions such as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Envy, and Fear. Riley, the main protagonist, is a girl coming of age and is not yet sure how to accept and regulate her emotions. She is yet to realize that even Anxiety at times is useful, but that it has to be kept from becoming overwhelming. 

    A dual narrative in the movie that helps connect the two worlds: the internal world of Riley’s emotions and her external world as a teen who wants to succeed at a hockey camp. Inside her, emotions are fighting, and Joy, with the help of Sadness and other emotions, has to stop Anxiety from controlling and ruining the internal balance in Riley’s mind. 

    One of the most memorable scenes in Inside Out 2 is the anxiety scene, when Anxiety frantically tries to “solve” Riley’s problem, and accelerates so quickly that she actually stops (or glitches). The animation shows her vibrating at a supernatural speed (like electrons, which are moving so fast that they are everywhere and nowhere at once). It’s a great visualization of cognitive overload when the emotions and thoughts overwhelm a person, and they become paralyzed. The scene uses cross-cutting to show how Riley’s internal emotional collapse affects her body on the hockey field. When Anxiety is out of control, there is an intense sound of Riley’s breathing that can be heard as she is spiraling due to anxiety during the hockey game (it is like she is having a panic attack). 

    Camera movements support an internal state Riley is in, with faster movements when Anger takes over, and slower movements when it is Sadness. The colors and shapes are used to represent emotions. Joy is round and light green-yellow, Anxiety is irregular-shaped and orange, Anger is red and square, Sadness is blue, Envy is green, as one would expect. 

    I had to watch Inside Out 2 because I am interested in cognitive psychology (especially memory formation and recall). The movie helps me visualize how memories become core beliefs (for example, the belief that “I’m not good enough”). A single bad moment drops into a machine to be processed and comes out as a judgment about oneself. Repeated negative experiences literally crystallize. Inside Out 2 is perhaps not as solid as a neuroscience textbook, but I think it can help people realize the role of emotions in their lives and how to cope with them and does it in a visually appealing and truthful manner. That makes the movie psychologically real. By using characters who portray the internal emotions of Riley, the movie helps viewers visualize her internal psychological states and internal conflicts that she faces, not just follow her external journey into adulthood.

  • The City That Won’t Hold Still Chungking Express (1994)

    Chungking Express throws you into a version of Hong Kong that feels alive and unstable at the same time. The film follows two loosely connected stories that drift through the city with a mix of romance, melancholy, and impulse. The editing is what stands out in this film. The step printing and the fragmented cuts make ordinary moments feel stretched out or compressed, almost like the characters experience the city in a different rhythm than everyone around them.

    The style gave me a sense of drifting with them. The cops, the woman in the blonde wig, Faye in the snack bar, they all move through the city with a kind of emotional blur. The editing captures that feeling better than dialogue ever could. Even when nothing important happens, the images keep shifting. Faces smear across the screen and the city lights streak behind moving bodies. That technique turns loneliness into something visible.


    I liked how the film breaks itself in half too. The two stories do not connect in a traditional way, but the editing creates a link through mood. Hong Kong feels crowded and bright but also strangely empty. The film makes that contradiction work because the cuts never let the viewer settle into a stable sense of time. I finished the movie with the feeling that its form expresses something the characters cannot say. The fractured structure becomes the story.

  • Stardom & Masculinity in Telugu Cinema

    Pushpa has been a big name in my family for years. Everyone watched it when it first came out, but I never got around to it until this break. I grew up seeing Allu Arjun in roles that lean toward humor or charm, so this film felt like a shift. The movie builds Pushpa’s masculinity through “swagger,” labor, and defiance, and the style of the film supports that version of him.

    The biggest thing I noticed how much the camera treats him like a star. It gives him controlled entrances, slow movements, and gestures that turn into instant signature moments. The film builds its rhythm around these beats. The songs also help with this because they highlight his confidence and turn simple actions into a sort of “mythmaking.” I watched this with the sense that I was supposed to admire him before I even learned everything about him, which fits how Telugu cinema often constructs larger-than-life heroes.

    The film anchors his rise in physical labor and class struggle, but it also turns that struggle into a fantasy about what a man should look like. Pushpa never doubts himself and never loses control, and the movie treats that stability as strength. I found myself wanting the story to challenge him, because the version of masculinity on screen feels inflated.

    Telugu cinema often does lift its male leads into myth, but here it feels a little too eager to protect him. Watching Allu Arjun play this harsher role made me think less about his transformation and more about how tightly the film holds onto a specific idea of manhood. It pushes the character upward without ever asking what that kind of masculinity costs.

  • Bugonia: A Chilling Climate Change Parable

    SPOILER WARNING!

    When I recently watched Bugonia in theaters, it felt impossible not to read the whole thing as a climate-change parable that finally stops pretending humans are the heroes of the story. Teddy thinks Michelle’s company is literally killing the bees as part of an alien plot, which sounds like pure conspiracy at first, but the film quietly confirms that the true planetary threat is not some hidden sci-fi device. It is the world we already live in: Michelle’s Andromedan monologue points straight at climate change, war, and human violence as the forces destroying Earth long before any mothership arrives. The bees become a simple, loaded symbol: if they are collapsing, whole ecosystems are collapsing too.

    That is why the final sequence lands so hard as a climate metaphor. Once Michelle reaches the Andromedan ship and drops the clear dome over the model Earth, every human on the planet simply shuts off, falling where they stand while everything else remains untouched. There is no exploding planet, no scorched biosphere, just a sudden absence of us. The last images linger on human bodies frozen in place and then cut back to Teddy’s apiary, where the bees begin to return. It is a brutally tidy reversal of the usual “save the Earth” arc: the only intervention that actually stabilizes the environment is one that removes the species that keeps insisting it will fix things someday.

    For me, that ending recasts everything that came before as a joke with a bitter punchline. Teddy’s conspiracy fantasies, the pharma optics, even the alien royal court all turn out to be less important than the simple ecological truth the film stages at the end. The planet does not need us to survive; we need the planet, and we have been acting as if the opposite were true. When the bees come back to life in a world emptied of people, Bugonia imagines climate “recovery” that does not center human redemption at all. It is funny in the darkest possible way: the film gives us the apocalypse and then quietly asks whether, from the point of view of the Earth, this might actually be the first good decision anyone has made in a very long time.

  • Makeup and World-Building as Narrative Tools in Planet of the Apes (1968)

    I have always been a huge fan of Matt Reeves’s Planet of the Apes films, so over Thanksgiving break I finally sat down with the original. I expected something slower and older, but the world pulled me in almost immediately. The makeup and the physicality of the ape characters create a full society that feels lived in. I found myself paying more attention to how their faces moved than the plot in the first few scenes because the design gives them so much presence.

    What surprised me most is how the makeup does more than provide surface realism. It shapes the entire meaning of the film. The ape hierarchy becomes believable because the design signals power and status before the characters even speak. The world works because it looks consistent. The costumes, the sets, and the prosthetics link together and guide the viewer to read this world as a mirror of our own.

    The makeup also affects how the story hits at the end. When the film reveals what happened to Earth, the ape world suddenly feels like a warning. I already believed in it because of the design, so the twist lands with more weight. It turns the apes into a reflection of human failures, not a random sci-fi civilization. Watching it now, after growing up with the new trilogy, made me appreciate how much world-building shapes the message rather than just the visuals.

  • Night Moves (1975)

    While watching the film, I noticed that the main character, Harry Moseby, is often visually framed by his surroundings (e.g., doorways, windows). This framing makes Harry seem trapped, not just physically but mentally. It reflects how limited his thinking is. He is a detective, but he never actually sees the full picture. Instead, he jumps from clue to clue without stopping to understand what is really happening.

    The main character (Harry) reminded me of George from Shampoo (also 1975), another character who constantly keeps himself busy but does not actually understand the situation (until it is too late). Both men move through their stories reacting instead of understanding, so I predicted early on in Night Moves that it would not end well for Harry.

    And that is exactly what happens. He cannot stop the disaster, even though he is supposed to be the “hero.” The more he tries to take control, the more confused and lost he becomes. The last shot of him going in circles in the boat shows this perfectly. He is still moving, but he is not getting anywhere.

    I also found the chess scene really interesting. The game seems to symbolize how little Harry actually knows. He thinks he is solving a mystery, but he doesn’t see the strategy or the larger pattern of it at all. He is basically playing a game he doesn’t understand/know the rules of, up against people who are always one step ahead of him.

  • Schindler’s List

    Schindler’s List is originally one of the three films I decided to do for my shot list and sequence analysis, but at the end I chose All Quiet on the Western Front for its more detailed mise-en-scene and cinematography elements.

    Schindler’s List is one of the few films that make me feel it is less of a movie but rather more like a historical reflection. Steven Spielberg approaches the Holocaust of the Jewish people with a documentary style approach. He grounds the story in the transformation of Oscar Schindler, who is first a opportunist but gradually become a savior to more than one thousand Jewish captives.

    We all know that the Holocaust is terrible, thousands and thousands of Jewish people die every day, but what makes the film astounding is not the scale, but the quiet shift in Schindler’s character as he face the Nazi machines.

    In addition, I think the decision to make the film black and white is not a stylistic choice but rather a moral and humane one. Stylistically, we can say that black and white increase tension, adds on pain, and reflect the brutality, but it is more reflected in how humanity is shown through the movie, so I believe it is more of a humane choice. It takes away the cinematic comfort, and force the viewers to put themselves into a drained up world, where humans are viewed as numbers.

    The minimal use of color, most famously the girl in the red coat, is like a spear that pierce through the monotone color scheme. Emphasizing the existence of humanity in such a dull and draining world.

    Unlike other historical or war film, Spielberg does not exaggerate violence, not framing heroic deaths or sacrifices, but rather he presents it abruptly and casually, as if dehumanization is a daily job for the Nazi officers and soldiers.

    Liam Neeson’s performance as Schindler, is also interesting. He never delivers grand speeches or have heroic moments. Instead, his transformation is conveyed through small moments, like hesitations and silent realizations. This step by step change his mindset and build up to the emotional climax. Where Schindler realize that he is not saving more lives, it feels overwhelmed, the weight of goodness lands on his shoulders and will feel devastated in the face of a genocide.

    In relation to RRR that we saw this week, I see a similar starting but different ending. Both film demonstrate the vulnerableness of individuals against high power, in RRR the British and in Schindler’s List the Nazi Power. The Indian people suffer from power imbalance and the Jewish people suffer from genocide. But the ending is Ram and Bhemm saving the world in RRR but Schindler’s list making a much more reflective, thoughtful ending of real history.

    What this film ultimately suggests is the fragility of humanity under an evil world. The film ends with real survivors placing stones on Schindler’s grave, a reminder that the story is still being told and passed down, carried by the ones survived.

  • Reframing Mulholland Drive as Art Cinema

    SLIGHT SPOILER WARNING

    Reading Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” framed Mulholland Drive for me as something less like a mystery that “should” resolve and more like a work that uses narration itself as its central problem. Bordwell’s description of art cinema highlights how it departs from classical Hollywood storytelling by loosening clear cause and effect, foregrounding style and authorial choice, and inviting the viewer to participate in interpretation rather than simply follow a chain of motivated events. 

    Bordwell’s framework is especially helpful because he describes art cinema as organized around two broad principles: a pull toward realism (psychological complexity, everyday detail, the sense of lived experience) and authorial expressivity (a visible shaping intelligence that can be felt through patterning, symbolism, and deliberate narrative uncertainty). Mulholland Drive constantly oscillates between those principles. On one hand, the film offers “realist” textures, like the awkward industry networking, auditions, and the humiliating vulnerability of wanting to be seen as talented and desirable. On the other hand, Lynch repeatedly interrupts anything that looks like stable plot momentum with sequences that feel like authorial punctuation marks, moments that insist on mood, dread, or formal play more than explanation.

    A good example is how the early portion of the film initially resembles a classical setup: Betty arrives in Los Angeles with an optimistic goal, Rita has amnesia and needs help, and the structure suggests that investigation will restore identity and produce narrative clarity. But Lynch keeps inserting events that do not sit comfortably as steps in a single causal chain. The hitman’s botched assassination plays like dark slapstick, the Cowboy appears as a kind of cryptic herald, and the diner sequence at Winkie’s feels like a self-contained nightmare. If we try to force classical psychological causation onto these moments, they resist it: they carry emotional and thematic weight, but they do not function like clean “clues” in a detective story. Bordwell notes that art cinema often replaces tight causal logic with gaps, digressions, and a more episodic chain of incidents, where motivation can be partial or retrospective. 

    This is where Bordwell’s vocabulary of motivation becomes useful. In classical narration, we tend to assume that everything is motivated in a legible way, usually by character goals and causal logic. Art cinema, as Bordwell describes it, is willing to shift motivation onto other grounds: realism (life is messy), authorial patterning (recurring images, symmetrical scenes), or even uncertainty itself as a guiding principle. Mulholland Drive makes us feel that shift most strongly through repetition and doubling. Names, roles, and relationships fold over each other. Scenes echo earlier scenes with altered emotional meaning, as if the film is less interested in “what happened” than in how desire, guilt, and fantasy can reorganize the same material. Instead of a straight line, the movie feels like a set of refrains.

    Club Silencio is the scene that most explicitly announces this art-cinema contract. The performance insists on emotional truth while simultaneously telling us that the band is not real, that sound and spectacle are produced, that what moves us can be fabrication. Bordwell argues that art cinema often makes authorship palpable, allowing style and narration to comment on themselves and on our habits of spectatorship. Club Silencio does that in a way that feels almost like a thesis statement: the film is warning us not to treat representation as transparent, and it is preparing us for the major narrative rupture that follows.

    That rupture, the shift into Diane’s reality, is where Bordwell’s emphasis on ambiguity becomes the key term. Bordwell describes ambiguity as a dominant principle in art cinema, where the viewer is encouraged to weigh competing explanations rather than receive definitive closure. After the blue box sequence, the film does not neatly label what came before as dream, fantasy, alternate reality, or subjective distortion. Instead, it forces the viewer to move backward and reinterpret. Betty becomes Diane, vitality curdles into resentment, romance becomes exploitation and pain, and earlier images begin to read like displaced wish-fulfillment. This is not simply “confusing for the sake of confusing.” It is a structured reorientation that makes interpretation part of the experience of the film, which is exactly what Bordwell identifies as central to art cinema’s mode of practice. 

  • The Seventh Seal

    The Seventh Seal is a classic 1957 movie by Ingmar Bergman. It raises many existential, philosophical questions related to faith, death, and the meaning of life. I was struck by the powerful scene of a religious procession. The film cross-cuts between a noisy, merry crowd enjoying an acting troupe’s performance and a grim religious procession through the village. This creates a sharp contrast of juxtaposed images of merry drunkards and lines of fearful, mournful figures in black who are dragging their feet and beating themselves with whips.


    The contrasting scenes show two ways people coped with life during the Black Plague, and neither looks attractive. Some people engage in partying and drinking to forget themselves. Others self-punish themselves even further (perhaps to feel a bit more in control, as if they choose their suffering). The diegetic sound suddenly shifts from the laughter and loud chatter of the crowd to the chanting and drums of the flagellants, with the actors and crowd going silent as if in fear or awe of the procession that may remind them of God and their sins, or of Death.

    The shot of the religious procession entering through the frame of the wooden gate may be symbolic. They are crossing a threshold into the everyday world of the villagers. The framing of dark bodies against light fumes and dust turns the figures into symbolic silhouettes (not real people), as if the fear is entering the village with people caught in a wild party.


    The movie still speaks to people, after so many years, because people still confront traumatic experiences (such as a pandemic) in the same ways. We either distract ourselves with noise and activity or turn to fanaticism/extremism, religious or otherwise, trying to impose order in a world full of uncertainty.  

  • Why Did Ki-taek Stab Mr. Park? — A Question After Parasite

    Parasite tells the story of how Ki-taek’s family, who live day to day on the edge of poverty, slowly infiltrate the wealthy household of Mr. Park through a carefully staged web of lies. Beginning with the son Ki-woo, they succeed one by one in placing each family member into the Park household—as an art therapist, a driver, and a housekeeper. These “con-artist” sequences are edited into elegant montages accompanied by a soundtrack that recalls Baroque music. No matter how many times I watch those scenes, they still feel almost impossibly precise, as if every movement, every note, falls perfectly into place.

    There are many characters in Parasite that I still struggle to fully understand. But the one moment I return to again and again is Ki-taek’s final decision near the end of the film.

    Why did Ki-taek stab Mr. Park?

    When Ki-taek’s daughter, Ki-jung, is stabbed by Geun-sae (the man who had been secretly living for years in the hidden bunker beneath the Park house), she collapses, bleeding heavily. Mr. Park asks Ki-taek to throw the car key so he can rush her to the hospital. But the keys have fallen to the ground beneath Chung-sook, who is physically fighting with Geun-sae. As Mr. Park moves closer to get the key, he recoils. He turns his head, wrinkles his face, and covers his nose at the smell coming from Geun-sae.

    In that brief moment, everything changes.

    As Mr. Park picks up the key and turns away to leave, Ki-taek suddenly lunges forward and stabs him. Then he runs away. What follows in this film is silence, where the audience can only hear the faint buzzing of flies.

    Why, at that moment, did Ki-taek choose to kill Mr. Park? His daughter was dying. Getting her to the hospital should have mattered more than anything. And yet, he killed a man instead, a man who was not even the doer.

    My answer is this: Ki-taek had reached the limit of what he could endure about “the smell.”

    Earlier in the film, even Mr. Park’s young son mentions that the members of Ki-taek’s family all share the same scent (he didn’t know that they were family). That smell is the smell of poverty, the smell of the semi-basement. The smell of a life that never fully dries, no matter how much you try to wash it away. It clings not just to the body, but to their life.

    Mr. Park believes he is reacting only to Geun-sae’s odor. But Ki-taek knows better. That smell is his smell too.

    In that moment, when Mr. Park turns away in visible disgust, Ki-taek finally understands that no matter how convincingly he performs this borrowed life, no matter how neatly he dresses, how well he imitates the manners of the wealthy, he can never escape the mark of who he truly is. The times of quiet humiliation, of being tolerated but never fully seen as equal, collapse into a single instant.

    And so the knife rises.

    Ki-taek’s act is not only an outburst of personal rage. It is an eruption of anger toward a society that makes escape from poverty nearly impossible. It is fury at the lie he tried to live, and at the invisible wall that kept dragging him back to where he began. In the end, he is attacking more than a man. He is struck by the smell of his own life.