| 13 |
TUESDAY |
5/13 - A thru L - Periods 3 & 4 Auditorium --- But enough
about the Hollywood version of the American dream, now we look at a foreign
film with an Americanized counterpart: First the American version City
of Angels then
Far Away So Close (In weiter Ferne, so nah!)/ What is lost in
translation between the settings of pre unified Berlin and L.A.??? View
these two films and first create a Venn diagram for the two 4 4 1 (counts as
test grade), then explain, in essay format, what had to be done to Wim
Wenders' film to bring this to an American audience-- Please, do not focus
on getting rid of the subtitles in French and German!... if you can't read
the subtitles or miss the film... read the following reviews/ scholarly
articles to fill in the gaps and complete your assignment worth four HW
assignments: Any of the Articles
HERE (you may wish
to view other POV-- Film Journal
issues)
"What is
Peter Falk Doing in Wings of Desire ? "
Frazer
Wahington Post
or this may help too
WRITING ABOUT FILM
U2's
Far Away So Close
Trivia:
- Willem Dafoe's character is named "Emit Flesti," which is "Time
Itself" spelled backwards.
The human name Cassiel chooses is Karl Engel. "Engel" is German for
"angel."
Mikhail Gorbachev only appears because his secretary was familiar with the
movies of Wim Wenders and was a great admirer. She talked Gorbachev into
giving up a couple of hours to do the cameo as he was on a trip to Germany
anyway.
When Cassiel walks through the underground after becoming a human, there's
a poster of Lou Reed in the background. Lou Reed plays himself in the
movie.
Wim Wenders cut nearly an hour out of the film to get it to its release
running time.
Summary:
Far Away So Close: The film opens with the angel Cassiel (Otto Sander)
standing on the statue of the Angel of Victory overlooking post-Cold War
Berlin. Growing ever more despondent over his fate as a mere observer of
human life, rather than a vital part of it, Cassiel dreams of "crossing
over" to the human world.
And he does, as Karl Engel, a man who perhaps knows too much, perhaps
like in many of Hitchcock's films, some harmless citizen who gets involved
in an affair to which he is not up to. In fact, there is no one as kind and
harmless as this newborn citizen of the Earth.
We will follow Cassiels's adventures into a "thriller." This story which
gets mangled with his own life is about weapons, more precisely about a
weapon deal where the weapons - or INSTRUMENTS of violence -- are traded for
IMAGES of violence.
|
Introduction
to
Research Paper/ Web Quest: View The Wizard of OZ and
complete prewriting assignment found in Web Quest (due Monday January 7
2008)