Xander Johnson's Film Studies Blog

 I thought Daughters of the Dust  by Julie Dash was really unique for it's time and even now. In class we discussed how it was one of the first feature films that an African-America women directed that was distributed throughout the United States. This would play a major role of what details were in the film. Since the writer/director was African-America she could get details that a white director would not think of in a film about black people. Julie Dash was able to get the ways people pronounced words or the slang they would say. This would bring more meaning and emotions to it. Also, I thought the use of sound was interesting. Connecting to before there were the ways that words were pronounced we be more realistic. Also at the beginning, there was the intro music that was there for a couple minutes. This music was backed up by scenes of nature that it brought the idea of locations and nature would play an important role. Unlike typical Hollywood films where the background music

Reassemblage by Trinh Minh ha is another film that breaks the traditional ideas of film, specifically for documentaries. Trinh Minh ha used a different topic to express her distaste or problems with documentaries. In this case, at first glance it seems as if she is making a documentary about a village and their way of life, but takes it a different way. She does a minimal explanation through out with a lot of random pauses. The pauses were personally a bit annoying to me because of the expectations that modern film has created for me. The pauses in my opinion help prove her point in the idea that documentaries are not always has truthful as they always are. The pauses allows us to see a more "natural" look at the people versus having the voice over telling us to believe. Honestly, even just the raw footage is bits and pieces so we can not always get the full idea from it.

 Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho" was something new for its time of release. "Psycho" was released in the 1960s. I am not really aware of the horror genre from around that time or earlier. I know there were some films, but there were other genres that were more popular. "Psycho" brought new possibilities to the world of film. All other film films followed the same "rules", "Psycho" started to break barriers. In Hitchcock's film introduced a new level of violence in film and produced a really well known scene that many if not most people know of. This would set standards for other film makers to go into new directions and extremes with film. Also, on a side note, the violence in "Psycho" would be seen as extreme in the 60s and following years, but compared to modern times, it seems trivial. With modern CGI, in many movies we see heads flying off with blood flying everywhere and bone. Modern horror is really gruesome and