“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed"
- Stanley Kubrick
Film in the Film
One Week (1920)
by Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton
The shorts Keaton made in the early twenties are warm-ups for his features, but they have exotic delights of their own. Filled with topical jokes about prohibition and the success of women’s suffrage, they exhibit a consistent self-reflexivity, making them perhaps the first serious films about films themselves. In One Week (1920), there is a delicious scene: his newlywed wife is taking a bath. She drops the soap and reaches to get it, but then looks at the audience and makes a “tsk-tsk!” face, whereupon a hand covers the camera lens to hide her nudity. This scene demonstrates his sophisticated awareness of the nature of the film medium, which would climax in Sherlock, Jr (1924). Keaton understood, instinctively, the dream-like nature of films — many of the shorts end with him waking up from a dream-filled slumber.
Sullivan’s Travels (1942)
by Preston Sturges
Sullivan and others glamorize the life of the poor through his wanting to make a film about that lifestyle. However, when he truly experiences the mundane activities that the poor have to deal with such as sleeping with the multitudes in a shelter, being stolen from, and digging through the trash for food, Sullivan realizes that being poor is not such a charming life. Sullivan fully assimilates into the poor lifestyle when he is at the church and finally begins to laugh at the Mickey Mouse cartoon shown, like the others. This is also Preston Sturges’s way of making the film a satire of Hollywood, for the film seems to say that laughter alleviates everything, even social standing, in the way the film concludes and how it simplifies poverty.
Peeping Tom (1960)
by Michael Powell
The self-reflexivity permeates the film’s opening of Peeping Tom’s narrative and stylistic structure.By making the viewer aware of what is normally “a hermetically sealed” construction of misogynistic gazes in a narrative that is thematically bound up with the dangers of voyeurism, Peeping Tom embodies Mulvey’s definition of an “alternative cinema.” Furthermore, Mulvey posits her own admiration for the film in the way in which, “the story is showing us an extreme, a perversion of the cinematic look, but it also reflects outwards, onto the cinema’s intrinsic fascination with looking, and the ease with which it can make peeping toms of us all”
Manhattan (1979)
by Woody Allen
Woody Allen's perpetual theme of self- reflexive in his 1979 film Manhattan -
The seed for Manhattan, which is Allen’s most critically acclaimed film grew out of the director’s desire to work within specific technical parameters: anamorphic shooting to mirror the immensity of his beloved city, and black and white film to echo the vision of New York that had been romanticized through countless classic films.
The seed for Manhattan, which is Allen’s most critically acclaimed film grew out of the director’s desire to work within specific technical parameters: anamorphic shooting to mirror the immensity of his beloved city, and black and white film to echo the vision of New York that had been romanticized through countless classic films.
Being John Malkovich (1999)
by Spike Jonze
The mysterious relationship between the mind and body: Being John Malkovich is self-reflexive film for those who question along with Craig(John Cusack) the nature of a world where there are portals through which people can enter others’ brains,John Malkovich’s brain. It’s clear that the creators of this film solve the mind and body problem by separating the two entities. For Craig and Dr. Lester’s(Orson Bean) bandwagon, John Malkovich’s body is a vehicle, one that is to be controlled. However, John Malkovich also has a soul, as he is knocked into his subconsciousness when Craig and Dr. Lester become his body’s new host.
