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Showing posts from October, 2013

Miral’s Mystery: A Film Analysis

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Born and raised in Jerusalem in the second half of the twentieth century could confuse one’s identity. Palestinian versus Israeli. Muslim Arab versus Muslim Israeli. The longest and most fought-over city in the world was the location of the film Miral . Miral was the name for the red flower that grew on the side of the road in Jerusalem. This flower was a witness to lots of the pain and change in the lands of Israel and Palestine like Miral, the film’s protagonist. Image from Google Images Miral was born to a mother who underwent sexual abuse as a child and an imam father who loved her mother despite of her pain and addictions. Miral came of age in an all-girls school. The school was the product of one woman’s desire to help orphaned Palestinian children during the 1948 war. Each subsequent war brought more orphans and more girls. After Miral lost her mother, her father decided to send her to the girls school for her education and well-being because her

"To Give Life is to Live": A Critique of Schindler's List - Part 2

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Allusive Scenes of Dehumanization Schindler’s List had multiple scenes of constant disposal of the Jews’ clothes, suitcases and their belongings. The Nazis would take their luggage before boarding trains, convincing their Jewish subjects that their luggage would arrive with them to their destination, but it never did. Instead, the Nazis collected the Jews’ belongings and mined through them for valuables – real silver menorahs, teeth with silver and gold fillings, and diamond and silver jewelry. In a sense, the Jews were debased to their belongings’ worth, once again dehumanizing the Jews as commodities and disposed goods that would soon be forgotten. The classical music composition for one of these scenes was titled “Stolen Memories”, which was what was depicted – lost memories, ravaged by the Nazis to blot out the history of millions of people who could only be remembered by those who lost them in the War. The last scene of dehumanization that I would like

"To Give Life is to Live": A Critique of Schindler's List - Part 1

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Image from Google Images Life is full of pain, but “A man who saves one saves the world entire,” according to the Talmud. Schindler’s List is the story of that one man, who known to many as a war profiteer, womanizer and Nazi party member became the saving force for 1,100 Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler was his name, and this film was about his acts that saved generations of people. So, from what began as an independent historical fiction film series evolved into a film series about genocide, which plays such a larger role in recent wars of the last and current centuries. The themes most present in this film were the good versus evil complex, power, equality and dehumanization. In a detailed foil analysis of Amon Goeth and Oskar Schindler and the director’s constant use of cinematography to depict different interpretations of the humanization of Jews, Schindler’s List contained the essence of the Holocaust in its many horrors yet its human