Categories of Film Love
Categories of Film Love
This chapter examines the different ways films encounter love aesthetically. The aesthetic and narrative differences between schools of filmmaking and between individual directors lead to different categorizations of love. Films such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death and Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express present the moral complexity of love. In David Lean's Brief Encounter, romantic feelings and desires are crushed by social obstacles. The spy film Russia House shows that love in film is not limited to the moral sphere but is now articulated within a world of political relations. On the other hand, Peter Greenway's The Draughtsman's Contract portrays a world in which all human relations are based on power, and all human motivations are expressions of a particular material, erotic, or social interest.
Keywords: film love, A Matter of Life and Death, Shanghai Express, moral complexity, Brief Encounter, social obstacles, Russia House, political relations, The Draughtsman's Contract, power
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