Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 comedy film written and directed by Wes Anderson and inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig. It stars Ralph Fiennes as a concierge who teams up with one of his employees to prove his innocence after he is framed for murder.

The film is a British-German co-production financed by German financial companies and film funding organizations, and was filmed entirely on location in Germany. The cinema of Wes Anderson is nothing if not mechanical. Watching his movies is less like marvelling at the silent workings of a Swiss watch than goggling at the innards of a grandfather clock, cogs and pulleys proudly displayed. Theatrical framing devices are everywhere, from book bindings to doll's houses to miniature stages and fluctuating screen ratios, with chapter headings a recurrent feature. As for the performances, one imagines that if Anderson were ever to include a "gag reel" of outtakes from his movies, it would include shots of an actor raising an eyebrow a millimetre too high, or placing a teacup an inch to the left of its allotted space upon a table.

The action centres upon the titular establishment, a once-grand confection of a building located in the imaginary European state of Zubrowka, lurking somewhere between the Best Exotic Marigold and the Overlook hotels, with Anderson's prowling, panning cameras occasionally resembling a cartoon caricature of Kubrick on speed. As ever, the story unfolds as a series of boxes within boxes. Our first narrator, a writer (variously played by Tom Wilkinson and Jude Law) hands the baton to a second storyteller, Mr Moustafa (F Murray Abraham, embodied in younger years by Tony Revolori) who in turn draws our attention to the real heart of the matter: the charismatic concierge, M Gustave (a splendidly rancid and randy Ralph Fiennes). Back in the 30s, Gustave was the hotel's primary attraction, a vision of purple-clad slickness attending the guests with oily efficiency, bedding the dowagers whose patronage was his fetish. When one such dowager (an unrecognisable Tilda Swinton) expires, leaving Gustave a priceless painting, the family revolts, and a frenetic caper is set in motion involving art theft, murder, love, prison breaks, steam trains, cable cars, occupying armies (non-specific war breaks out), dead cats, a clandestine order of fraternal concierges and elaborate cakes. In boxes.

With Lubitsch and Hitchcock his guiding lights, and author Stefan Zweig providing inspiration for a screenplay co-written with Hugo Guinness, Anderson conjures a fictional vision of Europe that nods its head towards the Hollywood backlots upon which so many émigré directors worked their magic in the golden age of the studios. Everything looks like a set, and deliberately so, with the screen oscillating between classic Academy ratio and more panoramic widescreen (both 1.85 and 2.35) to differentiate between the various time periods, ancient and modern(ish).

The overriding air is one of carefully controlled craziness in which even the outbursts of sporadic violence (a spontaneous gunfight shatters the hotel's studied serenity) are politely staged. It's a rigid structure in which the players flourish, most notably Fiennes, who caught Anderson's eye in a stage production of the savage farce God of Carnage, and whose brittle manner here proves the director's perfect tool. Relishing rapid-fire dialogue that veers incongruously between the oleaginous and the obscene (his clipped diction lends bizarre gravitas to the phrase "shaking like a shitting dog"), Fiennes is in roaring form, his timing note-perfect down to the last demisemiquaver, his mannerisms piercingly angular, from the set of his arms to the arch of his back, the curl of his lip, the bristle of his manicured moustache. Even more so than the mannequins of Fantastic Mr Fox, Fiennes has the appearance of an expertly animated creation, painstakingly captured frame by frame, each gesture rich in detail.

Around him a rogues' gallery of regular players is augmented by a growing gaggle of the great and the good, with fleeting turns from Bill Murray and Owen Wilson fighting for space alongside Harvey Keitel's shaven-headed comrade-in-crime, Saoirse Ronan's perfect partner, Adrien Brody's conniving son, Willem Dafoe's feral thug, Léa Seydoux's inquisitive maid, Mathieu Amalric's elusive butler, Jeff Goldblum's Freud-like lawyer, Jason Schwartzman's third-rate concierge, and more.

Sometimes the level of fleeting celebrity spectacle threatens distraction, with too many guests for even this sprawling hotel to accommodate. Yet each time we return to Abraham's ageing narrator the story merges once more, allowing the personal loss and historical tragedy to settle for the viewer to take in. This keeps the film lighthearted and adventurous.

With its signature zooms, motionless action, and ordered visual palette (architecture is everything, from the hairstyles to the shot compositions) this is Anderson-world writ large: a sealed environment in which reality is something you only read about in books, and the upheavals of the interwar years provide tonal rather than political background. What slices the surface is the rapier-sharp wit, with Fiennes on point at all times, a dashing foil for his director's comedic cut and thrust.

Pan's Labyrinth Style and Themes

Style

Guillermo Del Torro has a fasination

Themes

1. Rebellion
2. Imagination
3. Power
4. Imagination
5. Escapism
6. Fantasy 

Brief Context in 3 Films

German Expressionalism and Tim Burton

• German Expressionism is the artistic movement in Germany after World War I. It embodied the mental and physical wounds inflicted after the war was lost.
• The German Expressionist movement carries a legacy that still holds to this day, especially with film makers like Tim Burton. 
• The Expressionist movement as a whole began in the late 19th century through various artistic media. The movement picked up in Germany and heightened with a new medium of art -film.

• Above: A still from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920. The movement is often characterized with dark, stylized sets, with characters whose movements reflect their environment. 
• In the above movie still, both characters shown are twisted and contorted, almost identical to their surroundings. 
• The entire scene (mise en scène) appears chaotic, possibly representing the feelings of the German people at that time.

• Edward Scissorhands was one of Tim Burton’s first major films. 
• His fan base became much of what it is today because of this movie. 
• Burton’s films have always come with the expectation of a unique experience. 
• Burton’s films also often quietly attack social normalcies and question his viewers of what they believe is acceptable, by creating loveable characters. 
• Most of Burton’s movies and productions involve a socially awkward lead who is able to find love or acceptance from someone in society or society itself.
• Using dark humor and unusual examples, Burton tells his stories in a way that only he can. 
• Burton pays homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in Edward Scissorhands by essentially recreating the 1920s film.

In Edward Scissorhands, Johnny Depp plays a character (Edward Scissorhands) who looks similar to Conrad Veidt (Cesare). Both characters are rather awkward and manipulated throughout both films. Edward by society, Cesare by an evil hypnotist.

When Tim Burton had massive commercial success with his 1992 Batman Returns, it was obvious that Danny DeVito’s Penguin character derived direct inspiration from Dr. Caligari himself, as more of a dark, homicidal, and mentally unstable character as opposed to the intelligent, calculating, and wealthy renditions of the Penguin character in the Batman comics.

SOURCE: https://storify.com/StrangeMixtie/the-influence-of-german-expressionalism-in-tim-bur

French New Wave

In this video, we played with the idea of the French New Wave style of filming, in which we used jump cuts, hand held cameras. However we could've improved our clip with natural lighting and sound. We also could've improved upon the length of the clip, however we didn't have enough footage to put together a longer clip. If we had another chance to make the clip we would manage our time more wisely so that we have more footage to use. I used a black and white filter to give the footage an aged look, as well as a vintage filter to darken the edges.

Magical Realism

In this video I played with the idea of Magical realism and how someone is affected emotionally into thinking that something is there when it isn't. Our idea was that the man is dreaming about his lost lover who he is seen with in his dreams but she isn't there because they are no longer together. I faded the beginning black and white footage into the dream-like footage to make it seem like he's dreaming. I gave the footage a romantic feel to reflect what the man is feeling emotionally. Some footage wasn't useable so it was hard to put together a full clip but I feel that this short clip shows what the full clip would look like. I definitely think theres room for improvement, for example, there could've been more footage at the beginning of the man in reality, perhaps stumbling across items that remind them of his lover. I also think that if we decided on what props to use we could've taken our ideas in a different direction than a romantic relationship. For example, we could've taken a more comical route of a dazed man imaging things are there after being intoxicated; the camerawork, mise-en-scene, editing and lighting could reflect this. For me, it was important to understand the concept of Magical Realism because the film that I am studying, 'Pan's Labyrinth', shows Magical Realism through the main character Ofelia's belief in make belief which distracts her from the struggles she has to cope with in reality.

Styles of National Cinema

1. Magical Realism
2. French New Wave 

Both styles go against the mainstream styles in Hollywood films.

MAGICAL REALISM

An aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in order to access a deeper understanding of reality. Magical Realism is a form of fiction which inspires many unique interpretations.

Examples: 

1. "One Hundred Years of Solitude", when one of the characters is shot and his blood trickles all the way across town to his mother.
2. "House of the Spirits" is when a girl with green hair floats away into the clouds because she is so pure.

A professor from Colombia said that "magical realism exists because for us it has to. Life is so bad so often that we can only be happy with the hope of the impossible."

FRENCH NEW WAVE 

A movement in French cinema in the 1960s, led by directors such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut, that abandoned traditional narrative techniques in favor of greater use of symbolism and abstraction and dealt with themes of social alienation,psychopathology, and sexual love. Also called nouvelle vague.

Examples: