Hollywood Cinema Essay Example

Hollywood Cinema Essay Example Hollywood Cinema Essay Hollywood Cinema Essay Prediction of Dramatic Intensity Trends in Successful Hollywood Cinema â€Å" I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries. † (Frank Capra) Hollywood movies have several elements like drama, action and comedy skillfully weaved into them. However not all movies are able to make a mark with the average viewer or the critics. Some movies tend to handle these elements in a better way than others, making them successful box-office earners, while others despite some really interesting scenes are not able to make it. It is quite intriguing that despite a great storyline and well-written screenplay, some of these movies are not able to hold the interest of the movie audience through the entire run. Thus, is it possible that the pattern of these elements can be deciphered to reveal an underlying trend in successful Hollywood cinema? This paper attempts to uncover a paradigm of dramatic scenes sketched in the all time classic, My Fair Lady, based on a play by Bernard Shaw titled Pygmalion (1913). My Fair Lady was a landmark, academy award-winning (1964) movie produced by Jack L. Warner of the Warner Bros. Picture. It was adapted to the movie version from a musical play with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. The movie was directed by George Cukor and starred Audrey Hepburn as a poor girl Eliza Doolittle, with a Cockney accent who sold flowers. Professor Higgins, an irascible and egotistical professor of phonetics, struck a bet with fellow linguist Colonel Pickering to transform the uncouth Eliza Doolittle into a charming lady who could pass of for the â€Å"Queen of Sheeba†. What followed was a dramatic and hilarious set of episodes that included the tutoring sessions and the bond that developed between Doolittle And Higgins. The movie was an immensely popular musical and swept the academy awards with eight Oscars including best movie and the equivalent of best male lead for Rex Harrison. That Audrey Hepburn did not win an award, was quite a matter of controversy. My Fair Lady has inspired and been spoofed by many theater plays and television programs. It impacted fashion trends across Europe and America with the exquisite costumes designed by Cecil Beaton. This despite the fact that Lerner did not find it anywhere near the version directed by Moss Hart for Broadway. He also disliked the fact that the movie was shot in the Warner Bros. studios, instead of its original settings of London. The following section of this paper will make an attempt to study and explore the movie as a subject of analysis for a presentation style or pattern that makes it stand out as such a remarkable piece. The section tries to isolate one outstanding characteristic component and how it is spread over the movie. It elucidates on the proposition of defining a scene-based trend for dramatic play in the movie, to uncover an underlying schema for dramatic intensity distributions, a measurable and mathematically applied concept developed in this paper that can potentially identify successful movies. The paper than proceeds to introduce mathematical parameters developed for the analysis and the methods used to collect the data. The data is the converted into a form that can be used to apply the analytical concepts and presented as a measurable, defined and self-explanatory. The fourth section of the paper analyses the collected and formatted data to discover plausible logically valid trends that can be observed strongly enough to   lead to a conclusion. The section then summarizes the observations in mathematical terms and outlines the trends and their interpretations. The last section of the paper draws a conclusion based on the observations made. It also extends on what are the implications of these observations. Methods for developing concepts used for identifying trends There are several elements and presentation styles that are adopted by Hollywood movies in their screenplay. These styles and their language have evolved over time. But what remains unchanged is the presence of basic elements of storytelling. When one of these elements dominates a movie screenplay, the movie is classified under a genre defined by the element. Of the basic story elements in a movie, counted amongst the most common and rudimentary is drama. While action and comedy might be absent or minimal in some stories, drama is an unavoidable element of a screenplay. Thus this paper chooses to study the drama component of the movie ‘My Fair Lady ‘ and isolate a pattern in the use of dramatic intensity in its screenplay. Several other components could be used as basic parameters to isolate a pattern like the level of surprise associated through every defined unit of the movie. An interesting extension of the study would be to compare the trends and interrelationships of different basic elements in a movie, and see how a dominating pattern can offset the weaker parameter. Additionally, if this method proves productive, the study of various elements over a large sample set of successful movies can give an insight into which elements dictate viewer choice most.

Definition and Examples of Reduplicatives in English

Definition and Examples of Reduplicatives in English A reduplicative is a word or lexeme (such as mama) that contains two identical or very similar parts. Words such as these are also called  tautonyms.  The morphological and phonological process of forming a compound word by repeating all or part of it is known as reduplication. The repeated element is called a reduplicant. David Crystal wrote in the second edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language: Items with identical spoken constituents, such as  goody-goody  and  din-din, are rare. What is normal is for a single  vowel  or  consonant  to change between the first constituent and the second, such as  see-saw  and  walkie-talkie.Reduplicatives are used in a variety of ways. Some simply imitate sounds:  ding-dong, bow-wow. Some suggest alternative movements:  flip-flop, ping-pong. Some are disparaging:  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹dilly-dally, wishy-washy. And some intensify meaning:  teeny-weeny, tip-top. Reduplication is not a major means of creating lexemes in English, but it is perhaps the most unusual one.(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) Characteristics Reduplicatives can rhyme  but arent required to. They likely have a  figure of sound  represented in them, as alliteration (repetition of consonants) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) would be common in a word or phrase that doesnt change much among its parts, such as in this by Patrick B. Oliphant, Correct me if Im wrong: the gizmo is connected to the flingflang connected to the watzis, watzis connected to the doo-dad connected to the ding dong.† According to Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History by Kate Burridge: The majority of...reduplicated forms involve a play on the rhyme of words. The result can be a combination of two existing words, like  flower-power  and  culture-vulture, but more usually one of the elements is meaningless, as in  superduper, or both, as in  namby-pamby. Now, it struck me the other day that a large number of these nonsense jingles begin with h. Think of  hoity-toity, higgledy-piggledy, hanky-panky, hokey-pokey, hob-nob, heebie-jeebies, hocus-pocus, hugger-mugger, hurly-burly, hodge-podge, hurdy-gurdy, hubbub, hullabaloo,  harumscarum, helter-skelter, hurry-scurry, hooley-dooley  and dont forget  Humpty Dumpty. And these are just a few!(HarperCollins Australia, 2011) Reduplicatives differ from  echo words in that there are fewer rules in forming reduplicatives. Borrowed Reduplicatives The history of reduplicatives in English starts in the Early Modern English (EMnE) era, which was about the end of the 15th century. In the third edition of A Biography of the English Language,  C.M. Millward and Mary Hayes noted:   Reduplicated words do not appear at all until the EMnE period. When they do appear, they are usually direct borrowings from some other language, such as Portuguese dodo (1628), Spanish grugru (1796) and motmot (1651), French haha ditch (1712), and Maori kaka (1774). Even the nursery words mama and papa were borrowed from French in the 17th century. So-so is probably the sole native formation from the EMnE period; it is first recorded in 1530.(Wadsworth, 2012) Morphological and Phonological Sharon Inkelas wrote in Studies on Reduplication that there are two separate methods, producing two different types or subsets of reduplication: phonological duplication and morphological reduplication. Below we list some criteria for determining when a copying effect is reduplication and when it is phonological duplication. (1) Phonological duplication serves a phonological purpose; morphological reduplication serves a morphological process (either by being a word-formation process itself or by enabling another word-formation process to take place...).(2) Phonological duplication involves a single phonological segment...; morphological reduplication involves an entire morphological constituent (affix, root, stem, word), potentially truncated to a prosodic constituent (mora, syllable, foot).(3) Phonological duplication involves, by definition, phonological identity, while morphological reduplication involves semantic, not necessarily phonological, identity.(4) Phonological duplication is local (a copied consonant is a copy of the closest consonant, for example), while morphological reduplication is not necessarily local.​  (Morphological Doubling Theory: Evidence for Morphological Doubling in Reduplication. ed. by Bernhard Hurch. Walter de Gruyter, 2005)