Film Studies Blog

How does the aesthetic quality of Trainspotting depict ideological issues of youth and addiction? Part one: Renton Chooses heroin (01:45-5:50) The sequence begins with a close up pan of Renton lying on the ground, high. Non-diegetic narration explains to the audience that he "chose not to choose life". "who needs reasons when you have heroin" he says, as the camera pans backwards away from him, Iggy Pops Lust For Life plays, also non-diegetic, in the background of the narration. Choose Life was a protest movement in the 1980s, made famous by WHAM! and is a message of many different things. The way Renton interprets this is that you can choose the mundanity of life, or live for something else, and this is reflected through the heroin. The message was also fought against by different generations. Renton's generation of youth chooses to rebel against "life" and social norms, and the most obvious way to do this is to take drugs, as they change how l

'The Director is Always The Most Important Influence on a Film.' Compare how far your two chosen films support the statement. A director tends to be the most important role working on a film, as they are the ones who control actors/actresses, the sound technicians, cinematographers etc. And so they are the obvious choice on who has "made" the film in terms of creative control and endeavour, so we can call said director an Auteur. Auteur derives from the French word "author" and was coined by Andrew Sarris in 1962, but had been discussed decades before with the French magazine "Cahiers Du Cinema" by Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, who were directors of the French New Wave. The theory states that the director is the "author" of the film as they are the ones who have the most control, much like an author who is in control of the pen, this concept of the "camera-stylo" was introduced by Alexandre Astruc in 1948.  Returning to