Question One The conventions of a road movie are simple: a couple characters go on a trip and they change along the way. While the destination is important, the journey is even more interesting. When it comes to road movies, both Central Station and the Motorcycle Diaries are prime examples. “Genre films work by engaging viewers through an implicit contract. They encourage certain expectations on the part of spectators, which are in turn based on viewer familiarity with the conventions” (Grant). The characters in Central Station go through many different perspective changes due to their experiences.
Dora and Josue travel from place to place on what seems like a never ending trip to find Josue’s father. Their views of each other continually change as they move to different places. Very similar to Central Station, the Motorcycle Diaries follows Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado as they travel across South America. In the end, Guevara’s views have changed and the two split apart. The travel is still there, and the characters develop through their travels. We expect the travel in both movies to change the character’s views, but the originality comes from the way the views change in the end.
We can wish for a happy destination, but only the experiences of the characters will determine that. Question Two Both Nora’s Will and Juan of the Dead are black comedies centered on death. While they are both comedic throughout, they often crack jokes at things that would normally be considered scary or traumatic. Nora’s Will explores the death of a loved one, and the way to go about burying them. Instead of being a film that is gloomy and sad, the film has the remaining family members preparing a feast and arguing over where to bury the body.
We don’t ever feel sad that the character is dead in the first place. We just laugh at the way they go about putting her to rest. They set the story up so that we focus less on the death and more about the bickering between family members. One of the characters also pokes fun at certain aspects of religion, which is always a very controversial topic in movies. Juan of the Dead takes an interesting look at the dreaded zombie outbreak. Instead of having the characters dramatically fear for their lives throughout, they instead decide to turn murdering the undead into a business.
They try to make money off clearing people’s houses of their dead loves ones for a charge. This is as black as comedy gets. Instead of killing normal alive loved ones though, we’re killed undead zombies, so we laugh at the character’s need to capitalize on the situation. It’s also something we have never seen before. “But just as the individual and the family are dis-membered in the most gruesomely literal way in many of these films, so the novelistic as family romance is also in the process of being dismantled” (Modleski). This is why we can take a dramatic situation and turn into something funny.
That’s why Nora’s Will and Juan of the Dead can both be hilarious, even though they are all about people who have died. Question Three The auteur theory is something that is extremely relevant to films like Stellet Licht and Amores Perros. Both films are told in a way that is not average whatsoever, and the decision to make mostly came from the director. The auteur theory extends even more than usual to these two films as they are both written and directed by one person. Carlos Reygadas could have directed Stellet Licht as a simple melodrama about a husband’s affair.
Instead, he chose to make it all seem like one day, with the sun rising in the beginning and setting at the end. The shots of the film are extremely long so that they felt like they were in real time. This heightened the realism as we watched this husband go through the guilt and pain that comes with this situation. He chose to explore the inner workings of each character, following their thoughts all the way to the end so that we can understand a little bit more about why they are the way they are. Similar to Carlos Reygadas, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu chose to tell Amores Perros using a very different plot structure.
Instead of using a linear narrative, we instead get to investigate three different stories and how they all come into contact with each other at one moment. He uses really sad situations to tell all these stories and ties them all together to form a perfect narrative. This is something that he went on to do again with Babel and 21 Grams. He is the definition of an auteur as he brings a signature of storytelling and emotion that any other director may not have been able to capture. The auteur theory may be somewhat of an opinion, but there is no doubt that these specific stories would not be the exact same if they were told by someone else.
