Metropolis

METROPOLIS

Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film, and was made to express the social crisis that existed then between the workers and the owners. Metropolis has been since then the most costly silent movie to be made but yet the most famous and well-known.

I personally have mixed feelings about this film and the fact that it is a silent one. I realized that a silent film requires much more effort to watch than talking movies. The information is not spoon fed to the audience; it requires extent concentration primarily in the sense of what the movie is all about. Even till the end of the movie, I still hadn’t figured out what was really going on. Most of the scenes seemed very complex and vague.

Yet, on the other hand, I appreciated the silence that existed in the film. I realized that silence can be an extremely loud source to deliver a message. Silence gives a tremendously dramatic effect and leaves the audience to decide what they want to feel. It is deeper this way and makes us feel the movie’s weight, its strength, its tension. In the film, silence does not make the movie more quite, but does the complete opposite of giving it life. It does so by giving all our focus and all the energy to the actor’s actions and facial expressions. For example, it is easy for us to hear the sound of someone crying, but how much deeper will it become if we could see the expression of sadness and pain on that person’s face.

All in all, I don't think I am a big fan of silent movies, yet I believe it is important to experience watching at least one in your life in order to appreciate this different expressional artistic type of movie





Soldier's Home by Hemingway

Soldier's Home  

 

Soldier's Home can be considered an autobiographical since it tells a story about a person's life. Soldier's Home talks about the effects that the war had on Kreb, a soldier from Kansas who left to join the marines in 1917. “Soldier’s Home” mainly revolves around Harold Krebs. Harold is a young soldier who has returned from war and is tormented by the experiences that he had faced. As the story goes on, Harold eventually comes to realize that he shouldn’t be in his childhood home anymore and he is hence lost with what to do with his life. Even though Soldier's Home is not written or narrated by Kreb himself, it can still be considered a biographical story since many similarities have been found between him and the author Ernest Hemingway.

Many believe that Hemingway portraits himself through this character. It is quite common that authors replicate their identity and their own lives into characters of their stories. Hemingway did just so in Soldier's home, most likely to make certain confessions from his own life.

For example, in the story, Hemingway states that Kreb is from Kansas pointing out the fact that he is extremely religious. Similarly, Hemingway's mother was known to be a religiously puritanical woman, active in church affairs, and led her boy to play the cello and sing in the choir. Also, Ernest Hemingway faced certain interactions with soldiers and war during a specific period in his lifetime. He left his job in the magazine Kansas Star to join World War One, where he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He was injured during a delivery run which was the last rout of his career. From then on, his writings that followed were frequently about death and psychological trauma associated with war. Hence, both Hemingway and Kreb suffer from a troubled family life after returning from World War One.

Therefore, as a conclusion, there are many similarities between Hemingway, the author of the story, and the Kreb, the character which he created. Many authors replicate facts and events that occurred in their own life into characters in short stories. Ernest Hemingway did such in “A Soldiers Home” since he was somehow retelling his youth through it.