Hannah’s Movie Glossary

April 27, 2012Hannah Park

English 11

AllegoryDefinition: A form of extended metaphor in which objects, per-sons, and actions in a narrative are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus, an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.Personal Definition: A symbol represented in a story that always have a implicit meaning.URL: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-allegory.htmExample: The movie, Animal Farm, shows a great example of alle-gory in which a farm governed by animals represents the commu-nist regime of Joseph Stalin in USSR before the Second World War.

AllusionDefinition: A reference to or representation of a well-known person, place, event, literary work or work of art.Personal Definition: Referring to a well-known person, event, history and other work to present a clear ideaURL: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/example-of-allusion.htmlExample: The movie, Enchanted, alludes to several Disney movies: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Mary Poppins, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan and lots more.Eg. Giselle's cottage – similar to the dwarfs' cottage.

Comic ReliefDefinition: A comic episode or element inserted in an otherwise serious or tragic play to provide some relief from the heavy mood.Personal Definition: A funny element inserted in a tragic or melancholy scene to ease off some heavy mood.URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_reliefExample: In almost all episodes of the TV show, Fringe, a person dies of a tragic accident but when that person is brought into Dr. Walter Bishop’s lab in Harvard University for further ob-servation and biopsy, Walter is always happy like a little child when he sees the dead body and he would think of junk food such as licorice while he’s cutting open a person’s body. He would often lick the person’s body and also correlate that idea to the food that he wants to eat.“Let’s make some LSD!” ~Walter Bishop

InferenceDefinition: To gain meaning from something that is not directly stated.Personal Definition: To know the answer to a certain thing or an event without it being directly stated.URL: http://www.teachervision.fen.com/skill-builder/reading-comprehension/48611.htmlExample: In the last scene of the movie, Inception, Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) awakes safely from his dream in which he was close to being shot dead. However, the fact that Cobb’s totem (a small object that determines whether he’s in another person’s dream) was left spinning at the end of the movie infers that Cobb did not actually awake from his dream but was still trapped.

Interpretive LiteratureDefinition: Interpretive Literature is written to broaden, deepen and sharpen our awareness of life. Interpretive literature, through our imagination, takes us deeper into the real world. It enables us to un-derstand our problems.Personal Definition: Interpretive literature helps us to understand basic elements of human existence, such as death, life, sorrow, love and etc. It brings us closer to understanding the real world.URL: http://classiclit.about.com/od/literaryterms/g/aa_interpretive.htmExample:The movie, The Bucket List, itself is a interpretive literature that por-trays an adventure of two characters, Edward Cole (Jack Nicholsen) and Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman), whom share terminal ill-nesses. The storyline of this movie implants a meaningful message to people: Life isn’t all about money, wealth, reputation and sex; Life is all about finding joy and happiness in life itself.E.g. Carter Chambers: “Have you found joy in your life? Has your life brought joy to others?”

MicrocosmDefinition: Literally, “small world.” An iso-lated, self-contained setting in which the human activity is actually representative of human behaviour or the human condition in the world as a whole.Personal Definition: a miniature universeURL: http://www.cum-mingsstudyguides.net/xLitTerms.htmlExample:The society in the movie, Hunger Games, is a exaggerated microcosm of the society of the 21st century where people ranked in the higher hierarchy have a contrasting life-styles to the ones who are in the lower rank.

Motif

Definition: A subset of theme—a reappearing object or idea that is symbolic of something.Personal Definition: An idea or element that reappears in a story as a symbolic significance of something.URL: http://homeworktips.about.com/od/writingabookreport/a/Symbols-And-Motifs-In-Literature.htmExample:In the Matrix, the phrase “The One” is used as a motif. The numerous repetition of the phrase suggests the main char-acter’s (Neo) uniqueness, his saviour-like nature and his ca-pability of doing the extraordinary which the normal hu-man-beings cannot do.

Parallelism

Definition: The effective use of words, phrases, sentences, or ideas that are parallel or have a similar structure in order to heighten the focus. Eg. Have you ever thought of what it is like to fly, to hope, to dream?Personal Definition: An arrangement of words, phrases, ideas or sentences so that the composition presents a similar idea.URL: http://www.towson.edu/ows/moduleparallel.htmExample:The movie, Children of Men, has a symbolism of environmental de-struction and is parallel to today’s reality of our environment and global warming.

Prose

Definition: Ordinary writing as distinguished from verse.Personal Definition: Ordinary language that people use in everyday writing and speakingURL: http://www.types-of-poetry.org.uk/91-prose.htmExample: All the lines said in the movie, Despicable Me, is an example of prose. The characters in the movie have a natural flow of speech rather than a rhythmic structure.Eg. “Look, Mom, I drew a picture of me landing on the moon” ~ Young Gru

SoliloquyDefinition: In drama, lines spoken by a character to him or herself rather than to another character. The character is “thinking aloud” in order to reveal information about him/herself or an event that the audience needs to know.Personal Definition: A literary device in which a character talks to him/her-self when left alone to inform the audience of the situation.URL: http://literaryzone.com/?p=132 Example:The Little Mermaid—In this movie, the main character, Aerial, uses soliloquy through her song, “Part of Your World”. She thinks aloud of how she has ev-erything she wants and need under the sea—”Looking around here you think sure, she's got everything”—but desperately wants to explore the human world--“Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun, wanderin' free wish I could be, part of that world.”She constantly asks herself what it would feel like to live outside of the wa-ters and portrays her desire to spend her life on land: “What would I give if I could live out of these waters? What would I pay to spend a day warm on the sand?”

Stream of ConsciousnessDefinition: A style of fictional writing that reveals the random thoughts and actions of a character as a continuous flow.Personal Definition: A narrative technique that implants an im-pression of the character’s mind/conscious at work; continuous flow of random thoughts, feelings, emotions and sense-percep-tions.URL: http://literaryzone.com/?p=96Example:In the movie, American Psycho, the main character, Patrick Bateman (a serial killer and Manhattan businessman) uses stream of consciousness as he describes his daily life including conversations with his friends in bars and cafes, his office and nightclubs. One example of Bateman’s stream of consciousness would be: “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something il-lusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there. “

Red HerringDefinition: A false lead, assumed outcome or ob-vious solution that a writer plants in a story to fool the audience from guessing the real outcome.Personal Definition: A literary device used to dis-tract the onlookers from the main original idea.URL: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-red-herring.htmExample:An example of the use of red herring is best por-trayed in the movie, Saw. During the whole movie, two characters spend time imprisoned in a small room where the third person lies dead in the corner. Throughout the movie, the two characters appear to be guilty of series of murders of the third person until it is revealed in the end that the third person isn’t actually dead. He’s in fact the killer.

THE END.

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