Jack Oberli's Blog

 Rear Window is a thrilling murder mystery by Alfred Hitchcock. The story is captivating, and the filmography fits the story very well. I really enjoyed this film despite usually not being too drawn to older works. However, Rear Window tackles some innovative film strategies that really make it stand out along with solid character development. I do think that the mystery itself is pretty straight forward, yet the character dynamic is much more enticing.  I think on the most basic level of what makes Rear Window an intriguing work, are the characters. The protagonist LB Jefferies, also known as Jeff. Jeff seems to be a character that relies on being very active and must be very involved with everything around him. However, he suffers a broken leg which hinders this want bringing on the introductory conflict Jeff has. Another trait Jeff has is that he yearns for his independence. Which not only is impacted by his injury, but it sets up the character of Lisa beautifully. Lisa is ...

 The movie Snowy is quite the interesting short film. It follows a rather simple plot of a dad's fondness of the family turtle. Essentially what happens is that the dad decides to step up the living conditions Snowy the turtle. It may seem like the plot isn't very enticing and well, that's because it isn't. However, that's not why this short film shines. The cinematography and theme are what really give this story its legs. The editing and camera work of this film is extremely cunning. It's all pretty low budget, yet its execution is near perfect. The shots really bring out feeling very well. For example, there is a moment when Snowy is really struggling to eat a worm. He firstly can't even catch it. Then as soon as he eats it, he throws it back up. Following up Snowy's struggle, is a scene of his family upstairs enjoying a feast. They are laughing and eating without a care in the world. Then the film switches to an outside shot, which pans down to the b...

 The film "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari" is an extremely creative work of art. Since it was created in the 1920's they were very limited in the effects and camera work they could use. In order to get around this they used full theater sets to film on. Some of which seemed to be massive (the chase scene over the bridge had impressive scale to be done on an indoor set). Another thing they did very well was use color filters over the camera lenses. Of course, this would just turn the entire scene that certain color. However, they did it in a way that seemed as natural as it could. Such as, showing a differential between day and night or instill emotion into a scene. On the surface the acting in the movie seems somewhat cheesy. But the reason it seemed this way to me at first was because I was comparing it to modern acting. This was a time without any sound or dialog to film. All the characters had to directly relay their messages to viewers were brief pop-up dialog slides. S...