A Marxist/Feminist reading:

1. Why is the focus shifted from the bicycle to the chandelier?
2. How are the family relations presented in the film?    Compare the family in the film with the audience family on the one hand and the family in The Bicycle Thief.
3. Are the mothers in the film and out of the film criticized?
4. What role do the commercials play in the film?

1. inverting the text/context binary and blurring the boundaries between them.

• losing power: signing the release, caricatured, his plot changed (undone), becoming a character, locked in the T.V. frame.

• commercialized -- concerned with rating, the host does not know what he introduces, a lot of commercials

• consuming subjects with false choices -- remote control, the kid with a lot of building blocks, the pregnant woman with a lot of food and the remote, the husband

 

 

2. The free play of signfiers:

1. The characters and plot as combination of signifiers: e.g. the thief
2. Who determines the meanings and the plot?
The director?  Bruno?  Maria?  Or the commercials?
1. Intertextuality  (text and subtexts)   -- 1. between the text and its frames, among the three plots

• a review by By Desson Howe
• student report (from Central U.)