The Haunting Effects Of Stanley Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut Can Be Identif

The haunting effects of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut can be identified as creating curiosity, fear and anxiety in the viewer. They can be understood as painting a mosaic of symbolism in the viewer's eye, and as depositing fragments of concepts inside his mind. The film's slow pace seems to open wide gaps between the joints of the story's framework, causing the viewer to lose his secure sense of balance during the progression of the plot. Eyes Wide Shut is not a tale of terror nor one of mystery or of love; it is not a documentary about a married couple nor a psychological drama. It pretends to be all of these, and in so doing explores the filmic medium and secures the effects of its own elements. Like any film that is carefully constructed, Eyes Wide Shut is the sum of its elements and of the ways by which these interact with each other. The most significant elements of the film are 1) color, particularly red, blue and yellow; 2) sound, such as voices plus external and internal music; 3) camera movement, especially the track-forward, track-backward and the revolving shot; 4) the dissolve, as the main transition technique between shots; and 5) the recursive figures of the Female Nude, Masks and Christmas Trees. Some of these elements are recognizable from the earlier Kubrick films, such as A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, a fact which reveals the signature of Kubrick the auteur. Eyes Wide Shut can be divided into three parts, each of which contains the elements mentioned above. Part I introduces the main characters and their relationship towards each other. Dr. William Harford and his wife Alice attend a party where pianist Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), an old acquaintance of Bill and a pivotal character for the plot, provides the music. The Harford's friend and host Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), introduces his wife to his guests and later solicits Bill's medical attention to save the overdosed prostitute and beauty queen Mandy (Julienne Davis), who is sprawled naked on a divan in an upstairs room of the mansion, while Ziegler nervously gets dressed. On the wall behind her hangs a large painting of a female nude. In this manner, the figure of the Female Nude is introduced as having a dual significance: as a measure for risk and fatality (Mandy), and as a representation of aesthetic beauty (the painting). In the meantime, Alice drinks several glasses of champagne and dances with a pressing suitor. Half drunk and in full coquettish swing, her swaying disposition and her reluctant tongue oscillate between words, like a pendulum pulsating a decrepit waltz. Upstairs, Bill in a demanding staccato calls out to Mandy's dying ear: Mandy...can you hear me? Can you hear me...Mandy? Look at me...Mandy. In both cases, Alice's drunkenness and flirtatiousness, and Bill's tense, yet hopeful tone produce a slowness in their way of speaking and in the overall rhythm of the scenes. This device becomes characteristic of the film, where whatever altered state the character happens to be in (fear, shock, distress, stupor) can be defined as a justifier for the prolongation of his or her oral expression. This strategy of justifiers is used in numerous scenes. In one which follows the scenes of the party, for example, Alice and Bill smoke marijuana and she initiates an interrogation which tests her husband's sense of jealousy. The scene evolves from her dispassionate questioning to her violent reproach, to a daring confession of figurative adultery. Throughout all three phases, however, Alice deals with the effects of the drug and of the mental tiptoeing around her husband's defensive rationale. This is represented by her slow speech. In addition to this, during the confession phase, the film's grainy quality is accentuated, establishing a kind of screen or filter to distance the viewer from the subject, thus creating in the viewer a sensation of voyeurism. This relationship is first established in the initial credit sequence, where Nicole Kidman --or her unknown character-- very casually undresses, as if unaware of being viewed, setting up the viewer as the unsuspected voyeur of the events to follow. Furthermore, the scene establishes the red, yellow and blue colors, where Alice's character is usually set against the

Prehistoric Life During the Pleistocene Epoch

Prehistoric Life During the Pleistocene Epoch The Pleistocene epoch represented the culmination of 200 million years of mammalian evolution, as bears, lions, armadillos, and even wombats grew to bizarrely large sizesand then went extinct due to climate change and human predation. The Pleistocene is the last named epoch of the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago to the present)Â  and is the first epoch of the Quaternary period, which continues to this day. (Up to the year 2009, when paleontologists agreed on a change, the Pleistocene officially began 1.8 million rather than 2.6 million years ago.) Climate and Geography The end of the Pleistocene epoch (20,000 to 12,000 years ago) was marked by a global ice age, which led to the extinction of many megafauna mammals. What most people dont know is that this capitalized Ice Age was the last of no less than 11 Pleistocene ice ages, interspersed with more temperate intervals called interglacials. During these periods, much of North America and Eurasia was covered by ice, and ocean levels plummeted by hundreds of feet (due to the freezing of available water at and near the poles). Terrestrial Life Mammals: The dozen or so ice ages of the Pleistocene epoch wreaked havoc on megafauna mammals, the largest examples of which were simply unable to find enough food to sustain their populations. Conditions were especially severe in North and South America and Eurasia, where the late Pleistocene witnessed the extinction of Smilodon (the Saber-Toothed Tiger), the Woolly Mammoth, the Giant Short-Faced Bear, Glyptodon (the Giant Armadillo), and Megatherium (the Giant Sloth). Camels disappeared from North America, as did horses, which were only reintroduced to this continent during historical times, by Spanish settlers. From the perspective of modern humans, the most important development of the Pleistocene epoch was the continuing evolution of hominid apes. At the start of the Pleistocene, Paranthropus and Australopithecus were still extant; a population of the latter most likely spawned Homo erectus, which itself competed with Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe and Asia. By the end of the Pleistocene, Homo sapiens had appeared and spread around the globe, helping to hasten the extinction of the megafauna mammals that these early humans either hunted for food or eliminated for their own safety. Birds: During the Pleistocene epoch, bird species continued to flourish around the globe, inhabiting various ecological niches. Sadly, the giant, flightless birds of Australia and New Zealand, such as Dinornis (the Giant Moa) and Dromornis (the Thunder Bird), quickly succumbed to predation by human settlers. Some Pleistocene birds, like the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon, managed to survive well into historical times. Reptiles: As with birds, the big reptile story of the Pleistocene epoch was the extinction of oversized species in Australia and New Zealand, most notably the giant monitor lizard Megalania (which weighed up to two tons) and the giant turtle Meiolania (which only weighed half a ton). Like their cousins around the globe, these giant reptiles were doomed by a combination of climate change and predation by early humans. Marine Life The Pleistocene epoch witnessed the final extinction of the giant shark Megalodon, which had been the top predator of the oceans for millions of years; otherwise, though, this was a relatively uneventful time in the evolution of fish, sharks, and marine mammals. One notable pinniped that appeared on the scene during the Pleistocene was Hydrodamalis (aka Stellers Sea Cow), a 10-ton behemoth that only went extinct 200 years ago. Plant Life There were no major plant innovations during the Pleistocene epoch; rather, during these two million years, grasses and trees were at the mercy of intermittently plunging and rising temperatures. As during preceding epochs, tropical jungles and rainforests were confined to the equator, with deciduous forests and barren tundra and grasslands dominating northern and southern regions.