Summary:
Considers how the film Sunset Boulevard, directed in the 1950's by director Billy Wilder, depicts celebrity in a negative perspective. Discusses themes and issues portrayed in the film.
Sunset Boulevard, filmed in the 1950's by director Billy Wilder, positions us to view celebrity in a negative perspective. The film depicts the "behind the scenes" of Hollywood, the self-deceit, spiritual and spatial emptiness, and the price of fame, greed, narcissism, and ambition. The portrayal of celebrity as being both seductive and destructive, addictive and inescapable and a fantasy world in which reality is often blurred is established by employing many film techniques. These include Film noir, settings, costume, camera angles and dramatic music.
The blurring of reality in terms of celebrity is explored in Sunset Boulevard mainly in the part of Norma Desmond, the aging, once famous female lead in this film. The mood of the film is immediately established by the posthumous narrator, Joe- a dead man floating facedown in a swimming pool. Thus the.....
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