Author: SilverScreen89

My name is Matt Micucci and I am a student in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology in Film & TV, in my third and final year of the course. I'm specialising in fiction film, screenplay and production design. I have been writing film reviews and film theories for three years, inspired by the writings of Pauline Kael and especially Francois Truffaut, as well as the whole style of analyzing films that Cahiers du Cinema used. In college, I have written three academic essays. In "The Birth of A Nation: History of the Most Controversial Film Ever Made" which followed an account of the filming of DW Griffith's masterpiece and in which I took an interesting and non-conventional point of view, stating that his racist perspective was necessary for Griffith's intent to create a new kind of independent language for the art of cinema, and in doing so, in fact, ended up giving movies a lot more freedom and wider horizons than what they would have without it. In, "Triumph of the Will: Propaganda or Passionate Account of History in the Making", I discuss the theory that Leni Riefenstahl's propagandistic documentary was made to portray the huge popularity of Nazism and Hitler, and that the glamour that came with it was inevitable because of Nazi popularity itself. In "Hail the American Liberator: An Account of the Italian Peplum and the American Leading Bodybuilder/Actors", I discuss how the whole Italian peplum film trend was brought by the influence of the American liberators of Italy, given by the fact that although the heroes should have had Italian or Greek physiological traits, actors with Anglo-Saxon traits were often the ones picked for the leading roles. I am currently working on a German film exhibitions, where I am required to give an account of how Berlin was portrayed through landmark films of German cinema since the beginning of its existence (I quote films like 'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City', 'Olympia', 'M', 'Berlin Alexanderplatz', 'The Legend of Paul and Paula', 'Wings of Desire' and 'The Lives of Others'). I am currently preparing further reading on Walter Ruttmann's Symphony of a Great City, a retrospective of Paul Schrader's scriptwriting work, a more elaborate study of the controversy of The Birth of a Nation and an examination of American TV Series The Sopranos. I have also written a few scripts and short stories.