Key Ideas Paper 2

Question 1

What’s the deal with Stories We Tell?

Answer 1

While the film reach certain revelations, it simultaneously undermines the authority of those revelations by showing us how they’re constructed, contested, and partial. The film’s “resolution” about paternity is accompanied by explicit acknowledgment that this resolution is incomplete and contingent. This isn’t traditional expository logic wrapped in reflexive packaging - it’s a genuinely different relationship to documentary knowledge.

Question 2

Pan’s Labyrinth religiosity?

Answer 2

The core message (encoded in the male/female) extolls the virtues of empathy sacrifice and moral challenge - the fantasy world prizes these attributes, in contrast to Vidal’s patriarchal reality

By extension, the film offers a critique of the Catholic Church and its institutional complicity with the Falangist’s

Question 3

Mulholland Dr.

Answer 3

Resists interpretation, misrepresenting itself as a puzzle to be solved when in effect, the film functions as visual poetry, free form and Aesthetic, emotive before logical - However the film’s openness gives it an intrigue, that the human mind, in it’s distaste for chaos, instinctively rejects - we can accept it for what it is, or we can engage in meaning making, bending ourselves over backwards in search of order - either approach is valid, and offers different rewards