Nothing can stand the test of time more than the form of relationship or sympathy. But even greater is the ability to force that compassion and that relationship into the opposite perspective… in other words, instead of feeling emotion simply reacting to what happens on the screen during a movie, we can channel that emotion towards similar events. in the world off the screen. The famous director Ingmar Bergman said: “Film as dream, film as music. No art passes through our consciousness like cinema does and reaches directly to our feelings, deep in the dark rooms of our soul. This precisely highlights the reasoning on how these films stand the test of time; they do not simply tug at the heartstrings of audience members with entertainment value, but rather inspire us and inform our moral values. They challenge our perspectives on how we truly see the world we all live in. To explore this further, the focus will be on the theme of love in cinema and how contemporary romantic films, particularly Spike Jonze's Her (2013), show what love truly is and how it is evolving throughout the world. within our generational perspectives. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The reason we chose her for this topic is that this film truly provides a testament to our current culture, as well as embodying all the qualities of Bergman's statement on cinema. Jonze does this by taking a contemporary look at love in the eyes of modern society, demonstrating that regardless of the nature of the relationship and how "disconnected" it may be from reality, the power of love remains just as strong. This is explained by the author, Max Nelson, of Film Comment in which he points out how: “It is important to note that Jonze never makes Theodore an object of pity or contempt. His romance with the disembodied Samantha is as real, if not more real, than any human relationship in the film” (“Modern Love: Her,” Max Nelson, Film Comment). We see this expressed in the scene at the climax of the story, the “Book Monologue,” in which Samantha explains to Theodore why she is leaving. Samantha asks Theodore, “Can you feel me [Samantha] with you right now?” hitting on the idea that even though they are physically apart in separate existences, their love and bond with each other is together. True love, in a world that is false in itself. While it may be seen as too philosophically abstract for an OS-human bond to actually have romantic relevance, and contain a sense of satire, there is a certain humanization to the model of true love. relation. It's structured this way to grab the audience's attention, almost forcing them to look deeper at what you can't see directly on the screen to get the message Jonze is trying to evoke. James Bell, an author of Sight and Sound, furthers this message by pointing out how "Her is an unapologetic modern love story, except that one half of the couple remains invisible and isn't 'real'...yet Her isn't often comical in this way... instead, the film takes its love story seriously as well as its insights into how we use electronic media and what they are doing to us (Sight and Sound, James Bell, issue 2014).To exemplify a story in this way, Jonze uses the concept of abstract narrative, particularly in the form of this love story between a man and his operating system "Abstract Love". of then. The only difference that places an important division between these love stories and other more "traditional" ones isthe setting, gender roles, and society, both as represented in the story world and in the audience's real world. This is where more aesthetic elements come into play, to accentuate it as an emotionally engaging “abstract” film. The director of photography, Hoyte van Hoytema, portrayed this story in a futuristic Los Angeles with warm colors, sometimes pastel and dark. Since most abstract love stories are also tragedies, due to their nature of highlighting truth and the difficulty of achieving true love in a world where this type of connection may be frowned upon, Hoytema provided us with many shots looking melancholy during the saddest moments of the series. narrative. To do this, he took truly wide-angle shots that embody Theodore's smallness in a world engulfed by a sea of ​​people, in the vast dimensions of an urban landscape like Los Angeles. Furthermore, another conflict in these types of narratives, which are also present in Jonze's film, is the bilateral view of the relationship...where one person distances himself from the other, which we see in Theodore during the surrogate scene. Here he feels that Samantha is trying too hard to become something she definitely isn't: alive. It is this conflict that underlies everything else in the story and that leads to the final disintegration of the couple. And Hoytema captures this state of affairs perfectly, taking the scene where Samantha announces her departure and showing the dust particles in Theodore's warm, brightly colored room and then focusing to blend in with the blurry, cold snowfall. of Samantha's world/mind. By doing this camera work, Hoytema very vividly strikes the juxtaposition between the emotions of the two and the physical worlds of life. He even puts Theodore in both shots, which further emphasizes that even though both worlds are physically separate, they both live in them and share the experience together. This comes to fruition in a very honest sense of the struggle that is their relationship. While there is a more open-minded view of the film itself, as seen in the previously cited articles, there are also those who do not share the same sympathy for the story, nor evoke the same sense of relationship or compassion within themselves. They simply see the film for what it is: a science fiction novel about a troubled protagonist who fails to achieve love with a "real" being, so instead finds love through an artificially intelligent operating system. It takes a certain depth and willingness to enter into "abstract" love stories or any "abstract" film for that matter, with open-mindedness and a willingness to be introspective, but for some they simply don't put themselves in the shoes of the narrative. This is seen specifically in the New Yorker review, Richard Brody's “Ain't Got No Body,” in which he explains “The people he creates are so synthetic, so artificially sweetened, so pure in their saccharine isolation, that it's hard to know whether he's satirizing the hollowed-out specimens who are doomed to each other, condemning the advanced technological powers that have hollowed them out... or simply running up against the limits of his imagination. as it is simply a simple imaginative tale and social statement about technology's consumption of society, I have chosen to observe its social position not only through the physical progression of the story, but also by turning towards and embracing the fact that more "there exists an abstract approach towards the film. This requires a lot more introspection beyond what we see on the screen in front of us. I will take inspiration from Samantha's question This:.