2. About Zemeckis
Robert Lee Zemeckis - (born May 14, 1951)
First came to public attention after Directing “Back
to the Future Part 1” in 1985
3. Auteur Theory
“Auteur Theory suggests that a director can use the
commercial apparatus of film-making in the same
way that a writer uses a pen or a painter uses paint
and a paintbrush. It is a medium for the personal
artistic expression of the director. The film
theorotician, André Bazin, explained that: auteur
theory was a way of choosing the personal factor in
artistic creation as a standard of referencce, and
then assuming that it continues and even progresses
from one film to the next.”
A few bits of Robert Zemeckis’s life: Zemeckis was born in Chicago , Illinoi s, to a Lithuanian Amer ican father and an Italian American mother, and grew up on the south side.[4] He was raised in a working-class Roman Catholic family, and attended Fenger High Sc hool. Zemeckis has said that "the truth was that i n my family there was no art. I mean, there was no music, there were no books, there was no theater....The only thing I had that was inspirational, was television—and it actually was."
This explanation of the auteur theory helped me greatly. As I am a artist myself and have done studies on different painters and sculptures before it helped me understand it in my own terms. The auteur theory states that a film maker that is classed as an auteur can be shown to have followed similar themes and/or techniques throughout a number of their films. This is similar to how a artist may stick to a certain underlying theme or painting technique and most of the time if you know the artist or have seen some of their work before it is easy to distinguish wether or not a piece is theres or not. A good example of this is the street artist Banksy who’s distinctive style of large single layered stencils usually presenting political or social issues. This underlying similarity or “signature” can often be linked to the directors personal life or cultural background.
Zemeckis has directed 25 different titles. These nine are in my opinion are his best.
This is a quote that Robert Zemeckis gave in and interview he did for Hollywood Reporter Magazine. This quote made me look at his films with Isolation in mind and I found that in most of his films Zemeckis portrays the main protagonist in a isolate or lonely way. A few examples are, in Flight
Cast Away is about a normal man (Chuck Noland) who is happy with his job and family prospects with his girlfriend Kelly whom he is very much in love with. He works for the FedEx company traveling the world making sure packages arrive in the correct time. When traveling to Malaysia his plane crashes in a storm that plants him on a deserted island completely isolated from civilisation and completely alone. Armed with only a few objects washed ashore from the plane crash that have no relevance to his situation and a small old fashioned pocket watch broken from the crash which contains a picture of Kelly, he is forced to completely re-shape his life to stay alive and get back to her.
Back to the Future is about a boy (Marty McFly). He is a typical high-school boy, plays guitar, skateboards and has a beautiful girlfriend. Despite all of this he decides to spend most of his time with a mad scientist called Dr. Emmett Brown. Dr. Brown, or “Doc” as he is referred to regularly in the film, discovers the secret to time travel (The Flux Capacitor) after falling and hitting his head on the sink. After unforeseen circumstances Marty is transported back in time to November 5 th 1955 where he accidentally bumps into his younger mother and father altering his future so that his parents never fall in love at high-school. He must reunite them and find a way to get back to his own time or he will cease to exist.
Forrest Gump is man with avery low IQ who stumbles through life finding himself in extraordinary situations. His mother is very loving to him when he is a child teaching him the ways of life in terms that he can understand. On the first day of school he meets Jenny who he falls in love with and who helps him through the social issues that life in-tails. Despite not being as clever as those around him he has a good heart and the amazing ability to take orders exactly as they come. This ability sparks a series of events in his life that change others lives around him without him fully understanding the impact he has. All this irelivant to Forrest however as he is set on finding Jenny his childhood sweet hart who is slowly destroying her life.
