Topic 1 Gold Rush

Brandon Ricardo

Professor Sapphire

9/25/20

                    The Gold Rush

    Cinematic Language is the way in which a movie communicates with each and every viewer who watches it. In the movie Gold Rush there are plenty of ways in which cinematic language is used. Depending on what version you watch it will be different, if you watched the 1920’s edition there is no sound whereas the 1940’s version does and this has a big effect on how you view the film. Nonetheless with or without voice the movie still sends plenty of messages to communicate with the audience whether it is the lighting, the actions taken by the characters, the setting, and many more factors can drive cinematic language. Gold Rush is the perfect example of this and can be used to explain how cinematic language works. Charlie Chaplin’s performance in the movie was incredible and you can really sit back in your seat and enjoy it. 

   

    Realism and Antirealism is two ways in which a film can be produced as. Realism is how it sounds, something that can happen in real life and is realistic. Antirealism is pretend, fantasy that can’t happen in real life but is used in movies to make it more interesting and unique. Gold Rush uses both of these techniques really well and throughout the movie you can pick out what is realism and what is antirealism. For example it is Antirealism that a shack can be held off of a cliff just with a weak rope attached to it. An example of realism is when you see the ending of how the two characters are now rich after finding the gold and the way they dressed. Seeing how both of these are intertwined in the movie shows how well written and performed this movie was. It's extremely hard to nail what this movie did and to see how old this movie is shows how effective cinematic language is.

   

    A big example of antirealism is also the movie A Trip To The Moon in which people build a ship and travel to the moon. In this movie the antirealism is quite obvious as there was one scene where they stab the moon with the spaceship and if you know anything about space travel that is not how it works. I added this because the antirealism in the Gold Rush and a Trip To The Moon were used very differently and in my opinion I liked the way the Gold Rush did it because it worked with the rhythm of the movie. 

    Therefore Gold Rush is absolutely genius in not only its plot and story but also with cinematic language and the very effective use of both antirealism and realism. You look at movies nowadays and they just aren’t the same as the classics and this movie was made so long ago but yet we are writing a paper about it here in class almost 100 years later. That's how you can tell how well cinematic language is in film. Therefore in conclusion the Gold Rush was not only a masterpiece but a way of showing people how effective these techniques can be.