Paul Christian

Intro to Paul Christian

As you saw, my name is Paul Christian. I've been at UWM for over four years now, and this is literally the final class I need to graduate. I already completed my senior film and screened it. It was a dream-like sort of experimental film where I tried out a POV style while at the same time attempting to make the whole film look like one take (sort of like what Birdman did, but I started this movie first!) You can find it here at this link.

As for metacinema, I think it's a really cool concept. In the Marvel comic's, the character Deadpool is a superhero who constantly breaks the fourth wall and I loved it. He always made references to being in a comic book, much to the confusion of the other characters. I thought it was hilarious. When I think about my favorite example in film, the answer comes easy to me. Martin McDonaugh's Seven Psychopaths is littered with meta references.  The film centers around a guy writing an action screenplay about 7 gangsters called "the 7 psychopaths". The rest of the movie plays out right into his story, as seven different psychopaths all appear, all waving guns, allowing his screenplay to basically write itself. 

In this scene, the three friends are sitting at a campfire, out in hiding and with gangsters closing in on them. Billy goes on about how he wants their story to end, and describes how he thinks their fate plays out. These kinds of self-referential things happen over the course of the entire film, as Billy tries to fuel the flames to make a good story, and the other two just try not to get killed.