Essay #1: Moments of Meaning Scene Analysis--First Outline

I have the bulk of my ideas about Midnight in Paris sketched out.  I still need to find more quotations to back my claims, but I do have claims I feel represent the film using the formalist approach.  Here's my first outline:

Main Argument: I believe the formalist approach best describes the film, Midnight in Paris.  Through the use of shot, character, and dialogue in the scene involving Gil, Inez, Paul and Paul’s wife talking about Gil’s nostalgia shop book, Allen attacks a genre he helped perfect, and subversively sets the stage for the audience to grasp the ironic stance he has on his own film.

Claim #1: Using a single-shot and having the characters roam allows for them to speak freely on the matter of Gil’s nostalgia shop, and more correctly about longing for the past; instead of the hesitancy that comes with having a direct conversation, it creates a more professorial attitude, one that allows them to speak without the intimacy and negative reaction of the people around them.

Claim #2: The characters Allen uses in this scene—Paul and Inez, the realists, and Gil, the dreamer—represent the dichotomy of personality and lifestyle in the world; the one who dreams for big things, and the other who is steeped in reality.  Also, it shows the duality of ways the audience views film; they either become lost, like Gil, or they take a critical, objective view of its significance and its flaws, like Paul and Inez.

Claim #3:  The dialogue itself—talking about Gil’s story idea—launches Allen’s criticism of the escape of cinema and the romantic-comedy genre.  As the man who essentially perfected the genre, he now attacks it.  Just as Paul and Inez criticize the idea of a man working in a nostalgia shop and the longing of times past, Allen criticizes the audience for not thinking objectively, instead “escaping” into a fantasy world.