Grand Budapest Hotel Research Articles

Cortico-hippocampal networks carry information about characters and their relationships in an extended narrative

Social information is a centerpiece of human experience. Despite a wealth of research into the way we understand social relationships and how aspects of social life might be supported by the brain, relatively little is known about how the brain represents individual people and their relationships with others. How do intrinsic networks in the brain track people and their connections in complex situations? Here, we sought to understand this issue using an open neuroimaging dataset in which people freely viewed “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Using support vector machine classification of fMRI activity patterns, we found that character identity could be decoded throughout subsystems of the brain's “Default Mode” Network, especially in regions of an Anterior Temporal and a Medial Prefrontal subsystem, as well as a Medial Temporal Network (MTN). We tested character relationships in two ways - onscreen co-occurrence and shared semantic information from an independent sample of character descriptions - and found evidence for these representations throughout the “Default Mode” Network, and the MTN. The extent to which each variant of character relationships fit neural patterns differed across networks, with abstract semantic relatedness being especially prominent in regions of Anterior Temporal and Medial Prefrontal Networks. These data show that subsystems of the brain's “Default Mode” Network and MTN carry information about individual people as well as their connections, and highlight a particularly strong role for the Anterior Temporal network in representing this information.

Своеобразие имен собственных в киноистории Уэса Андерсона «Отель “Гранд Будапешт”»

The article analyzes proper names in Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. It examines structural, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the film proper names. The results of the research show that fictional characters’ names perform different functions, namely, characterizing, stylistic, expressive, referential. Etymological meaning of a personal name is an important source of information about characters. Geographical names are all fictional but they are formed according to word-building patterns of different languages. Names of hotels take a special place in the film onomastic system. Other names of objects allude to some real historical phenomenon. Proper names play a significant role in building, representing, and understanding the fictional world depicted in the film created by Wes Anderson.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Abstract In recent years, a number of philosophers have suggested that the aesthetic value sometimes depends on moral value. In this paper, I motivate and defend the inverse position: the view that aesthetic value sometimes partially grounds moral value. I appeal to Grand Budapest Hotel and The Lovely Bones to show that maudlin treatments of morally serious subject matter are sometimes disrespectful, in part because they are maudlin; I appeal to Madame Bovary to show that lyrical treatments of morally serious subject matter are compassionate, in part because they are lyrical. I go on to clarify that aesthetic value and descriptive facts about the subject matter of an artwork jointly ground its moral value, and I conclude by considering and rejecting a number of potential objections to the aestheticist thesis.

Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne by Sophie Reyer

Reviewed by: Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne by Sophie Reyer Andrew B. B. Hamilton Sophie Reyer, Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021. 281 pp. Was Stefan Zweig a good writer? Hardly any question of literary merit seems to elicit such polarizing opinions among readers of German as this one. Now, eighty years after his death, we are still echoing the ambivalence of Zweig's contemporaries—and from the author himself. This ambivalence is near the root of the fascination Zweig exerts over his many readers. For Zweig is remembered at once as a man, as a symbol, and an author: his image is the embodiment of an entire cultural milieu characterized as much by cosmopolitan elegance as by impotence in the face of epochal violence. The best works on Zweig produced in this century have been creative or idiosyncratic works that understand the uncertain bonds connecting the [End Page 78] man, the work, and the persona that derive from this his curious place in cultural memory. Such films as Maria Schrader's Vor der Morgenröte (2016) and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) concern themselves more with how Zweig is seen and remembered than how he was or what his books are like. George Prochnik's unconventional biography The Impossible Exile (2014) frames much of its narration through the lens of Zweig's rising and falling literary reputation. To this constellation, we can now add Sophie Reyer's novel Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne. Reyer has taken on quite a challenge, for while Zweig's life offers an abundance of material, any novelization of the author's life is obliged to compete with Zweig's own autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern, which for all its flaws remains one of his best-loved works. Indeed, it is from this work that so much of his persona is derived. It is hard to imagine any work of Viennese nostalgia supplanting its status. A number of approaches to this problem are possible. A twenty-first-century reader might expect a critical eye toward Zweig's rosy image of the Habsburg world. But Reyer's approach is at once more naïve and more creative than this. Reyer's work spans forms and genres, including fiction, poetry, theater, and performances of various kinds; in fact, this novel was performed as a Hörspiel at the Landestheater Linz in 2021. Its writing is characterized by clipped sentences in the present tense. The chapters are short and bear almost childish titles: "Muter: Geburt," is the first, "Sterben" comes near the end, and in between we find, for instance, "Das erste Buch" and "Krieg." Zweig's life, in Reyer's telling, is a series of set pieces presented with estranging simplicity. The very un-Zweig-like opening sentence reads: "Es ist in einem Kaiserreich, in dem alles beginnt. Denn jede Geburt ist ein Anfang der gesamten Welt" (7). A scene that might have been an emotional climax is written with jarring understatement. This is how the Zweigs decide to go ahead with their plans for a double suicide: "Ich würde gerne aufhören, jetzt!" sagt Stefan an einem Morgen im Februar. Es ist lange geplant, Lotte weiß Bescheid. […] "Ich würde gern damit aufhören," wiederholt Stefan. Pause. "Denkst du, es wird aufhören, wenn wir aufhören?" fragt Lotta da. [End Page 79] "Woher soll ich das wissen," meint Stefan. Dann schweigt er für einen Moment. "Aber schlechter kann es nicht werden, oder?", fragt er und streicht ihr übers Haar. (273) It goes on like this, and the reader will know how it ends. There is a deliberate refusal here to fulfill the promise of the promotional material on the back of the book, to answer the question: "Wie ist es möglich, dass ein derartig großes literarisches Talent im Exil Suizid begeht?" Likewise, the reader's understanding of what kind of book this ought to be is destabilized by such inscrutable gestures as including footnotes at the end of the first four chapters, reading simply, "Vgl.: Stefan Zweig: Die Welt von Gestern." Omitted here are page numbers, which might suggest a...

“Extra-Special Care”

Abstract This paper reads Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel through the lens of liturgical theology. It proposes that by revivifying collective memory—both its tragedies and joys—in a rhythmic, sensory, spatial, playful, and paradoxical way, the film forms our “social imaginary” for the better. In exploring the resonances between existing Anderson scholarship and liturgical theology, the paper highlights three key facets of the film: its implication of the present through the mythical stylization of the past; the relationship between M. Gustave and Zero, who find their place together as priest and acolyte of the Grand Budapest Hotel, enacting its liturgy of service against the rising tide of barbarism; and Anderson’s formal and aesthetic vision, which curates and elevates “found” objects and spaces, recognizing them as sacramental. Rejecting metaphysical dualism, the film suggests that communion and mystery are embedded in and enlivened by the material world.

Cinematic Architecture and Place Perception: A Study on Wes Anderson's Film the Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Although there are many differences and innovations in creating place in cinema, virtual spaces can be created as well as using real architectural urban or physical environments. The perception of time, which is an important element that improves the narrative language of cinema, is related to creating an architectural and spatial image. Cinema and architecture, as two separate disciplines, are not independent from each other in terms of creating a cinematographic place perception. Therefore, the importance of cinema and architecture interaction in creating cinematic place is discussed in this study. The aim of the study is to examine the relationship between architecture and cinema, which are two separate art branches, through the "perception of place" and to explain the cinematographic effects of architecture through the example of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel". In both areas, it has been tried to explain to what extent the place's important elements in terms of time, movement, light, color and shadow reflect the reality. While "design" is an important issue in fictional places, it is also necessary in terms of creating a space perception. In this study, it is aimed to analyze the film structure with architectural semiotic approach, especially the role of architectural and space usage in cinema, by emphasizing the processes and reference points of the interaction between both disciplines. According to the case of Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), the specific spaces of the film, the perception of space and the role of cinematographic space designs are discussed. In line with this information, subjects such as space design and spatial density in cinema, space, balance, harmony and symmetry in architecture and cinema, construction process and its effects in cinema and the perception of space in cinema were examined. The architectural structure and the suitability of the space design to the story are also discussed in the film. The film, which is considered as an exemplary analysis within the scope of the research, was chosen as a purposeful sampling because it is an example of especially the relationship between harmony and balance in cinema and the relationship between cinema and architecture explore and sets an example. Keywords: cinema and architecture, perception of place, place design of cinematographic DOI: 10.7176/JSTR/7-04-08

Grand Budapest Hotel: Authorship of a Fantasy Masterpiece

While The Grand Budapest Hotel (GBH) (2014) has demonstrated the most popular, commercial, and critical appeal of any of Wes Anderson’s film to date, in this work of film criticism, I will show tha...

Storytelling through the Mise en Scene in the film The Grand Budapest Hotel

This study aims to analyze the film The Grand Budapest hotel from the mise en scene aspect applied in the film. Mise en scene to be analyzed in this film includes: property settings, wardrobe, makeup, and lighting. The method used in this research is a qualitative method with a content analysis approach, namely mentioning the mise en scene aspects of the film The Grand Budapest Hotel descriptively and then analyzing the impression that the film creates. The results obtained from this study are wardrobe selection, lighting arrangement and proper property settings that will produce a great films from cinematic and narrative aspects. Researchers hope that this research can provide a general description of the mise en scene and the aspects of the costume, lighting and property design of The Grand Budapest hotel. The conclusion of this research is that the use of mise en scene in the film The Grand Budapest Hotel is very good in terms of costumes, lighting and property design, so that the narrative and message in the film can be conveyed well to the audience. The costumes used give the impression of harmony between costume design and property design, property design gives the impression of unity between scenes and other scenes and the last is the lighting arrangement that combines low key and high key techniques to give the impression of a deep emotional change in a scene.

An fMRI dataset in response to \u201cThe Grand Budapest Hotel\u201d, a socially-rich, naturalistic movie

Naturalistic stimuli evoke strong, consistent, and information-rich patterns of brain activity, and engage large extents of the human brain. They allow researchers to compare highly similar brain responses across subjects, and to study how complex representations are encoded in brain activity. Here, we describe and share a dataset where 25 subjects watched part of the feature film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” by Wes Anderson. The movie has a large cast with many famous actors. Throughout the story, the camera shots highlight faces and expressions, which are fundamental to understand the complex narrative of the movie. This movie was chosen to sample brain activity specifically related to social interactions and face processing. This dataset provides researchers with fMRI data that can be used to explore social cognitive processes and face processing, adding to the existing neuroimaging datasets that sample brain activity with naturalistic movies.

Translation of the Comic in the Films of Wes Anderson (based on English and Ukrainian)

The article is dedicated to defining the specific features of the expression of the comic in the auteur film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” by the American director and screenwriter Wes Anderson, as well as to the analysis of the translation of the comic on the material of the authentic movie dialogue, its dubbing and subtitling in Ukrainian. The relevance of our research is determined by the increased interest in the auteur films, especially in the genre of comedy and comedy drama, as well as by insufficient research on the representation of the functional types of the comic in Ukrainian translations for authentic films. The article provides definitions of the comic types and describes common difficulties in translating functional types of the comic and difficulties caused by the peculiarities of audiovisual translation. Common linguistic translation difficulties include translating the comic expressed by culturally-labeled lexical units or allusions to little-known phenomena. Typical and common for dubbing and subtitling extralinguistic difficulties include the need for keeping to the timeline. Dubbing also implies the achievement of phonetic synchronization, while subtitling presupposes the observance of the readable length of the subtitle. The article presents five principles with the help of which Wes Anderson achieves comic effect in the original movie dialogue. In general, these principles are a careful selection of time and place of the events and disruption of the characters in unusual situations. The article argues that in order to create a humorous effect, Wes Anderson uses both non-verbal humor expressed by elements of non-verbal communication, e.g. movements, glances, facial expressions, gestures, and verbally expressed comic, i.e. humor, irony, satire, and sarcasm. Each of the principles for achieving the comic effect was illustrated by the examples from the original movie dialogue and the analysis of their dubbing and subtitling in Ukrainian.

El uso del travelling como marca del estilo de Wes Anderson: análisis de Academia Rushmore (1998), Los Tenenbaums: una familia de genios (2001) y El Gran Hotel Budapest (2014)

Wes Anderson is a film director recognized worldwide for the particular style he gives to each of his films. In this study we will analyze the importance of the use of travellings in the construction of this director's personal style, taking as an object of study three films from his extensive filmography, Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). To achieve this goal, we will make an analysis of the use of the travellings and their contribution to the development of the films stories. The results suggest that this camera movement is used by this American director to highlight the encounter that the protagonists have themselves and to give continuity to the story through the maturation suffered by them throughout the film.

Assembled Worlds: Intertextuality and Sincerity in the Films of Wes Anderson

Anderson’s stylized film worlds are more than pure aestheticism. Placing disparate objects from across film history and popular culture in concert with each other, they assemble cinematic worlds that contain issues “too big” to be approached directly. As such, although both Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel are permeated by stultifying loss and grief, their anachronistic, reflexive diegeses act as both canvases and containers for unresolvable narrative and thematic concerns.

The Great Frame-Up: Wes Anderson and Twee Narrative Contrivance

Abstract Wes Anderson frequently utilizes narrative double-framing, both as embedded frame stories and as representational frames from other media. In The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Li...

Teaching Without Explication: Pedagogical Lessons from Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Emperor’s Club

How can one teach what one does not know? Most film depictions of teaching follow a satisfying (and it would seem endlessly entertaining) Aristotelian dramatic structure. But what if the teacher does not know what she is summoned to teach? And what if there were a theory of pedagogy that celebrated a teacher's ignorance rather than her authority (power, position, privilege, pre-established role) or expertise (knowledge, experience, judgment)? How or why, in Jacques Ranciere’s parlance, an ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ may have a talent for teaching – that is, an efficacy and influence on student learning that trumps antecedent knowledge – becomes a locus of inquiry in these pages. Several of Wes Anderson’s films can be said to include an ignorant schoolmaster, or ‘New Master’. Arguably, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) features the highest achievement of expression of the ignorant schoolmaster in Anderson’s work: M. Gustave teaches without knowing, teaches inadvertently as he learns what needs to be taught. By way of contrast – that is, as a way of illuminating M. Gustave’s representative qualities as an ignorant schoolmaster – I will also consider the character of the professional, authoritative, and knowledgeable preparatory school teacher, or 'Old Master', William Hundert in The Emperor's Club (2002).

The Baroque imagination: Film, costume design and Italian high fashion

Abstract In the 2010s, feature films such as The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013) or The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014) and other audio-visuals like fashion films or video ads of Italian fashion houses’ collections reveal a convergence between narration and costume that renovates and adapts the cultural meaning of the Baroque. This ‘Baroque imagination’ has deep roots in the first centuries of European Modernity, when Italian cultural vectors dominated the arts and a few spheres of material culture, including clothing, architecture and garden design. Presently, it is sustained by fashion jargon’s exploitation of the word ‘Baroque’ and by the impressive visual impact of costume cinema (beginning with Marie Antoinette, Coppola, 2006). The author interrogates how some Italian high-fashion brands’ engagement with spheres of meaning connected to sumptuousness and sophisticated craftsmanship plays an influential role on an international scale, as revealed in big film productions based on a ‘sartorial film aesthetic’, which convey exclusiveness of tastes and spaces, blatant social inequality, and an oneiric projection into a decadent past. She explains cinematic vintage aesthetics against the backdrop of the fashion industry’s not-innovative production politics in the current end-of-fashion era. Drawing on some crucial traits of the historical Baroque, including the centrifugal phenomenon of French Rococo, she also underscores surprising similarities with the contemporary culture of celebrity: the rituals of power in a decadent democracy, a perception of economy as static, the fear of public and private debt accompanied by a cult of luxury and personality, the conflict between the exhibition of wealth and its condemnation.

Wes Anderson’s ambivalent film style: the relation between mise-en-scène and emotion

Through a systematic analysis of his seven live action films (from Bottle Rocket to The Grand Budapest Hotel), this essay investigates the ambivalent features of Wes Anderson’s distinctive mise-en-scène and examines the emotions it evokes. This essay is guided by several research questions: What are the stylistic characteristics of Wes Anderson’s films? How does Wes Anderson’s mise-en-scène create a distinctive emotional appeal? And: How exactly does mise-en-scène work in particular scenes to create specific emotions?

Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): Reading through Eisenstein's Montage Theory

본 연구는 에이젠슈타인의 몽타주이론을 바탕으로 웨스 앤더슨의 영화 그랜드 부다페스트 호텔(2014)이 활용하는 미장센과 다양한 편집 방식을 통해 만들어지는 몽타주 효과에 주목하고자 했다. 그에 따라 먼저 영화가 그려내고 있는 다양한 공간과 미장센 등이 시각적 음악으로서의 몽타주 공간을 만드는 요소로 활용된다는 것을 발견하였다. 나아가 짧은 커트를 통한 속도감 있는 편집방식이라는 시각적 요소, 효과음, BGM 등의 음향적 요소들이 조화와 충돌을 바탕으로 수직적 몽타주를 형성하는 사례들을 찾고자 했다. 그리고 이러한 미학적 특성들이 영화 전체에 율동감을 부여하고 그를 통해 형성된 희극성이 관객에게 미치는 인상과 정서에 어떻게 영향을 밝혀보았다. 그 점에서 그랜드 부다페스트 호텔은 제 1, 2차 세계대전, 파시즘으로 인해 파괴된 인간의 본성과 우울한 현실을 유쾌함과 기이한 분위기를 통해 유머러스하게 전복해 내고자 한다는 문화정치적 함의를 담고 있다는 것을 확인할 수 있었다. 이를 통해 영화가 가진 독특한 미학적 표현방식은 표현 그 자체로 그치는 것이 아니라 관객의 정서와 인상, 행동양식에 대해서도 영향을 미칠 수 있다는 것을 밝히고자 했다.

Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): Reading through Eisenstein's Montage Theory

Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): Reading through Eisenstein's Montage Theory