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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Literature is something very general; it can deal with the human activity and human experience. When reading literary works, we ought to use our deep
comprehension; in this case, we have to use ways or techniques in analyzing them.
Literature is literally acquaintance with letters as in the first sense given in the
Oxford English Dictionary from the
Latin littera meaning an individual
written character letter
. The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts
, which in Western culture are mainly prose
, both fiction
and non-fiction
, drama
and poetry
. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral
as well, and include such
genres as
epic ,
legend ,
myth ,
ballad , other forms of oral poetry, lyric
and the folktale. Literature also tells us about human life, including its problems, habits,
customs, ambitions and even desires. In general, people need literature to discover themselves and their world, to asses their special roles in universe, to learn the
meaning of personal struggle in which they are engaged. In other words they want to share experience. According to Plato as cited in Rees, by studying literature we
are in the sense of making ourselves better people. So, literature is something from which we get moral education.
Literature may instruct and inform, entertain, express personal joy or pain,
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glorify a nation or hero or advocate a particular point of view whether it is political or social
In modern life literature output are not only poetry and drama, but we can see that due to the modernization and the development of technology, people have
developed their mind and their imagination using not only poetry and drama as the media, but also a new output that in someway can be categorized into one of
literary works. According to Encyclopedia Americana 1986:505, films, in their performance, cover all arts, point of view, from painting, in which film presenting
two-dimensional picture within a frame, music, present all of materials within the dimension of time, dance, films are choreographed to used space for the aesthetic
sense, literature, in which most film used by human not only as the subject but also as the object, and the last is poetry. Film can present several kinds of
meaning at once. Film is fascinating form of entertainment, because everything on the screen appears to be life-like and natural. The movie characters walk and talk
as people actually do. In this study the writer will present a film as an object of this research. A fiction film with a little touch of romantic and science entitled
City of Angels. City of Angels is a film that was directed by Brad Silberling in 1998. The
film stars Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Set in Los Angeles, California, U.S the film is a remake of Wim Wenders’1987 German film Wings of Desire, which was
set in Berlin. In the film, an angel Cage falls in love with a human woman Ryan and has to decide whether to become mortal to spend human life with her.
The Angel who becomes human is a sort of herdsman for the dead, known simply
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as Seth. He listens to music every dawn and dusk, which apparently originates in the sunrise and sunset. With him are scores of other Angels, invisible and
undetected by human adults. Seth spends considerable time thinking about humans; he becomes very interested in their thoughts, particularly those of a
female surgeon. To be able to analyze a film, people must know the elements that construct
of the film. Considering the former explanation that film covered is all of arts point of view including theatre or drama. Based on the statement above, we can
assume that film as the form of modern drama has an intrinsic point of view; they are theme, plot, character, mood, setting and background, and dramatic technique
that contain lighting, properties, music, and dialogue. All elements of a film are served as a life itself.
1.2 Reasons for choosing the Topic