Background of the Study

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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, 2 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 3 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