The Hero's Journey

Hollywood loves old stories and often borrows their narrative structures. Joseph Campbell's 1949 The Hero With a Thousand Faces is a central study of this tendency, while George Lucas's Star Wars marks the turning point after which more and more films would follow this formula. These archetypes can still be found in movies today and will probably continue to be used far into the future. This lecture will walk along the 12 stages suggested by Campbell, looking at a variety of different films to find out where creative potential still lies and where the hero's journey becomes a lifeless blueprint.

Presented by Andreas Eli