Go
over syllabus -- make sure to make statement about adult subject matter
Discuss
how classes will run -- often lecture, film during which I will talk and
point out images, quiz.Will take
quizzes online and quizzes in class.Online
quizzes based on book, class quizzes based on film for week.Online
quiz each week, take by Friday at 8am
Information
Sheets:Discuss VARK
What
is film?
Some
early history summary
·Photography
invented early 19th c by Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre in
France.
·Drawn
figures had already been given motion by such machines as the Zoetrope
and the filoscope.
Show
clip?
Stage
set with Muybridge motion studies Edward Muybridge projected a series of
still photographs so as to capture
increments of motion in the 1870s, and these helped establish the
possibility of creating moving pictures.
Show
clip?
Needed
the perfection of a flexible film that could replace glass photographic
plates.Amateur
inventor discoverd a celluloid film base and George Eastman marketed the
first roll film in 1888. With
the development of celluloid film in the late 19thC, the beginningof motion
pictures was only a step away.
William
Dickson and Thomas Edison used the film for cinematography rather than
still photographs.By
1889, problems regulating movement of celluloid strips through the camera
had been solved and the kinetoscope was developed.Individual
viewers --> peep shows.
·By
1894, peep show parlors had cropped up nationally and internationally.
·Short
step to adapt versions of cameras (which were readily developed after this)
to projection on a large screen.
·Auguste
and Louis Lumiere produced their first set of films in Paris in 1895; these
had a documentary style, although there were also some fictional narratives
from the beginning as well.
Show
clip?
·From
beginning -- documentary and fictional representations -- Giannetti splits
this into a formalist and realist dichotomy
·By
Melies -- "the two greatest assets of the film medium had been discovered
-- its ability to record and its ability to create."George
Melies was a magician and theater operator.He
used the specific capacity of the camera to create dissolves, manufacture
the disappearance and reappearance ofcharacters,
to duplicate images (through masking, double exposure, superimpositions),
create slow and fast motion.Responsible
for "in-the-camera" editing (created the double exposures and dissolves).Told
fantastic stories, such as A Trip to the Moon in 1902.
Show
clip?
·Earliest
movies -- filmed as if on stage.The
camera remained immobile, with the picture centered like a stage drama.Melies,
for instance, maintained a centered picture and chronological ordering
of scenes.
·Edwin
S. Porter -- demonstrated the possibilites in manipulating time and space.Refined
storytelling techniques:
·1st
use of simultaneous time in The Life of an American Fireman (1903);
simultaneous time used to create suspense in The Great Train Robbery.Simultaneous
time/parallel editing -- showing 2 simultaneous actions occurring in different
locations.
·Chase
sequence
·Scenes
shot from different angles
·Use
of dramatic close-up
Show
clip?
·Griffith
-- camera became as important as the human actors in "developing a narrative
through exposition and drama; the camera no longer merely recorded a story
-- it structured, interpreted, and narrated the story through its shifting
perspectives, movements, and visual emphases."Between
1908 and 1912, he began:
·moving
the camera within and among scenes.Actors
were also clustered in groups to enhance drama.
·restrained
actors' gestures and posturing
·use
of dramatic lighting
·through
the use of different angles and motion, the audience is more
thoroughly involved in the action
·perfected
parallel editing to increase suspense and also to translate verbal metaphors
into visual terms.
·scenes
built out of shots from different angles and varying
·distances.
·use
of invisible editing, breaking down scenes into shots and inserting close-ups
and medium shots into the main action.
·Development
of film comedies with Mark Sennett and Thomas H. Ince.
Show
clip?
·1920s
-- other national cinemas arise to challenge Hollywood.More
serious treatment of film.The ways
in which the camera can express "psychological subjectivity through lighting,
highly stylized and artificial sets and acting"was
explored in Germany.Wiene 1919 --
expressionism.We’ll be looking at
Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
·Sweden,
Denmark, France, and Russia all developed film as a subject of serious
artistic attention.
·Use
of subjective camera -- F.W. Murnau 1924 The Last Laugh
·later
-- discoveries of how angles (low and high), film stock, film speed, and
lens aperture size influence the creation of meaning in film.Film
speed -- increased, allowed smaller lens apertures --> ability to create
deep focus --> more complex spatial relationships between characters and
objects.(1930s Eastman Kodak --
film speed)
·Addition
of sound circa 1927 -- sound booths, mikes.
Cinematic
vision
Mimics
our own sense of space and time, camera seems merely to record.However,
"cinematic vision is always interpretive -- interested and invested in
what it chooses to look at and actively determining the meaning of what
it sees."We generally pay more
attention to what we are seeing than how we are seeing it.
Exs.:Andy
Warhol's minimalist films Sleep (1963) and Empire
Tend
to see through the frame rather than looking at it, esp. in documentary
or narrative films.We forget that
the vision is mediated, thatsomeone
else has constructed it with certain purposes in mind."this
tendency to appropriate and trust film images as if they were our own,
tolose sight of their external origin
and to identify subjectively with their source, gives the cinema much of
its special power to engage us so thoroughly"Complicity
in illusionism of cinema.Giannetti
calls this aesthetic distance.Part
of this illusionism/aesthetic distance is the seeming verisimilitude of
the film, including its space and time in relation to our own space and
time.When cinema reveals its constructed
nature --> reflexive films "which make us aware of cinematic technology
and technique and also of the perceptual psychology that governs our usual
complicity with dominant forms of cinematic illusionism"Reflexive
films point up the illusion and make us aware of it.Comedy/parody
-- only genre generally that may reveal the artificial nature of its construction
(exs. Moonlighting, Ferris Bueller)
In
abstract or nonrepresentational films, more likely to look at the frame.The
frame becomes like that of a painting, separating the audience and making
it aware of the separation.(Brechtian
theory)
Cinematic
meaning
Formed
from a complex of aspects: sound, lighting, spatial relations (of characters
and/or objects and/or camera), dialogue, narrative line and point of view,
editing, tone of film (relates physically/visually to the tones or shadings
of the actual images we see -- musicals generally bright, horror generally
dark.)
The
Hollywood standard
"Standards
or general rules and conventions of visual and aural representation tend,
over time, to become normative.That
is, standardized film practices (of both production and viewing) can become
so dominant and pervasive that they seem not only normal, but soon also
natural"
Ex.
of science fiction -- accept people in costume as aliens
These
standards gradually become invisible to practitioners and audience alike.
(ex.
Griffith had to learn to think cinematically rather than theatrically)
While
the system which spawned these conventions -- the studio system -- lasted
from 1917 to 1960s, it influenced how we view and think about film--
our criteria of what a good film is.While
innovations have surfaced, they have been "put to the service and maintenance
of two constant, intimately related, normative practices: the production
of narrative (or story) films, and the rejection from the narrative
films of all signs which might indicate the technology and labor used in
their production. "
We
focus, thus, on product -- the story -- rather than the process
and labor through which it was created.Similar
to other American industrial and consumer practices, although one difference:
the process must be covered up for film to function, for the illusion to
remain.Basically, the Hollywood
standard depends upon illusionism/aesthetic distance.It
relies upon making "the construction and production of its fictions as
transparent
and invisible as possible."Thus,
certain types of narratives are privileged, and the institution of cinema
maintains stability and continuity in its production of both its product
and consumer desire for it."
The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
-- show first few scenes --
what
do they anticipate?Who is important?Why
and how is this established?
Stop
after train meets old sheriff
stop
with old sheriff and Ms. Hally talking about the desert, then when they
arrive.
stop
after they ask the questions: what's the trip for?See
how fades into story.
Part
of Hollywood Standard
What
is Film?
Variable
associations:communication of information,
personal expression as art,pleasure
of entertainment, argumentative capacity.
Also:
Commodity -- mass production dep. on mass consumption.Form,
content, and function are economically determined.
(Sobchack
and Sobchack)
What
ramifications does this have?
types
of films made, why films are made, way in which they are made, how they
are viewed (pop culture)
Film
and escapism:
Film
has been dismissed, as much of popular culture has been, as escapist and
non-artistic.Is this charge useful?Does
film have anything to do with our culture?How
does our culture show itself in film?What
ideologies are being argued by films, if any?Proponents
of escapism would argue against there being any messages.But
we will be discussing the cultural codes present in these films.If
nothing else, the cycle of consumption and production indicates certain
things about our culture.Can anything
ever be purely escapist?(Setting,
narrative line)
3
possibilities for film in relation to culture:
sustain
subvert
subvert
and sustain
societal
mores/ status quo
We
will be focusing on both the technical aspects of film -- generally the
cinematography -- and its place within culture.This
latter will become more important as the semester progresses and will be
directly addressed in the Ideology section.