Film Terms: Genre And Basic Film Terminology

Director

The individual responsible for putting a work on film and sometimes for the vision and final realization of the entire motion picture. He/she unifies the entire motion picture process and experience. Elements of a director’s style include: subject material, script, images (composition and lighting), acting performances, pace (cadence and rhythm), editing, and use of supportive elements.

Producer

The person in charge of all the financial and administrative aspects of a film production, from the very inception of the film project and its initial planning through all stages of production, distribution, and advertising.

Screenwriter

The individual responsible, in total or in part, for writing the various stages of a film script.

Actor

Any person, male or female, who plays a role in a film.

Film Noir

A French term meaning “black film,” now used to describe a particular kind of film made by the Hollywood studios during the late 1940s and early 1950s that presents a dark, brutal, and violent urban world of crime and corruption, peopled by sordid and neurotic figures and presented in a style that emphasizes bleak settings, heavy shadows, and sharp contrasts of light and dark.

Auteur theory

A theory of film popularized by the French critics in the 1950s. The theory emphasizes the director as the major creator of film art, stamping the material with his or her own personal vision, style, and thematic obsessions.

Genre

A recognizable type of movie, characterized by certain preestablished conventions. Some common American genres are westerns, thrillers, sci-fi movies, etc. A ready-made narrative form.

Iconography

The use of a well-known cultural symbol or complex of symbols in an artistic representation. In movies, iconography can involve a star’s persona, the preestablished conventions of a genre (like the shootout in a western), the use of archetypal characters and situations, and such stylistic features as lighting, settings, and costuming, props, and so on.

Motif

A subject, idea, object, phrase, musical passage, compositional effect, film technique, or color that reappears throughout a work to form a definite pattern that imposes itself upon the viewer’s awareness.

Neorealism

An Italian film movement that produced its best works between 1945 and 1955. The term has also been used to describe other films that reflect the technical and stylistic biases of Italian neorealism. It is strongly realistic in its techniques.

French New Wave

A movement in French cinema beginning in the late 1950s and peaking by 1962 that sought innovation in subject matter and technique. New Wave directors are marked by individual approaches.

Script

A written description of a movie’s dialogue and action, which occasionally includes camera directions.

Surrealism

An avant-garde movement in the arts stressing Freudian and Marxist ideas, unconscious elements, irrationalism, and the symbolic association of ideas. Surrealist movies were produced roughly from 1924 to 1931, primarily in France.

Voice-over

A nonsynchronous spoken commentary in a movie, often used to convey a character’s thoughts or memories.

Foreign Cinema

A version of a film prepared for export abroad, either by dubbing in a new soundtrack and putting in new titles in the country’s language or putting in “subtitles” (a translation of dialogue and narration) at the bottom of the frames.

Silent Era

The entire corpus of motion pictures during the period when there was no sound, starting about 1895 until 1927.

Adaptation

A work in one medium that derives its impulse as well as a varying number of its elements from a work in a different medium. Film adaptations may be made from plays, stories, novels, histories, biographies, and even on occasion from poetry or song.

Documentary

A film that deals directly with fact and not fiction. It tries to convey reality and not some fictional version of reality. These films are concerned with actual people, places, events, etc.

Cinéma Vérité

Also known as direct cinema. A method of documentary filming using aleatory (i.e., by chance or luck) methods that don’t interfere with the way events take place in reality. Such movies are made with a minimum of equipment, usually a hand-held camera and portable sound apparatus.

Talkies

A colloquial term for sound motion pictures, especially used during the years immediately after the advent of sound in 1927.

Screwball Comedy

A film genre, introduced in the 1930s in America and popular up to the 1950s characterized by zany lovers (often from different social classes) absurd and out of control plots, slapstick comedy scenes, aggressive and charming heroines, and a variety of outlandish secondary characters.