Film hist. MT 2

Pre-revolutionary

Russian film

Psychological melodramas

“Russian endings”

Long takes

Slow pace

Precision staging

Agit-vehicles

Included newsreels reedited to

serve as agitation and propaganda

(agitprop)

The State Film School

Founded 1919 in Moscow

World’s first film school

The most famous of

the Kuleshov

experiments

The same picture of a guy making a neutral face was interpreted differently depending on what played after it

New Economic Policy

(NEP)

In 1923, only 38 movies produced

In 1923, 99% of films shown were

foreign

Sovkino

State-run production & distribution company

Private production companies required to own stock in it

Tasked with opening theaters and portable projection outfits

Made money by importing foreign films and exporting Montage films, like Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin’s reception abroad

• More successful in Germany than in any other country, including the Soviet Union

• Huge hit, despite riots and cuts and bans by individual German states

Constructivism

1. Art should fulfill a social function

FILM: The chief purpose of Soviet Montage films is to win people over to the cause of the Soviet Union.

2. Artists are engineers

FILM: The responses of film spectators can be predicted and guided by filmmakers

3. The work of art is a machine

FILM: Vertov’s notion of Kino-Eye. Cinema is a modern technology, and cinema should reflect that

4. Like a machine, art is made by assembling parts

FILM: Assemblage = montage = editing

Intellectual montage

The juxtaposition of a series of images to create an abstract idea not suggested by any one image. The use of nondiegetic shots to make a conceptual point

October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928)

benshi

Speakers who would explain a film’s action, speak the dialogue, and offer commentary

jidai-geki

historical film

Initially drew on kabuki theater

gendai-geki

films of contemporary life

Initially drew on shimpa theater

First shimpa adaptation, My Sin (1909, lost)

The Pure Film Movement

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, an effort by reformist intellectuals to produce more “cinematic” films.

• Against men playing women’s

roles

• Against benshi narration

• Against “canned theater”

The Pure Film Movement Pt. 2

Models were European and American films, and shingeki, a new realist form of theater

Souls on the Road (1921)

• Based on Western sources

• 127 inter>tles in a 91-minute film

• Used actresses

• Wipes, fades, dissolves, irises,

panoramic shots, tracking shots

• Close-ups

• Crosscutting

• Flashbacks

The success of Japan’s

film industry

After 1923, cinema becomes a mass entertainment

Between 1928 and 1938, Japan produces more films than any other country in the world

The “tendency film”

1929-1930

Political melodramas

Low-budget commercial films that provided social critiques of contemporary Japan

The most commercially successful films of their time, but the trend ended due to increased censorship

After 1923, new types of jidai-geki

Kinetic sword fighting instead of the dance-like sword fighting of kabuki

Nihilistic or rebellious protagonists who start to question the strict social codes of their society

The Shinkankaku writers

“New Sensationalist”/”New Impressions”/”New Perceptions” school

”I recognize futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, symbolism, constructivism, and some of the realists as all belonging to the Shinkankaku school.”

--Riichi Yokomitsu

1. Startling and vivid images

2. Subtle shifts between objective narration and the memories, fantasies, and hallucinogens of the characters

An example of the “international style”

A page of madness 

Influenced even more by French Impressionism

Soviet cinema had not yet reached Japan

The Passion of Joan of Arc

(Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

Most famous example of the “International style”

Distorted sets, from German

Expressionism

Dynamic low framings, from Soviet Montage

Accelerated subjective editing, from French Impressionism

“salvage ethnography”

Recording of traditional practices that are nearing extinction

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

(Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)

First feature film entirely performed in the Inuktitut language

“Salvage ethnography” in a certain sense, but made by the people themselves

City symphonies

Experimental and often lyrical documentaries that attempt to capture the phenomenon of large modern cities through inventive cinematography and editing

cinéma pur

An experimental film movement that aims at exploring motion, light, and rhythm

Like abstract animation, these are non-narrative films that use music as a structuring model

Unlike abstract animation, these use the abstract visual qualities of the physical world

Paramount-Publix

The run-zone-clearance system

A tiered system of distribution that gave priority to the largest theaters in urban areas (“first-run theaters”)

Three-point lighting

One in front to illuminate characters, and two in back on either side like a triangle (halo on bald head) 

Panchromatic film stock gradually replaces orthochromatic film stock

The Toll of the Sea

(Chester M. Franklin,

1922)

starring Anna May Wong

Two-strip Technicolor

First color feature not needing a special projector

Universal and the horror genre:

German emigres Paul Leni and Karl Freund

Fleischer Brothers’ Car-Tunes

(1925-1926)

Sound cartoons that used a “bouncing ball” to encourage audience sing-alongs

Vitaphone

(sound-on-disc)

1926-1931

invented by Western Electric;

licensed by Warner Bros.

Don Juan

(August,1926)

The Jazz Singer

(October 1927)

Mixture of recorded orchestral accompaniment, songs, and a little dialogue

Lights of New York

(1928)

First “all-talking” picture

Cost $23,000 to produce, and made over one million dollars

Standardization of technologies

1927

Big Five Agreement—The largest firms agree to act together in adopting whichever sound system proved most advantageous

1928

Western Electric introduces its own sound-on-film system, and undercuts RCA Photophone

1931

Western Electric sound-on-film starts being adopted as industry standard

Problem: Stationary, omnidirectional microphones

Solution:

Microphone booms

Unidirectional microphones

Problem: Noisy cameras

Initial solution: Sound-proof booths

Ultimate solution: Camera blimps

Problem: Single audio track

Initial solution: Multiple cameras

Ultimate Solution: Multiple track recording

Strategies of distributing foreign language films

1. No translation

2. Multilanguage versions (MLVs) (1929)

3. Subtitles (1930)

4. Dubbing (1931)

After 1932, linguistic territories split between dubbing and subtitling

Larger European markets preferred dubbing

Japan opts for subtitling

“The Lubitsch touch”

Several meanings!

• Sexual innuendo

• Oblique expression

• Finding a novel and elegant way to depict a narrative event or idea

• A sense of ease, elegance, and sophistication

Tarzan and His Mate

(Cedric Gibbons, 1934), MGM

First enforcement showdown

Full frontal

Assembling a crew for citizen kane

Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland

Producer-unit system

Group of managers/producers each

supervising 6 to 8 films per year,

each with a specialization

The Magnificent

Ambersons

Orson Welles

Studio cuts the film from 131 minutes to 88 minutes while Welles is in South America

Studio loses $2 million from Welles’s films, and Schaefer resigns

Deep focus

cinematography &

staging in depth

Elaborate blocking to show

dramatic relationships