film final

zoetrope

- optical toy created by William George Horner
- early motion picture projector that produced illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs

The Lumiere Brothers

- invented the Cinematographe
- created "Arrival of a Train at the Station"
- shocked audiences because it looked like the train was going to come out of the screen

George Melies

- one of the first fictional narratives
- inventor of special effects in movies
- created "The Man with the Rubber Head" and "A Trip to the Moon"

Cinema of Attractions

- 1895-1906
- emphasis on performative spectacle
- aim is to show and exhibit
- direct stimulation
- incite visual curiosity

Classical Hollywood Cinema

- 1907-present
- emphasis on construction of a story; to narrate
- creation of digests
- encourage voyeurism
- action for the sake of narrative continuity

shot / counter shot

- sometimes referred to as shot / reverse shot
- prime example in the film Pulp Fiction and The Wolf of Wall Street
- when a filmmaker places a camera on a subject (usually a person looking at something) and then shows the reverse view of that subject (usually what the subject was looking at)

long take

- used in film without any cuts or reverse shots
- the camera remains stationary and follows the characters continuously without any editing or interruptions
- example: Godard's "Breathless"

Edwin Porter

- worked as a Vitascope projectionist which led him to the practice of continuity editing
- pioneered crosscutting/intercutting across simultaneous actions in different spots
- created "Life of an American Fireman", "The Great Train Robbery", and "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest"

Kinetograph

the first true motion picture camera

Diegesis

- a Greek term
- literally means the fictional world of the film
- may be a world that resembles ours
- outer space environment in Star Wars, Middle Earth from LOTR

Tom Gunning "Cinema of Attractions"

- defined attractions as "directly soliciting spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle"

D. W. Griffith

- established the narrative language of cinema through a combination of his own analogies with those of others (modeled the narrative we call "film")
- directed for Biograph films and innovated alternate shots of different spectacle lengths
- begins to use close ups and more cuts in "The Greaser's Gauntlet"
- Directed "The Lonely Villa", "Corner Wheat", "The Birth of a Nation", and "Way Down East"
- had a role in Edwin Porter's "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest"

interframe Narrative

- meaning is created within the shot
- multiple camera setups within the use of close ups, full shots, long shots, cross cuts, POVs, etc
- ex: "Way Down East", main character looks up and sees a beautiful chandelier. she is in awe because she comes from a low income background and has never seen anything like it

intraframe narrative

- meaning is created within the shot
- dramatic lighting and use of probs, costumes, makeup, performance, screen space
- long takes with camera movement and angle

Buster Keaton

- American film director and comedian during silent film
- known for his deadpan expression and elaborate visual comedy
- "Our Hospitality", "Cops", and "The General"

Thomas Ince

- worked with Griffith
- introduced the continuity script to the filmmaking process
- pioneered the studio system of production

Charlie Chaplin

- transformed cinema from a novelty into a living art form
- films addressed the real issues with dimensional characters

"Our Hospitality" dir. Buster Keaton and John Blystone, 1923

- silent comedy that used a specific narrative style which ranged from broad to subtle
- tells the story of a Southern family feud between the Canfields and McKays

French Film d'art Movement

- brought great stage plays and artists o the movie screen
- stunted advances in narrative techniques

UFA

- main German production company during 1920s
- became the core of the Nazi film industry
- became largest studio in the world behind Hollywood

German Expressionism

- artistic movement that seeks to express that artist's emotional state while offering a depiction of reality that is widely distorted for emotional effect
- utilizes highly stylized decor and lighting

Fritz Lang

- made films that were often Expressionist in theme
- used lighting to emphasize architectural space and line
- director of "Metropolis"

Karl Freund

- cinematographer of many silent German classics
- emigrated to Hollywood and was D. P. for "Dracula"
- developed the 3 camera setup for "I Love Lucy"

Kammerspielfilm

- German films from the 1920s that offered an intimate, cinematic portrait of lower - middle class life

Alfred Hugenberg

- bought out UFA and forced the studio to push his extreme beliefs
- began producing newsreels containing Nazi propaganda and films pushing German Nationalism

chiaroscuro lighting

- technique of arranging light and dark elements in pictorial composition

unchained camera

- continuous camera movement

subjective camera

- POV of the character allowing us into their emotional state

"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" dr Robert Wiene, 1920

- the first and most influential German Expressionist Film
- critical to the weakness of the new German Government

Moscow Film School

- created by the Cinema Committee (aka VGIK)
- Kuleshov studied editing and helped establish it as the first film school

Dziga Vertov

- co founder of Soviet cinema and newsreel editor
- experimented with more expressive editing

Kinoki

- young group of documentary filmmakers founded by Vertov
- influential on Soviet montage editing
- their filmmaking doctrine was kino-gaze (cinema eye)

"Man with a Movie Camera" 1929

- Vertov's masterpiece showing Moscow life
- used techniques such as trick photography, multiple exposure, candid camera, and montage

Kuleshov Workshop

- focused on editing
- goal was to discover the laws by which film communicates meaning to the audience
- discovered "Kuleshov effect" - a blank face interchanged with different pictures can change emotion

Soviet Montage

- cutting film as an expressive or symbolic process by where logically or empirically dissimilar images can be linked together synthetically to produce metaphors

Sergei Eisenstein

- student of Kuleshov
- filmmaker and film theorist
- directed "Battleship Potemkin"
- main focus was "attraction"

Montage of Attractions

- structuring films around "attractions" to implant emotions and ideas in working class viewers
- "units of impression combined into one whole" that could be used to produce "a new level of tension"

dialectical montage (theory)

- human experience is a personal conflict where one force (thesis) collides with another force (antithesis) to produce a new phenomenon (synthesis)

5 types of montage

- metric
- rhythmic
- tonal
- overtonal / associational
- intellectual

"Battleship Potemkin" dir Sergei Eisenstein

- one of the most important and influential films in the history of cinema
- chronicles the revolt of Potemkin during the failed Bolshevik revolution
- famed Odessa step massacre: one of the most influential in the history of cinema
- Eisenstein uses emphasis on montage (rhythmic) along with stress of intellectual contact

Thomas Edison

- invented Phonograph
- his Cinephongraph and Kinetophone did achieve
sound on disc synchronization

Eugene Augustin Lauste

- first achieved adding sound directly onto the filmstrip (1910)
- converted sound into light beams to be recorded on the film strip photographically

Tri-Ergon

- system invented by 3 Germans that converted sound waves into light waves
- recorded photographically on film strip

The Audin

- vacuum tube invented by Lee de Forest that allowed for amplification of radio signals and later for the amplification of sound in movie theaters

Vitaphone

- sound-on-disc system developed by the Western Electric and Bell Telephone laboratories (under AT&T)

"The Jazz Singer"

- first feature length film with running dialogue
- end of silent film era

Fox Movietone

- sound-on-film method of recording sound for motion pictures which guarantees synchronization between the sound and picture

Talkies

- nickname for early sound films due to their inclusion of dialogue

The "Big Five"

- Mero-Goldwyn-Mayer
- Warner Bros
- Paramount
- Fox
- RKO

"A Man Escaped" dir Robert Bresson, 1956

- a French Resistance fighter being held by the Nazis
- film follows his plan to break out.
- Bresson’s use of sound is symbolic - sound gets louder as they near an escape route

Orson Welles

- began in theater and moved to Hollywood
- directed “Citizen Kane” and signed 2 productions with RKO
- used deep focus photography, long takes, and complex sound montage

The War of Worlds

- 1938 broadcast that seemed real
- narrated by Orson Welles

Gregg Tolan

- Welles' most important collaborator on Citizen Kane

"Touch of Evil"

- Welles's last attempt to work in Hollywood
- use of long takes and crane shots
- financial failure

"Citizen Kane" dir Orson Welles, 1941

- starts with his death, follows his life from childhood till death again
- intercuts narration of people in his life being interviewed to find meaning of “Rosebud”
- cinematography: long take, deep focus, deep space composition
- Welles shows connections through long takes and intraframe movement
- deep focus: staging of important narrative
- expressive lighting: expresses thematic issues
- editing “lightning mix”: use of continuity on the soundtrack to link together images, often over long periods of time
- use of montage to compress large amounts of story information

Cesare Zavattini

- theoretical founder of neorealism
- argued that films should “embrace the dignity and sacredness of the everyday life of normal people”
- sought a cinema that would find the drama in ordinary events

Roberto Rossellini

- a founder of neorealism
- brought documentary-like authenticity to filmmaking: “Rome: Open City”

Neorealism

- cost: saving measures, increased the sense of spontaneity and realism
- stylistic: shot on actual locations, innovative storytelling, nonprofessional actors, natural lighting
- political/Ideological: often dealt with contemporary social/political issues, focus on a culture of poverty, gave significance to individual personal problems

"Ossessione"

- precursor to neorealism
- unauthorized adaptation of James M. Caine’s “The
Postman Always Rings Twice”
- one of the first Italian films to take the camera out of the studio and look at the lives of ordinary people

Impact of Neorealism on Third Cinema

- opposite of Hollywood: for profit, sought to make
films that dealt with social/political realities

Realism as a Theory

- art as an expression of the real world
- cinema and photography constitute index of reality
- encouraged the limitation of artistic choice

"Bicycle Thieves" dir Vittoria de Sica, 1948

- shows how institutions are indifferent to the flight of individuals
- created sense of honesty and conveyed emotions
- viewers could see how Italy was affected by the war with their own eyes

Influences of the French New Wave

- production style
- small crews location shooting
- largely unknown actors

Camera-stylo

- permit the cinema “to become a means of expression as supple and subtle as that of writing language”

Jean-Pierre Melville

- founded his own production company in 1945
- production style: small crews/location, shooting largely unknown actors

George Franju

- started as a documentary filmmaker (realism)
- made movies with a horror tone which shifted the genre

Characteristics of the French New Wave

- aesthetic: discontinuity editing, shooting on location, hand held mobile cameras, improvised dialogue and plotting, direct sound recording, long takes
- thematic: characters are usually young, marginalized anti-heros; general sense of existentialism

Alain Resnais

- first new wave director
- first documentary filmmaker

Francois Truffault

- most commercially successful of the New Wave filmmakers
- influences were American B-movies, film noir, and the work of Alfred Hitchcock

Dziga-Vertov Group

- founded by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
- films were openly agitational in the spirit of the 1920s Soviet Cinema