Midterm for Popular Chinese Media

Shadow Puppets (Ying Xi)

An early form of shadow play in China, considered a precursor to motion pictures.

Dingjun Mountain (1903)

The earliest known Chinese-made film, capturing a stage performance.

Film Form

The overall set of relationships among a film's parts; a pattern or process of engaging the viewer.

Three Things About Form

not opposite of content, creates expectations, may have many meanings

Referential Meaning

Allusion to particular items of knowledge outside the film that the viewer is expected to recognize.

Explicit Meaning

Significance presented overtly, usually in language and often near the film's beginning or end.

Implicit Meaning

Significance left tacit, for the viewer to discover upon analysis or reflection.

Symptomatic Meaning

Significance that the film divulges, often against its will, by virtue of its historical or social context.

Cinema of Attractions

A style of early cinema that exploits novelty, stunts, and tricks, directly acknowledging the spectator (Tom Gunning).

Narrative Cinema

focuses on story, character development, and plot progression

Mise-en-Scène (MES)

All elements placed in front of the camera: settings, props, lighting, costumes, makeup, and figure behavior.

Exclusions from Mise-en-Scène

Sound, editing, things imagined but not visible, and camera movement/cinematography.

Story vs. Plot

Story is the chain of events in chronological order (including implied events); plot is all action visibly and audibly presented in the film.

Motivated Camera Movement

Camera movements that are prompted by the actions and movements of onscreen characters.

Unmotivated Camera Movement

Camera movements that are independent of character action, reflecting the filmmaker's commentary.

Diegetic Sound

Sounds sourced from the world of the film's story (the diegesis).

Nondiegetic Sound

Sounds not sourced in the story-world, such as the film's musical score or outside voiceover narration.

Synchronous (Simultaneous) Sound

Dialogue, sound effects, and diegetic music that is heard at the same time its visible source appears onscreen.

Asynchronous (Offscreen) Sound

sound the occurs the same time as the event but without event onscreen

Notice film form

Be factual, be specific and precise (right terms), and include even "basic things"

Step for analyzing film form

Facts first, interpret meanings, research to learn more, repeat

Inside/ outside distinction

You need to have knowledge about something outside the film in order to recognize its meaning inside the film

Form

Everything that happens as a conception of the film

Xie Zhen

Writing the truth

Xiao zhao

small portrait

zhao xiang

to take a likeness

she ying

to capture a shadow image

Hong Kong Tourism Board

junk boat logo

"genre" photos

habits and customs, staying motionless for long exposure time

Exoticizing eye

studio staging of "typical"

customs and institutions

Creates icons

people, places, scenarios

Convetional modes of representation

types, tropes and stereotypes

Shapes narratives

inspire imagination, serve as frames of reference

Creates physical objects

tactile items, artworks, commodities, tokens of exchange, mementos

Vehicles

a fascination of early cinema globally

Keystone cops

speed, profusion, chaos, chase

Horizontal reading

Interpreting

Film

Medium for showing something

Presentism

putting things on display to amaze and entertain

Operational aesthetic

Focus on the way things work, now those processes can be modified, exploited, made novel

Narrative cinema

using cinema to tell stories

Standard

narrative integration

Laborers love

two aesthetic systems: narrative and attraction

Three point lighting

idk

Nanjing Decade

president Chiang kai sheik kidnapped

The New Life Movement

filial piety, respect for hierarchy

The frame

individual rectangular on a strip of motion picture film through a projector has the impression of movement from variations of position of objects being photographed

Frame-rate

how many frames are run through the camera (during filming or projection) over time and usually measured in frames per second

Freeze-frame

the illusion that the film is showing a single frame for a duration of time; in fact, we are seeing multiple frames

Aspect ratio

frames; masks or cropping like a frame within a frame

Framing

Practice and process of using camera to include or exclude things from the image, intentional choices

Mobile framing

changing camera movement with direction, speed, distance, and quality

Framing describe

precise about what can be seen and where in the frame + what is the camera doing

Intertitles

Not MES

Nonsynchronous (Nonsimultaneous) sound

Sounds that do not occur at the same time that their sources appear onscreen

No source but can hear it

asynchronous/ off screen

Nonsynchronous

sound created earlier or later but we hear it now

Asynchronous, off screen

sounds being created now and we hear it now, but we can't see the source

What is diegesis in film?

The world of the film, including all story elements presented by the narrative

What is an example of diegetic music?

Music broadcast from an onscreen radio

What is an example of nondiegetic music?

The film's musical score

Diegetic sound

sounds including most dialogue and sound effects, some music that are sourced from the world of the film's story

Non diegetic sounds

sounds that are not sourced from the film's story

Examples of non diegetic sound

Voice Over when narrator not a character, Sound Effects, Soundtrack

Examples where it could be non diegetic or diegetic depending on context

Sounds effects and dubbed sounds

External diegetic sound

sounds that are perceptible by all characters in the story world

Internal diegetic sound

sounds representing the unspoken thoughts of a character or characters, and perceptible only to them