finals

auteur

1950s literary roots: caméra-stylo, Cahiers du cinéma criticsturned-filmmakers, cinécriture

cinematic authorship

director largely responsible for themes, style, and meaning in film; unified oeuvre

An Author is a limit imposed on a text, one that closes meaning

suggests that a text can be unlocked

problems with auteurism

• authorial determination

• retrograde romantic notion of “individual genius”

• lack of diversity

• general disregard for social, economic, technological, and reception

• Has the auteur sold out?

Andrew Sarris

Revisiting the Auteur Theory (1977)

François Truffaut

• Influences: Bazin, Renoir, Hitchcock, Balzac, Proust

• French New Wave Cahiers critic-turned-filmmaker Select

• Filmography: Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), Day for Night (1973), The Last Metro (1980)

• Doinel series: The 400 Blows (1959), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), Love on the Run (1979)

James Naremore, “Authorship”

• Study of authors (biographical) v. auteurism (theoretical)

• 1950s Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” (Truffaut, 1954)

• André Bazin: auteurism v. writing about directors

• Global reach: 1960s spread to UK, American critic-filmmakers

auteurist analysis

Looking at a director’s entire output for evidence of similar thematic concerns, iconography, mise-en-scene, technique, or other stylistic choices

Classical School of Acting

emphasizes technical precision and control, focusing on voice, movement, and the actor's physical and vocal delivery to portray characters and stories

Brechtian School of Acting

aiming to provoke audience reflection rather than emotional immersion

A star image or persona is made by media texts

• promotion (deliberate)

• publicity (seems more authentic)

• films themselves (star vehicle)

• criticism, commentaries

Naturalism

aims to create a highly realistic depiction of life, striving to make filmmaking techniques and devices as invisible as possible to the audience

hegemony

the dominance of one group over others

alice guy blache

She was one of the first filmmakers to make a narrative fiction film, as well as the first woman to direct a film

Ida Lupino

actress, director, writer, and producer, and is particularly notable for being one of the few women to direct films during the 1950s and 60s, including the film noir The Hitch-Hiker

Sakane Tazuko

Japan's first female director

Second wave feminism (1960s-70s)

• goal of transforming hierarchy of gendered social relations

• fought for equality in employment, politics, marriage and family, education, and sexuality

Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)

Turns attention from content (women’s roles, representation on screen) to form (how women are shown)

Chantal AKERMAN

• 40+ films (Je Tu Il Elle; Jeanne Dielman; News from Home; No Home Movie )

• “When people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves”

Third Cinema

1960s as challenge to dominant First Cinema (corporate Hollywood) and differentiated from nation-state based Second Cinema

Edward SAID’s Orientalism

• Western scholarship constructs an idea of the “Orient” (North Africa, Middle East, Asia) in order to have authority over it

Postcolonial film studies

Interest in questions of representation, epistemological violence and colonization of the imagination, role of aesthetics in politics

Ousmane SEMBÈNE

Select filmography: La Noire de…(1966), Mandabi (1968), Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), Camp de Thiaroye (1988)

Film genre

a category or group of films that share similar subject matter and/or similar narrative and stylistic patterns

Challenges of defining genres

• lacks precision

• develop informally and change over time

• Hollywood hegemony and cultural specificity

• Hybrids (and critique of “hybrid”)

Iconographic (semantic) approach

focuses on the visual elements that signify a genre

Structural (syntactic) approach

focuses on the underlying structures and patterns that create meaning within a film, particularly within the context of genre

genre analysis

• Conventions that define genre: plot elements, character archetypes, themes, techniques, formal patterns (and attention to how a film draws on, revises, and/or rejects conventions)

Using genre to interpret films

• Use of repeated formula

• Social implications of following conventions

• Changes in genre

• Relation of filmmaker to established conventions of genre

Use of repeated formula

• To what degree does the film rely on conventional plots and visual details?

• How does the filmmaker modify conventions?

• What new ideas are introduced?

Social implications of following conventions

• genre films and repetition of conventions can reinforce cultural values

• lull audiences into complacency

• assumption that genres don’t change

Changes in genre

• genres as culturally responsive, conventions change/evolve with times

Relation of filmmaker to established conventions of genre

• tension between genre and auteurist approaches

• filmmakers who consciously work within and against conventions to assert personal vision

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

First known animated feature film

Multiplane camera

Motion-picture camera used in traditional animation to move pieces of artwork past the camera at different speeds and distances from one another to create sense of depth

Television and the birth of anime in Japan (1960 – 1990)

• Postwar expansion

• Limited animation

• Hakujaden (1958): first feature-length color animation

New distribution formats (1970s-80s)

• VHS, DVD

• Expansion beyond children’s market

• Fandom subcultures

• OVA (original video animation)

New media and new television (1990 – now)

• Digital technologies and end of cinema?

• Manga film continues

• Franchise animation film

Digital turn 1990s

• Transnational distribution

• Genres proliferate (contingent on context)

• Japan’s rising soft power

• Fans as “prosumers” (producer-consumers)

art cinema

movies that prioritize artistic expression and intellectual depth over commercial success

Classical narrative cinema

• Cause-effect narrative

• Characters with goals

• Formal continuity

• Compositional unity

realism (art cinema)

• real locations and problems

• psychologically complex characters that lack clear goals but whose itineraries have rough shapes (e.g. taking a trip, making a movie); more likely to express and explain than take action (e.g. Persona)

Authorial expressivity (art cinema)

• author becomes formal component, intelligence organizing film; viewer watches for stylistic signatures and motifs, film as part of larger oeuvre

Ambiguity (art cinema)

• resolves realism and authorial expressivity (e.g. Red Desert color scheme)

• open-ended, lack of clear-cut resolution, pensive endings

Avant-garde or experimental cinema

• Surrealist filmmaking and city symphonies (1920s-30s)

• Independent filmmakers 1940s-50s

• Structuralist filmmaking (1960s-70s)

• Punk, feminist, queer cinema (1970s)

• Alternative cinemas (1980s-90s)

Surrealism in France

• 20th-century literary, philosophical, and artistic movement exploring the workings of the mind and championing the irrational, the poetic, and the revolutionary

Structuralist filmmaking

• 1960s-70s

• Shape of the film v. content

• “Structuralist filmmaking” coined in 1969 essay in Film Culture (P. Adams Sitney)

• Characteristics: fixed camera position, flicker effect, loop printing, repeat photography

Documentary

• Distinct from journalism

• Nonfiction

• Factual record or report

• “creative treatment of actuality”

1920s-1930s

• Robert Flaherty: Nanook of the North (1922)

• Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (1926)

1930s-40s: nation-state, propaganda

• Different use of rhetorical techniques, often on behalf of the government

• Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will

1950s-60s

• Italian Neorealism

• direct cinema, cinéma verité • ciné – ma vérité

• lightweight filming equipment, zoom lenses

1968 Cinétracts

• May 1968 student strikes in France

• French New Wave directors( Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker) and others saw filmmaking as a means of direct action

Cinéma vérité style

a style of observational, documentary-style filmmaking

Cinétracts

• 2:44 (30m reel of 16mm film)

• anonymous, collective work

• designed to inform and mobilize audience

• silent, intertitles, b&w, still photographs

Michael Renov’s four fundamental tendencies of documentary

• record, reveal, preserve

• persuade or promote

• analyze or interrogate

• express

Record, reveal, preserve

• Driven by mimetic drive, replication of the real

• Exploits the camera’s revelatory powers

• Real at any cost?

• Examples: Lumière actualités, filmed diaries

Persuade, promote

• Rationalist desire to achieve personal or social goals

• Ethical, emotional, and/or demonstrative persuasion

Analyze or interrogate

• Cognitive desires to organize, make inferences, construct schemat

• Analytical documentary may acknowledge mediational structures

Express

• Aesthetic function

• Can documentaries incorporate beauty?

• Opposite end of the spectrum from surveillance, cinéma vérité

Bill Nichols’s six documentary modes:

• Expository

• Observational

• Participatory

• Poetic

• Reflexive

• Performative

Expository mode

• Direct address to viewer with titles, voiceover, omniscient narration

• Didactic, educational, journalistic, historical

• Argumentative logic, aims to disseminate information, persuade

Observational mode

• Unobtrusive camera, fly-on-the-wall perspective

• Ideally no narration or non-diegetic music

Participatory mode

• Interaction between filmmaker and subject

• Chronicle of a Summer, Errol Morris

Poetic mode

• Attention to form

• Visual, rhythmic, and/or descriptive elements or formal structure of film itself

Reflexive mode

• Calls attention to the assumptions and conventions of documentary filmmaking

• Foregrounds the construction of the film, and questions the representation of reality

Performative mode

• Foregrounds the filmmaker’s own perspective and engagement with a subject and/or with an audience

• Close to participatory mode but highly personal, interested in subjectivity of experience and memory

Critical approaches: ethics

• Institutional context of ethical codes

• medicine: do no harm

• journalism: remain objective, do not accept gifts

• protects interest of professional group and people who come into contact with it

André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”

• realism

• film’s unique obligation to reality and documenting the world

• art is torn between aesthetic and psychological ambitions

2000s: the digital shift

• 35mm production and projection quickly becomes obsolete

• Cheaper production and special effects

• Changes in theatrical presentation

• Development of streaming

Analog

• Representation

• Photographic

• Mechanical recording

• Real world

Digital

• Presentation

• Graphic

• Composition 1s and 0s

• Pixels

AI use in production

• Script development and analysis

• Pre-production planning and casting

• Location scouting

• Virtual production environments

• Performance: de-aging, digital revival, facial replacement, voice cloning

• dubbing

• VFX

• animation

Resisting AI

• 2023 Hollywood strike

• 2025 Annecy Animation Film Festival protest

Ethical Concerns

• Copyright and authorship

• Consent and harassment

• Deception and disclosure

• Environmental impact