Drama and Film Notes

Drama

  • General term for performances with actors impersonating fictional or historical characters.

  • A dramatic text serves as a script for theatrical performance, needing the entire apparatus of theatre production.

Dramatic Genres

  • Comedy: Humorous themes intended for entertainment, often with fertility symbolism and happy endings.

  • Tragedy: A noble character faces disaster, achieves understanding (anagnorisis), and accepts punishment due to a flaw (hamartia).

  • Aristotle's definition: representation of serious action, using pity and fear to achieve catharsis.

  • Modern tragedies focus on ordinary people constrained by social realities.

  • Sympathy in drama is elicited through character, plot, and language.

Text vs. Performance

  • Text: Includes dialogues, monologues, asides (primary text), dramatis personae, stage directions (secondary text).

  • Dialogue functions include character presentation, information exchange, and action planning.

  • Monologue: A character speaks alone with other characters present.

  • Soliloquy: A character alone on stage reveals innermost thoughts to the audience.

  • Aside: An actor addresses the audience, unheard by other actors, breaking the fourth wall.

  • Discrepant Awareness: Monologues, soliloquies, and asides provide information to the audience alone, leading to dramatic irony.

  • Word-scenery: Describes the location or props not visible on stage.

Dramatic Conventions

  • Agreements between writer and audience, such as suspending disbelief.

  • Examples: verse, dance, song, chorus, unities, asides, soliloquies.

  • Three Unities: Unity of action, time (24 hours), and place.

Acts and Scenes

  • Act: Major division comprising scenes; scene: smaller unit with no locale change.

  • Classical drama: 5 acts; 19th century: 4 acts; 20th century: 3 acts.

  • Plot Structure: Freytag's Pyramid (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, catastrophe, denouement).

Transformation

  • Directing a Play: Script selection, cuts, concept, casting, stage adaptation, costumes, rehearsals.

  • Other Roles: Producer, stage manager, designers, technicians, actors, prompter.

Stage

  • Types: Amphitheatre, Elizabethan open-roof playhouse, Globe Playhouse, Restoration Theatre, Proscenium Arch Stage.

Performance

  • Elements: Actors (methods, gestures, expressions, voice).

  • Semiotics: Study of signs and codes in theatre communication.

  • Typology of theatre codes: actor, stage, acoustic, visual.

  • Characterization: Explicit/implicit, verbal/non-verbal techniques.

Film and Literature

  • Film is influenced by literary techniques; literature evolves with film's impact.

  • Film analysis uses literary criticism and theory.

  • Film vs. Television: TV, series have serial structures.

  • Film vs. Play: Film is recorded; plays are unique performances.

  • Transformation: Continuous in drama; sequence-based in film.

  • Inside Information: Literature reveals character thoughts; film relies on strategies like voice-over.

Film Analysis Levels

  • Story, image, sound, narrative mode.

  • Image: Cinematography, editing, actors, location.

  • Sound: Noise, voice, music (on-screen/off-screen, commentative).