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).