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ENGL/EAST 279: Introduction to Film History – Midterm Review Sheet

ENGL/EAST 279: Introduction to Film History – Midterm Review Sheet

Week One: Early Film

  • Technological determinism

    • The idea that the technology determines the form of cinema

    • Cinema is continuous with earlier technologies

  • The diffusion model

    • help

  • Primitive cinema and classical cinema

  • Cinema of attractions and cinema of narrative integration

    • Attractions

      • Exhibitionist cinema, characterized by presentationality and direct look at the camera

      • Power of making images seen

      • Shots are autonomous, few cuts with long takes

      • Recognizable features to help viewer understand

      • Technology and technique on display as much as the story – cinema technology is the attraction, where they are viewed, etc

      • Story is an excuse to showcase techniques and effects

      • Exhibitionist cinema

    • Narrative integration

      • Techniques shifting from showcased effects to actually being used to tell the story

      • Development of characters, long shots/close ups now used for psychology

      • Cinematic devices (parallel editing, POV shots, close ups to guide spectators attention to tell story

      • Unified world of space and time

Week Two: A Page of Madness

  • Photogénie

    • Beings/souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction

    • Movement is fundamental

  • Theories of montage

    • Montage: the creative act of editing

    • Linkage versus collision

      • Montage is conflict

      • Collision/disparate images is what creates the effect, not alignment

  • Top-down versus bottom-up

    • Shot is not an element of montage; it is a montage cell

  • Early Japanese cinema

    • Kyugeki versus shinpa

      • Period dramas

      • Filmed kabuki theater

      • Used to capture a kabuki performer or promote them

  • The benshi

    • “New school”

    • Contemporary setting, often focused on social issues

    • Western-style “modern” spoken word theater

    • Comedies, melodramas

  • Pure Film Movement

    • Not a moving picture, is a film, something which is completely different

    • Film as a closed text

    • Film distanced from theater/theater acting

    • No female impersonators or benshis

  • Vernacular modernism

Week Three: The Woman of the Port

  • Modernity

  • Modernization

    • The rapid expansion of socioeconomic and technological development

  • Rationalization and instrumentalization

    • Fritz Lang Metropolis

  • Surveillance, Taylorism, Fordism

    • Modern Times Charlie Chaplin

  • Rupture of the new

    • Continual emergence of the new

  • Mobility and speed

    • Increased speed and tempo of modern life, changing sense of space and tim

    • Modern modes of transport

      • Rene Clair Entr’acte

  • The masses

    • Development of a mass audience and mass culture

    • Alienation and the breaking of social connections but also new sites of mixing

  • Sensory overload

    • extreme sensory overload—the “shock of modernity”, distraction and sensory overload

    • Julien Duvivier Au Bonheur des Dames

  • Urbanization

    • Lionked with modernity

    • Hub of industrialization, transportation, infrastructure, and social mixing of populations

  • Cinema as “dream factory”

    • Disneyland and creative ventures for capital gain

    • Confusion between characters and real life people

  • Mediated modernities

    • Unequal development → unequal participation in global symbols and unequal reception depending on different social/cultural norms

    • Western culture decentered

    • Premodern and modern coexist; asynchronous

    • Hybrid between innovation and imitation among spectators

    • In Latin america: Share in a modernity while simultaneously excluded from it

      • Arrives via the “routes of modernity”

    • Industrialization and cinematic advancement happening at the same time – “cultural lag” that increased the wonder of the cinema

  • Indigeneity versus alterity

    • Self conscious spectatorship; Latin American spectator participant while at the same time just someone looking in

    • Seeking representation of your own culture on screen – What does it mean to be Mexican? (Mexicanidad)

  • Cinema as “secularizing”

    • Spectatorship crosses class and gender lines

    • Cinema “secularizes…only to replace religion with its own wonders”…

      • Mystical feelings of its spectators

  • Cultural democratization and cinema

    • No one to mediate reactions to scientific and technological leap forward due to Mexico’s “cultural lag”

    • Technological revolution let poplar sectors emerge from cultural isolation

  • Melodrama (part one)

(telenovelas)

  • Social change

    • PLays out struggle felt when one conflicts with the status quo

    • “Body genre”

      • Something that does something to your body; makes you cry

    • Metonymy

      • Substitution for one thing as a metaphor for another thing

      • Family as social/national conflict, woman as stand-in for nation

    • Gender and patriarchy

      • New roles/models of behavior played out to make sense of changing world

    • Reflection and negotiation

      • Inevitability of industrialization, rural/traditional life as obsolete

Week Four: Spring in a Small Town

  • National Film – what makes a film a National film?

  • Economic

    • National cinema + domestic film industry

      • Establishing their conceptual correspondence

  • Textual

    • Do films share a common style or world view?

  • Exhibition

    • Consumption based – has everyone seen the film from this region, is it a ‘classic’ among citizens?

  • Criticism-led

    • Reduces national cinema to terms of a quality art cinema – what films “should” represent the nation according to people?

  • Chinese film history

  • “Civilized plays”

    • Spoken word drama about contemporary issues

    • Space for chinese people to think through modern problems and become civilized

    • Nationalist rhetoric, private firms looks for profit

    • China must civilize and unify to survive

    • Spoken in conversational mandarin, not dialects

    • Film is art of the masses, can represent and include everyone

  • Left-wing cinema

    • National film

  • National defense film

    • Brought on by Japanese invasion

    • Nationalist wartime capital

    • Representing majority of China’s population, rural instead of urban perspectives

      • Condescending attitude by dumbing down cinema for common people

  • “Mental vista” and obstruction/non obstruction

    • Made through long takes and slow motion

    • Observing life happening naturally?

  • Neorealism

  • Techniques

    • No cuts, lingers in space

  • Mission

    • Watching life as it happens

    • Everyone is an actor; not complete focus on star figures like in Hollywood

    • Function of cinema not to tell fables

  • Content

    • Life is not what’s invented in stories, it is what actually happens

    • Exploring all echoes and implications of any minor action/scenario

  • Audience

  • Production

    • Not compatible with capitalism; anyone can film or act in neorealism

  • Bazin – (1918-1958) Ran film screenings and published reviews during WWII

  • Faith in image vs. faith in reality

    • Reality laid bare – “confessing under relentless examination”

    • Images don’t add or deform anything to reality

  • Depth of field/deep focus

    • Unity of image in space and time

    • Relation with spectator and image closer than with reality

Week Five: The Housemaid

  • Cultural hegemony

  • Cold war cosmopolitanism

  • Melodrama (part 2) – periods of social/cultural change

  • Moral occult

    • Genre of excess

    • Spiritual values, radically democratic

  • Excess of effect over cause

    • preparation/motivation always insufficient

    • Emergence of terms: Fate, Chance, Destiny

  • “Too much, too soon”

    • Thickening/condensation of time violates reality

  • Women

    • Femininity subject to radical changes

    • Fascination with “modern woman” – prostitute, dangerous sexuality, erring/wandering urban woman

    • Sexual thrill

  • Desire

  • Femme fatale

    • Male loses access to body during era of production, body a vessel to produce goods

    • Women have overrepresentation of their bodies; femme fatale the antithesis of maternity

    • Body produces nothing in a society that fetishizes production

    • Power despite herself

  • Film noir

    • Good and evil hand in hand

    • Actions confused, motives unclear – like a dream

    • Contradictions and confusion make the viewer co experience feelings of anguish and insecurity