film final

zoetrope

- optical toy created by William George Horner - early motion picture projector that produced illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs

The Lumiere Brothers

- invented the Cinematographe - created "Arrival of a Train at the Station" - shocked audiences because it looked like the train was going to come out of the screen

George Melies

- one of the first fictional narratives - inventor of special effects in movies - created "The Man with the Rubber Head" and "A Trip to the Moon"

Cinema of Attractions

- 1895-1906 - emphasis on performative spectacle - aim is to show and exhibit - direct stimulation - incite visual curiosity

Classical Hollywood Cinema

- 1907-present - emphasis on construction of a story; to narrate - creation of digests - encourage voyeurism - action for the sake of narrative continuity

shot / counter shot

- sometimes referred to as shot / reverse shot - prime example in the film Pulp Fiction and The Wolf of Wall Street - when a filmmaker places a camera on a subject (usually a person looking at something) and then shows the reverse view of that subject (usually what the subject was looking at)

long take

- used in film without any cuts or reverse shots - the camera remains stationary and follows the characters continuously without any editing or interruptions - example: Godard's "Breathless"

Edwin Porter

- worked as a Vitascope projectionist which led him to the practice of continuity editing - pioneered crosscutting/intercutting across simultaneous actions in different spots - created "Life of an American Fireman", "The Great Train Robbery", and "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest"

Kinetograph

the first true motion picture camera

Diegesis

- a Greek term - literally means the fictional world of the film - may be a world that resembles ours - outer space environment in Star Wars, Middle Earth from LOTR

Tom Gunning "Cinema of Attractions"

- defined attractions as "directly soliciting spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle"

D. W. Griffith

- established the narrative language of cinema through a combination of his own analogies with those of others (modeled the narrative we call "film") - directed for Biograph films and innovated alternate shots of different spectacle lengths - begins to use close ups and more cuts in "The Greaser's Gauntlet" - Directed "The Lonely Villa", "Corner Wheat", "The Birth of a Nation", and "Way Down East" - had a role in Edwin Porter's "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest"

interframe Narrative

- meaning is created within the shot - multiple camera setups within the use of close ups, full shots, long shots, cross cuts, POVs, etc - ex: "Way Down East", main character looks up and sees a beautiful chandelier. she is in awe because she comes from a low income background and has never seen anything like it

intraframe narrative

- meaning is created within the shot - dramatic lighting and use of probs, costumes, makeup, performance, screen space - long takes with camera movement and angle

Buster Keaton

- American film director and comedian during silent film - known for his deadpan expression and elaborate visual comedy - "Our Hospitality", "Cops", and "The General"

Thomas Ince

- worked with Griffith - introduced the continuity script to the filmmaking process - pioneered the studio system of production

Charlie Chaplin

- transformed cinema from a novelty into a living art form - films addressed the real issues with dimensional characters

"Our Hospitality" dir. Buster Keaton and John Blystone, 1923

- silent comedy that used a specific narrative style which ranged from broad to subtle - tells the story of a Southern family feud between the Canfields and McKays

French Film d'art Movement

- brought great stage plays and artists o the movie screen - stunted advances in narrative techniques

UFA

- main German production company during 1920s - became the core of the Nazi film industry - became largest studio in the world behind Hollywood

German Expressionism

- artistic movement that seeks to express that artist's emotional state while offering a depiction of reality that is widely distorted for emotional effect - utilizes highly stylized decor and lighting

Fritz Lang

- made films that were often Expressionist in theme - used lighting to emphasize architectural space and line - director of "Metropolis"

Karl Freund

- cinematographer of many silent German classics - emigrated to Hollywood and was D. P. for "Dracula" - developed the 3 camera setup for "I Love Lucy"

Kammerspielfilm

- German films from the 1920s that offered an intimate, cinematic portrait of lower - middle class life

Alfred Hugenberg

- bought out UFA and forced the studio to push his extreme beliefs - began producing newsreels containing Nazi propaganda and films pushing German Nationalism

chiaroscuro lighting

- technique of arranging light and dark elements in pictorial composition

unchained camera

- continuous camera movement

subjective camera

- POV of the character allowing us into their emotional state

"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" dr Robert Wiene, 1920

- the first and most influential German Expressionist Film - critical to the weakness of the new German Government

Moscow Film School

- created by the Cinema Committee (aka VGIK) - Kuleshov studied editing and helped establish it as the first film school

Dziga Vertov

- co founder of Soviet cinema and newsreel editor - experimented with more expressive editing

Kinoki

- young group of documentary filmmakers founded by Vertov - influential on Soviet montage editing - their filmmaking doctrine was kino-gaze (cinema eye)

"Man with a Movie Camera" 1929

- Vertov's masterpiece showing Moscow life - used techniques such as trick photography, multiple exposure, candid camera, and montage

Kuleshov Workshop

- focused on editing - goal was to discover the laws by which film communicates meaning to the audience - discovered "Kuleshov effect" - a blank face interchanged with different pictures can change emotion

Soviet Montage

- cutting film as an expressive or symbolic process by where logically or empirically dissimilar images can be linked together synthetically to produce metaphors

Sergei Eisenstein

- student of Kuleshov - filmmaker and film theorist - directed "Battleship Potemkin" - main focus was "attraction"

Montage of Attractions

- structuring films around "attractions" to implant emotions and ideas in working class viewers - "units of impression combined into one whole" that could be used to produce "a new level of tension"

dialectical montage (theory)

- human experience is a personal conflict where one force (thesis) collides with another force (antithesis) to produce a new phenomenon (synthesis)

5 types of montage

- metric - rhythmic - tonal - overtonal / associational - intellectual

"Battleship Potemkin" dir Sergei Eisenstein

- one of the most important and influential films in the history of cinema - chronicles the revolt of Potemkin during the failed Bolshevik revolution - famed Odessa step massacre: one of the most influential in the history of cinema - Eisenstein uses emphasis on montage (rhythmic) along with stress of intellectual contact

Thomas Edison

- invented Phonograph - his Cinephongraph and Kinetophone did achieve sound on disc synchronization

Eugene Augustin Lauste

- first achieved adding sound directly onto the filmstrip (1910) - converted sound into light beams to be recorded on the film strip photographically

Tri-Ergon

- system invented by 3 Germans that converted sound waves into light waves - recorded photographically on film strip

The Audin

- vacuum tube invented by Lee de Forest that allowed for amplification of radio signals and later for the amplification of sound in movie theaters

Vitaphone

- sound-on-disc system developed by the Western Electric and Bell Telephone laboratories (under AT&T)

"The Jazz Singer"

- first feature length film with running dialogue - end of silent film era

Fox Movietone

- sound-on-film method of recording sound for motion pictures which guarantees synchronization between the sound and picture

Talkies

- nickname for early sound films due to their inclusion of dialogue

The "Big Five"

- Mero-Goldwyn-Mayer - Warner Bros - Paramount - Fox - RKO

"A Man Escaped" dir Robert Bresson, 1956

- a French Resistance fighter being held by the Nazis - film follows his plan to break out. - Bresson’s use of sound is symbolic - sound gets louder as they near an escape route

Orson Welles

- began in theater and moved to Hollywood - directed “Citizen Kane” and signed 2 productions with RKO - used deep focus photography, long takes, and complex sound montage

The War of Worlds

- 1938 broadcast that seemed real - narrated by Orson Welles

Gregg Tolan

- Welles' most important collaborator on Citizen Kane

"Touch of Evil"

- Welles's last attempt to work in Hollywood - use of long takes and crane shots - financial failure

"Citizen Kane" dir Orson Welles, 1941

- starts with his death, follows his life from childhood till death again - intercuts narration of people in his life being interviewed to find meaning of “Rosebud” - cinematography: long take, deep focus, deep space composition - Welles shows connections through long takes and intraframe movement - deep focus: staging of important narrative - expressive lighting: expresses thematic issues - editing “lightning mix”: use of continuity on the soundtrack to link together images, often over long periods of time - use of montage to compress large amounts of story information

Cesare Zavattini

- theoretical founder of neorealism - argued that films should “embrace the dignity and sacredness of the everyday life of normal people” - sought a cinema that would find the drama in ordinary events

Roberto Rossellini

- a founder of neorealism - brought documentary-like authenticity to filmmaking: “Rome: Open City”

Neorealism

- cost: saving measures, increased the sense of spontaneity and realism - stylistic: shot on actual locations, innovative storytelling, nonprofessional actors, natural lighting - political/Ideological: often dealt with contemporary social/political issues, focus on a culture of poverty, gave significance to individual personal problems

"Ossessione"

- precursor to neorealism - unauthorized adaptation of James M. Caine’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” - one of the first Italian films to take the camera out of the studio and look at the lives of ordinary people

Impact of Neorealism on Third Cinema

- opposite of Hollywood: for profit, sought to make films that dealt with social/political realities

Realism as a Theory

- art as an expression of the real world - cinema and photography constitute index of reality - encouraged the limitation of artistic choice

"Bicycle Thieves" dir Vittoria de Sica, 1948

- shows how institutions are indifferent to the flight of individuals - created sense of honesty and conveyed emotions - viewers could see how Italy was affected by the war with their own eyes

Influences of the French New Wave

- production style - small crews location shooting - largely unknown actors

Camera-stylo

- permit the cinema “to become a means of expression as supple and subtle as that of writing language”

Jean-Pierre Melville

- founded his own production company in 1945 - production style: small crews/location, shooting largely unknown actors

George Franju

- started as a documentary filmmaker (realism) - made movies with a horror tone which shifted the genre

Characteristics of the French New Wave

- aesthetic: discontinuity editing, shooting on location, hand held mobile cameras, improvised dialogue and plotting, direct sound recording, long takes - thematic: characters are usually young, marginalized anti-heros; general sense of existentialism

Alain Resnais

- first new wave director - first documentary filmmaker

Francois Truffault

- most commercially successful of the New Wave filmmakers - influences were American B-movies, film noir, and the work of Alfred Hitchcock

Dziga-Vertov Group

- founded by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin - films were openly agitational in the spirit of the 1920s Soviet Cinema