Film Appreciation - Key Concepts 2

Ethnicity in Cinema

 

• Ø Derived from the Greek word ‘ethnikos’.
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• Ø A group of people sharing a common cultural heritage.
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• Ø Ethnic struggles in adjusting in new places.
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• Ø Ethnic groups are united by some injustice done to them.
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• Ø They share common beliefs.
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• Ø It depends upon religion, nationality, culture, tradition, race.
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• Ø They are subjected to genocide.
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• Ø They are dispossessed and disenfranchised.
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• Ø E.g., Jews and Blacks – Star of David, skull cap, totem, painted face, feathered head dresses, loose garments, beard etc mark them.
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• Ø Scholars consider these iconographic symbols to be damaging to the ethnic community.
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• Ø A typical bearded guy is essentialzed in cinema.

Ø In the Land of Blood and Honey (2012) – genocide in Yugoslavia directed by Angelina Julie.

Ø No Man's Land (Serbo-Croatian: Ničija zemlja, Ничија земља) is a 2001 Bosnian war film that is set in the midst of the Bosnian War.

Ø Gentleman's Agreement is a 1947 American drama film based on Laura Z. Hobson's best-selling 1947 novel of the same name. It concerns a journalist (played by Gregory Peck) who poses as a Jew to research an exposé on the widespread distrust and dislike of Jews in New York City and the affluent communities of New Canaan, Connecticut and Darien, Connecticut

Ø Dances with Wolves is a 1990 American epic Western film starring, directed, and produced by Kevin Costner in his feature directorial debut. It is a film adaptation of the 1988 book of the same name by Michael Blake that tells the story of Union Army lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Costner), who travels to the American frontier to find a military post, and of his dealings with a group of Lakota.

Ø Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the 1982 non-fiction novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who together with his wife Emilie Schindler saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II.

 

Meta-Cinema

Ø It originated from Meta – Theater.

Ø It is the convenient name for the quality in a play which challenges theaters claims to be simply realistic.

Ø Metacinema, also meta-cinema, analogous to metafiction in literature, is a mode of filmmaking in which the film informs the audience that they are watching a work of fiction. Metacinema often references its own production, working against narrative conventions that aim to maintain the audience's suspension of disbelief.[1] Elements of metacinema includes scenes where characters discuss the making of the film or where production equipment and facilities are shown.

Ø ​8 1⁄2 (Italian title: Otto e mezzo, pronounced [ˈɔtto e mˈmɛddzo]) is a 1963 Italian surrealist comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini. (recommended to be watched)

Ø About a film maker who suffers from a directors block.

Ø La strada (lit. '"The Road"') is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini from his own screenplay co-written with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina, a simple-minded young woman (Giulietta Masina) bought from her mother by Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), a brutish strongman who takes her with him on the road. (recommended to be watched)

Ø It has self referrentiality.

 

Method Acting

Ø This term is interesting because this method is applauded and is ridiculed in our cinema.

Ø It raises an actor a serious actor if you are his performance or her performance to another level.

Ø Orsol Wells said : I am always making fun of the method but I use a lot of things that are taken from it.

 

Ø George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in radio, theatre and film. He is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

 

Ø Konstantin Stanislavski was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner.[2] He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation

 

Ø Stanislavski was a main exponent of the genre. Meta Cinema is associated with him.

 

Ø An Actor Prepares (1936) is the first of Konstantin Stanislavski's books on acting, followed by Building a Character and Creating a Role.[1] Stanislavski intended to publish the contents of An Actor Prepares and Building a Character as a single volume, and in the Russian language.

 

Ø Building a Character (1948) is the second of stage actor/director Constantin Stanislavski's three books on his method for learning the art of acting.

 

Ø Creating a Role (1957) is theatre actor/director Constantin Stanislavski's third and final book on his method for learning the art of acting.

 

Ø In New York, the method was popularized by the Group Theater. (1930’s).

 

Ø Lee Strasberg was a Polish[3]-born American actor, director, and theatre practitioner.[4] He co-founded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective".

Ø Stella Adler was an American actress and acting teacher.[2] She founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949.[3] Later in life she taught part time in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her protégée, actress Joanne Linville,[4] who continues to teach Adler's technique.

 

 

Ø Key Principles of Method Acting.

Ø Emotional memory to prepare for a role that involve fear the actor must remember something frighten and attempt to act the part in the emotional space of that fear.

Ø This was the clear break from previous modes of acting that held that the actor’s job was to become the character and leave their own emotions behind.

Ø Shamitabh is a 2015 Indian Hindi-language satirical drama film written and directed by R. Balki.[7][8] The film stars Amitabh Bachchan, Dhanush and debutante Akshara Haasan.

Ø Actors Examples: Marlon Brando Jr, Edward Montgomery Clift, James Byron Dean – School of Method Acting

 

Ø American New Wave - Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and later on

Ø Even Sean Penn Mickey rourke actress such as Meryl Streep and Dorothy Faye Dunaway, Emma Thomson, Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot).

Ø There will be Blood, Heathledger et al.

Did you mean: Mise En Scene

 

Mise-en-scène

Ø It is the stage design and arrangement of actors in scenes for a theatre or film production, both in visual arts through storyboarding, visual theme, and cinematography, and in narrative storytelling through direction.

Ø It originated from Theater.

Ø It includes elements of visual style.

Ø It includes production design, framing, color, lighting etc, aspect ratio, hight, actors’ performances, sounds that are diegetic.

Ø Douglas Sirk - was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. Sirk started his career in Germany as a stage and screen director, but he left for Hollywood in 1937 because his Jewish wife was persecuted by the Nazis. He is considered as the master of mise-en-scene. He is known for his melodramatic movie.

Continuity Editing

Ø Traditionally audience were made unaware of editing.

Ø Establishing shot.

Ø Eye level shot – camera equal to the eye level of the actor.

Ø In film, reframing is a change in camera angle without a cut and can include changing the focus of the scene. The term has been more often used in film criticism than in actual cinema. Critics of the technique include André Bazin among others.

Ø Yasujirō Ozu - was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He began his career during the era of silent films, and his last films were made in colour in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. He subverted the eyeline shot.

Ø An eyeline match is a film editing technique associated with the continuity editing system. It is based on the premise that an audience will want to see what the character on-screen is seeing. An eyeline match begins with a character looking at something off-screen, followed by a cut of another object or person: for example, a shot showing a man looking off-screen is followed by a shot of a television. Given the audience's initial interest in the man's gaze, it is generally inferred on the basis of the second shot that the man in the first was looking at the television, even though the man is never seen looking at the television within the same shot.

Ø You see the back of the head of one character who is listening and you see the face of the character who is speaking. So its a reverse shot the first shot frames character a and its typically the shot from the character’s points of view or over the shoulder. This process is reverse with character B. shot from character as perspective. This continues throughout a screen and its repeated many times as it necessary.

 

180⁰ Rule/Shot

Ø Excess of action for the purpose of continuity.

Ø When shooting a screen that the cameraman imagines an invisible line cutting through the action.

Ø It is necessary that all shooting takes place on one side of this line.

Ø The camera must always be placed on one specific side of this line.

Montage

Ø Soviet realism

Ø It is a type of editing technique and it refers to a series of images and sounds that form the visual pattern.

Ø It came out of the Soviet Experimental Cinema of the 1920’s.

Ø It was first thought of Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov. He was a Russian and Soviet filmmaker and film theorist, one of the founders of the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. He was intimately involved in development of the style of film making known as Soviet montage, especially its psychological underpinning, including the use of editing and the cut to emotionally influence the audience, a principle known as the Kuleshov effect. He also developed the theory of creative geography, which is the use of the action around a cut to connect otherwise disparate settings into a cohesive narrative.

Ø Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th greatest film of all time.

Ø At the ideological level it signify conflict and collision.

Ø It is particularly used when an editor or filmmaker want to convey a great deal into a brief segment.

Ø Eisenstein believed that collision and conflict must be inheritant to all visuals science and films just upon the shots made them colloid or conflict and meaning is produced through this.

Ø Conflict between people and situation for example the in Battleship Potemkin of Odessa Steps. (is a 1925 Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against its officers.)

Ø Baptism Scene in The Godfather, the Dining Table Scene in Citizen Kane, the training Sequence in Rocky are examples for Montage and also in Cinema Paradiso.

Musicals

Ø Broadway Melody of 1929, is a 1929 American pre-Code musical film and the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It was one of the first musicals to feature a Technicolor sequence, which sparked the trend of color being used in a flurry of musicals that would hit the screens in 1929–1930.[4] Today, the Technicolor sequence is lost; only a black and white copy survives in available versions. The film was the first musical released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was Hollywood's first all-talking musical.

Ø Singing in the Rain (1952), Carefree is a 1938 musical film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Ø MGM & RKO were associated with Musicals.

Ø Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were iconic dance partners in a total of 10 films, nine of them with RKO Radio Pictures from 1933 to 1939, and one, The Barkleys of Broadway, with MGM in 1949, their only color film.

Ø Indian film Kalpana and Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje.

Ø One of the function of the music was to resolve conflicts in a society and encourage some sort of social harmony and stability.

Ø Beatles and Elvis Presley Films were also Musicals.

Ø Westside Story.

Ø It is a dying genre in Hollywood.

Ø Mama Mia, My Fair Lady, Nashville, Saturday Night Fever.

Ø From 70’s Musicals are declining.

Ø Indian films are Romantic Musicals like DDLJ & Hum Aap Ke.

Mythological Cinema.

Ø Hollywood films are based on Greek and Roman Myths.

Ø Indian mythological films begin with Raja Harishchandra (Dada Sahib Phalke).

Ø Episodes are taken ah in our situation at least from epic and scriptures.

Ø We have TV Serials.

Queer Cinema

Ø New Queer Cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.

Ø Sundance Film Festival.

Ø The term itself can be seen as a culmination of several development in an American cinema and American culture most film makers making queers in a films self-identify as queers.

Ø Edward II is a 1991 British romantic historical drama film directed by Derek Jarman and starring Steven Waddington, Tilda Swinton and Andrew Tiernan. It is based on the play of the same name by Christopher Marlowe. The plot revolves around Edward II of England's infatuation with Piers Gaveston, which proves to be the downfall of both of them, thanks to the machinations of Roger Mortimer.

Ø Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener, and author.

Ø Poison is a 1991 American science fiction drama horror film written and directed by Todd Haynes and starring Edith Meeks, Larry Maxwell, Susan Gayle Norman, Scott Renderer, and James Lyons.

Ø My Brother… Nikhil is a 2005 Indian film set in Goa, based on the life of Dominic d'Souza. The movie portrays the life of the protagonist, Nikhil, from 1987 to 1994, when AIDS awareness in India was considerably low.

Spoof Film

Ø Imitative work created to mock comment on or trivialize an original work.

Ø Opening shot of 2001: a Space Odyssey, Zoolander.

Ø Johnny English.

Horror Films

 

Ø In 1930’s Hollywood made a series of classical horror film like Dracula and Frankenstein.

 

Suture Films

Ø Viewing in or stitching so what is being stitched.

 

Ø Thematic visual and editing technique employed by the director or cinematographer to make us to forget that the camera is the one doing the looking.

 

Camera and editing techniques help us know how to watch the movie.

Voiceover

Ø It is a production technique where a voice is not as part of narrative is used.

 

Ø It is used to give voices and personalities to animated character.

 

Ø Moby Dick is a 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. It was directed by John Huston with a screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury. The film starred Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, and Leo Genn.

 

Ø In Moby Dick it is Ishmael narrates the story and sometimes comments on the action in voice over.

 

Ø William Holden’s character in Sunset Boulevard.

-Anjoe-