Saturday, August 22, 2015
Time - connection script
Scene set in a house with contemporary decor.
Woman is listening the radio and dressing in smart clothes. The radio clearly indicates it is morning, as does the angle of the light.
A number of her belongings are laid out on the bed, being inspected by a cat.
She packs all of the belongings into a bag and zips it up.
She turns off the radio and places a coffee mug in the sink.
She checks the back door is locked and takes a look around the flat.
She exits via the front door.
Fade to black briefly.
The camera remains in same position.
The door opens again and she reenters the flat dumping her bag on the floor and slipping off her jacket. She sighs and runs her hand through her hair looking tired and slightly frazzled.
The flat is much darker with a slice of evening sun across the hallway.
She heads for the kitchen whilst making noises at the cat.
She pours a glass of wine and takes a gulp before leaving the kitchen.
Alternative narrative
I have chosen Tree of Life (2001, dir Terrence Malick) to study as an 'alternative narrative'. It is not that there is no narrative but Malick has allowed this to become more of a sensory experience which takes the viewer on an emotional and spiritual journey. Instead of the images supporting the story, they are designed to trigger memories and empathy to create experiential viewing.
Not everyone enjoys this approach. Even Sean Penn who plays the adult Jack O'Brien in the film was critical of Malick: "I didn't at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I've ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context. What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly." (Interview in Le Figaro, August 2011)
This movie is quite autobiographical. Malick grew up in Waco, Texas where the film is set (although it was filmed in Smithville) where his father worked for an oil company but played the organ. The director's brother Lawrence R Malick committed suicide when he was 19, the same age as the death of the brother : R.L in Tree of life. Malick's other brother died after a car crash in 2008.
Structure
Act 1 - idyllic scenes of a family home; the mother (Jessica Chastain) receives a telegram to say her child has died; she tells her husband (Brad Pitt); there are scenes of grief and cold comfort from grandmother. Some flashbacks to show the boy played guitar. Adult Jack (Sean Penn) lights a votive candle and has a phonecall with his father; mumbles about his brother; scenes in a very modern glass building where Penn seems to be an unhappy architect; some dream sequences of desert and a murmuration.
Act 2 - creation sequence - a journey through time and space evolution. Nature and grace seem to be hand in hand here.
Act 3 - 1950s Texas where we see the family begin and grow up; the father is a disciplinarian, the mother is soft and forgiving; the boys do boy things and then get a bit wilder, get into trouble, go through growing pains; we see Jack as a troubled boy who doesn't get along too well with his Dad; things go wrong with Dad's job and he admits he had the wrong priorities and he was hard on the kids. There is some resolution here.
Act 4 - Adult Jack is wandering around the desert; more impressionistic sequences; whole family on the beach; Jack kneels at his mother's feet. The final line is "I give you my son".
Cinematography
Malick called upon Douglas Trumbull, responsible for the special effects in 2001: Space Odyssey to create many of the visuals and he seems to have successfully captured Malick's ideas and vision.
Malick wanted the interior spaces to be unlighted, so three houses were used in the main story, depending on the time of day and the position of the sun. The sun is always visible shining through the windows. Lots of use of light and dark
There were lots of very high angles (eg when Mr O'Brien is walking along metal ladder corridors at his job to show scale) and low angles to show the POV of the kids revelling in nature.
Book of Job theme
The Book of Job is featured heavily as part of the theme of Tree of Life - to the detail of Jack O'Brien's initials as well as being the epigraph for the movie.
"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Job 38:4,7
We hear the mother whisper - presumably to her God - "What are we to you?" and the father later rages that he didn't acknowledge the glory. "I wanted to be loved because I was great; A big man. I'm nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn't notice the glory. I'm a foolish man."
Mrs O'Brien: "The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow." ["Grace" and "Nature" are whispered at the start of the film.]
As voiceover: "Lord, Why? Where were you? Did you know what happened? Do you care?"
Mother
The mother epitomises forgiveness, softness, light. She urges her boys: "Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive." She's playful - in one scene, she wakes them up by pressing ice cubes to their skin. Several scenes are filmed with the camera following her from behind, as if she is leading the boys through life.
Father
Some reviews describe him as being almost brutal but his character almost certainly reflects how a father would have behaved at that time. This is where life and art becomes rather cliched - that father wants to be respected and successful, fails in his job through no fault of his own and life changes for the family. At times he takes the discipline too far and the children are clearly scared of him but he is not abusive by the standards of the time. He is also very playful with them - making shadow puppets and drawing on their faces.
Impressionistic sequences
There is too much to cover here but some of the things that stood out for me were how well Malick recreated the sense of long, hot childhood summers. Surely every viewer could relate to something here? Butterflies, frogs, Halloween, reading stories by torchlight, sprinklers in gardens, climbing trees, kicking cans, playing in long grass, staring at weird adults, falling in love with classmates, firecrackers, peer pressure, breaking windows, roughhousing with brothers. And they always seemed to be surrounded by dogs.
Roger Ebert described this beautifully as "where life flows in and out through open windows". http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-tree-of-life-2011
The creation segments are gorgeous and epic. Much of the space imagery looks like rich baroque paintings. We see galaxies, nebulae, lava, waterfalls, cells, amoeba, DNA, jellyfish, seaweed, calm and beautiful dinosaurs, hammerhead sharks, giant manta rays, the eye of a foetus, the asteroid hitting the Yucatan peninsula. The music and whispers and soundscapes make for a magical experience if the viewer is will to immerse themselves.
My response
This film definitely did not bore or irritate me as it seems to have done with many filmgoers. I enjoyed the sensory experience throughout and I was definitely taken on emotional journey. I wonder if the sense of devastation of the brother dying would have been more powerful if we had seen the boys together more before we hear the news that he is dead?
Malick really succeeds in evoking the wonders of childhood and how hard it is to grow up. When you are young your family and friends are everything so small things seem unsurmountable and we really feel this through young Jack.
The impressionistic sequences elevate this from being a straight story of the mundane trials and tribulations of a family growing old together who suffer a bereavement. This allows us as viewers to participate and explore our greater feelings about the world and why we are here and how we should behave.
Many things puzzled me, of course ... the doorway in the desert that adult Jack (Sean Penn) walks through in his sharp suit; the lost souls wandering around on the beach; what sparked adult Jack's specific angst and sadness at that moment (an anniversary of RL's death?); what were memories, what were dreams and what was imagination (eg the tall creepy man in the attic)?; how did he finally achieve happiness and resolution? ...
There are so many things explored in this film which connect us humans and I found it to be a wonderful lyrical experience. Malick took a very simple premise - ordinary family relationships - and made something truly magical. I can understand why people were frustrated by some of the apparently 'arty' bits but I am sure every single thing meant something to Malick and his teams and was included the final cut to help take us on the journey.
My attempts to summarise the 'narrative' in a diagram...
Not everyone enjoys this approach. Even Sean Penn who plays the adult Jack O'Brien in the film was critical of Malick: "I didn't at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I've ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context. What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly." (Interview in Le Figaro, August 2011)
This movie is quite autobiographical. Malick grew up in Waco, Texas where the film is set (although it was filmed in Smithville) where his father worked for an oil company but played the organ. The director's brother Lawrence R Malick committed suicide when he was 19, the same age as the death of the brother : R.L in Tree of life. Malick's other brother died after a car crash in 2008.
Structure
Act 1 - idyllic scenes of a family home; the mother (Jessica Chastain) receives a telegram to say her child has died; she tells her husband (Brad Pitt); there are scenes of grief and cold comfort from grandmother. Some flashbacks to show the boy played guitar. Adult Jack (Sean Penn) lights a votive candle and has a phonecall with his father; mumbles about his brother; scenes in a very modern glass building where Penn seems to be an unhappy architect; some dream sequences of desert and a murmuration.
Act 2 - creation sequence - a journey through time and space evolution. Nature and grace seem to be hand in hand here.
Act 3 - 1950s Texas where we see the family begin and grow up; the father is a disciplinarian, the mother is soft and forgiving; the boys do boy things and then get a bit wilder, get into trouble, go through growing pains; we see Jack as a troubled boy who doesn't get along too well with his Dad; things go wrong with Dad's job and he admits he had the wrong priorities and he was hard on the kids. There is some resolution here.
Act 4 - Adult Jack is wandering around the desert; more impressionistic sequences; whole family on the beach; Jack kneels at his mother's feet. The final line is "I give you my son".
Cinematography
Malick called upon Douglas Trumbull, responsible for the special effects in 2001: Space Odyssey to create many of the visuals and he seems to have successfully captured Malick's ideas and vision.
Malick wanted the interior spaces to be unlighted, so three houses were used in the main story, depending on the time of day and the position of the sun. The sun is always visible shining through the windows. Lots of use of light and dark
There were lots of very high angles (eg when Mr O'Brien is walking along metal ladder corridors at his job to show scale) and low angles to show the POV of the kids revelling in nature.
Book of Job theme
The Book of Job is featured heavily as part of the theme of Tree of Life - to the detail of Jack O'Brien's initials as well as being the epigraph for the movie.
"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Job 38:4,7
We hear the mother whisper - presumably to her God - "What are we to you?" and the father later rages that he didn't acknowledge the glory. "I wanted to be loved because I was great; A big man. I'm nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn't notice the glory. I'm a foolish man."
Mrs O'Brien: "The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow." ["Grace" and "Nature" are whispered at the start of the film.]
As voiceover: "Lord, Why? Where were you? Did you know what happened? Do you care?"
Mother
The mother epitomises forgiveness, softness, light. She urges her boys: "Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive." She's playful - in one scene, she wakes them up by pressing ice cubes to their skin. Several scenes are filmed with the camera following her from behind, as if she is leading the boys through life.
Father
Some reviews describe him as being almost brutal but his character almost certainly reflects how a father would have behaved at that time. This is where life and art becomes rather cliched - that father wants to be respected and successful, fails in his job through no fault of his own and life changes for the family. At times he takes the discipline too far and the children are clearly scared of him but he is not abusive by the standards of the time. He is also very playful with them - making shadow puppets and drawing on their faces.
Impressionistic sequences
There is too much to cover here but some of the things that stood out for me were how well Malick recreated the sense of long, hot childhood summers. Surely every viewer could relate to something here? Butterflies, frogs, Halloween, reading stories by torchlight, sprinklers in gardens, climbing trees, kicking cans, playing in long grass, staring at weird adults, falling in love with classmates, firecrackers, peer pressure, breaking windows, roughhousing with brothers. And they always seemed to be surrounded by dogs.
Roger Ebert described this beautifully as "where life flows in and out through open windows". http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-tree-of-life-2011
The creation segments are gorgeous and epic. Much of the space imagery looks like rich baroque paintings. We see galaxies, nebulae, lava, waterfalls, cells, amoeba, DNA, jellyfish, seaweed, calm and beautiful dinosaurs, hammerhead sharks, giant manta rays, the eye of a foetus, the asteroid hitting the Yucatan peninsula. The music and whispers and soundscapes make for a magical experience if the viewer is will to immerse themselves.
My response
This film definitely did not bore or irritate me as it seems to have done with many filmgoers. I enjoyed the sensory experience throughout and I was definitely taken on emotional journey. I wonder if the sense of devastation of the brother dying would have been more powerful if we had seen the boys together more before we hear the news that he is dead?
Malick really succeeds in evoking the wonders of childhood and how hard it is to grow up. When you are young your family and friends are everything so small things seem unsurmountable and we really feel this through young Jack.
The impressionistic sequences elevate this from being a straight story of the mundane trials and tribulations of a family growing old together who suffer a bereavement. This allows us as viewers to participate and explore our greater feelings about the world and why we are here and how we should behave.
Many things puzzled me, of course ... the doorway in the desert that adult Jack (Sean Penn) walks through in his sharp suit; the lost souls wandering around on the beach; what sparked adult Jack's specific angst and sadness at that moment (an anniversary of RL's death?); what were memories, what were dreams and what was imagination (eg the tall creepy man in the attic)?; how did he finally achieve happiness and resolution? ...
There are so many things explored in this film which connect us humans and I found it to be a wonderful lyrical experience. Malick took a very simple premise - ordinary family relationships - and made something truly magical. I can understand why people were frustrated by some of the apparently 'arty' bits but I am sure every single thing meant something to Malick and his teams and was included the final cut to help take us on the journey.
My attempts to summarise the 'narrative' in a diagram...
Lubezki & Malick - a dogme
This is the series of parameters agreed by Terrence Malick and his DoP Emmanuel Lubezki for Tree of Life...
- Shoot in available natural light.
- Do not underexpose the negative. Keep true blacks.
- Preserve the latitude of the image.
- Seek maximum resolution and fine grain.
- Seek depth with deep focus and stop: "Compose in depth."
- Shoot in backlight for continuity and depth.
- Use negative fill to avoid light sandwiches (even sources on both sides)
- Shoot in crosslight only after dawn or before dusk; never front light.
- Avoid lens flares.
- Avoid white and primary colors in frame.
- Shoot with short focal length, hard lenses.
- No filters, except Polarizer.
- In the eye of the hurricane, shoot with steady handheld or Steadicam.
- Z-axis moves instead of pans and tilts.
- No zooming.
- Do some static tripod shots "in midst of our haste"
- Accept the exception to the dogma (a.k.a Article E) - Article E however does not apply underexposure of the negative.
Reflections on tutor report from Assignment Three
Interesting feedback on this. I was pleased that Peter was quite critical about this assignment. I hope this means he feels that it has solid enough basis to be worth looking at very specific improvements which will help my later work.
The main comments were around the sound, specifically that the soundtrack does not reinforce the visuals enough. The changes are too abrupt making the cuts seem amateur. I think I did intend for some of the tea-making sounds to seem unpleasant as I wanted to set the mood for the narrative but I seem to have gone too far.
Peter also commented that final conclusion is 'more than a little ambiguous'. I think this would normally be fine but the specific brief for this assignment was all about the implied meaning so this is a failure in that regard.
Other people who watched the film did interpret it as the protagonist feeling suicidal and I had hoped that the note on the table would be a strong enough signifier but I can see now there could have been other connotations.
I really liked the suggestion that the actor breaking the frame was acceptable in this circumstance "so long as she is made to return, confinement is often a matter of trying unsuccessfully to escape" - this is a great way of taking forward my plan of cropping tightly and its justification.
I have tried to re-edit this and filmed myself in the role with some medium shots and more look room which was instructive but not really fit to be seen by anyone. I would love to have reshot the whole thing properly to allow myself more footage for a new edit but my actor selfishly sold her flat and moved to Australia!
Given the time constraints in completing this course, I have made a decision to move on and practise the suggested improvements in other projects.
My research has also continued on narrative structures and context. Barthes goes in to this in depth in his Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives essay in Image Music Text. He looks at the language of narrative, levels of meaning, classes of units. He explains how drinking a whisky in and airport lounge "is an action which can act as a catalyser to the (cardinal) notation of waiting, but it is also, and simultaneously, the indice of a certain atmosphere (modernity, relaxation, reminiscence, etc). In other words, certain units can be mixed, giving a play pf possibilities in the narrative economy."
Barthes, R., 1977. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana.
I think I may need to read these essays several more times before I can really make sense of it all...
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Understanding Movies by Louis Giannetti
Understanding Movies by Louis D. Giannetti (Tenth Edition), Pearson Education, 2005
I am amazed that this book is not on the essential reading list for the OCA Digital Production Course. I could not put it down and found it to be extremely useful.
It aims to help the reader understand "how TV and movies communicate and the complex network of language systems they use." Each chapter has an overview and often a summary of questions we should ask when analysing a specific area.
It covers:
and the final chapter "Synthesis: Citizen Kane" is a summary of the main ideas all applied to a single movie.
It references hundreds of films and includes fascinating information as well as wide range of ideas, theories and opinions.
I am amazed that this book is not on the essential reading list for the OCA Digital Production Course. I could not put it down and found it to be extremely useful.
It aims to help the reader understand "how TV and movies communicate and the complex network of language systems they use." Each chapter has an overview and often a summary of questions we should ask when analysing a specific area.
It covers:
- Photography
- Mise-en-scene
- Movement
- Editing
- Sound
- Acting
- Drama
- Story
- Writing
- Ideology
- Critique
and the final chapter "Synthesis: Citizen Kane" is a summary of the main ideas all applied to a single movie.
It references hundreds of films and includes fascinating information as well as wide range of ideas, theories and opinions.
Visual Culture by Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros
Visual Culture by Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros (Second Edition), Polity Press 2012
I suspect I should really read this book every year whilst I am studying. There is a lot to take in and not all of it makes complete sense to my ageing brain...
It provides an intro to analysis of visual culture, by seeking to increase visual literacy. "It does not aim to provide solutions to the meanings of specific visual texts, but instead to equip students with the means to discover for themselves what and how such texts communicate."
"A primer for the practice of looking."
The book tackles theories of visual analysis and aggregates a variety of approaches.
The first half provides strategies for the analysis of visual texts.
1. Looking at the content of a work of art - the practice of iconology
2. Looking at the form rather than the content of a visual text
3. The usefulness and limitations of art history in reading visual texts
4. Art interpretation via ideology; gender-based film study and sociological models for cultural texts
5. Semiotics
6. Hermeneutics
The authors call for "an interpretative and multilayered approach to the discover of meaning in visual texts.
The second half of the book moves from general theories to an analysis of specific media:
7. Fine art
8. Photography
9. Film
10. Television
11. New media
Considering the breadth of the information and the complexity of some of these ideas, this book is quite palatable. It is well laid out with a summary at the beginning of each chapter to help with orientation. Each section ends with a 'Key Debate' topic and plenty of suggestions for further reading.
The Film chapter discusses the connections between film and reality, specifically focussing on time and space. It compares film with theatre and with the novel (with which it has much more in common). The authors then go on to break film down into basic grammatical units (the shot and the edit), showing how editing allows it to break loose from worldly constraints, contributing to its narrative complexity. Film can move us from physical state to psychological insight instantly.
"...because it appears to free the viewer from the constraints of both time and space, which are so fundamental to the physical world, film at the same time appears to free us from reality altogether."
"Film is an artificial medium that goes to considerable lengths to conceal its own artifice."
"If we fail to notice the way in which real-life time and space have been left behind, the director's work has been professionally accomplished."
What may first appear to be the most realistic of media turns out to be the opposite. "We are drawn into a fantastically crafted construction and, while always intellectually cognizant of its artifice, we are still emotionally manipulated by its apparent realism."
"Among the pioneers of film semiotics are Christian Metz and Peter Wollen who argue that film communicated with three different types of sign: the icon, the index and the symbol."
"Where film particularly lends itself to Geertzian hermeneutics is in its narrative form. If cultural texts are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, then explicitly narrative forms (which, like film, benefit from the added dimension of time) are likely to be especially rich in cultural meaning. And because hermeneutics acknowledge ambiguity and layers of meaning beyond the literal, it is possible (for example) to interpret twentieth-century films about an alien invasion of the earth as metaphors (whether intended or not) for Western fears about communism and the former Soviet Union. The content and the meaning are never necessarily the same thing."
Marc Auge, French anthropologist created the terms 'espaces quelconques' to refer to homogeneous and anonymous spaces (such as airport terminals, metro stations) that rob people of their individuality. Translates as 'any-space-whatever'. Gilles Deleuze sees these same places not as de-singularizing but as spaces whose apparently homogeneous universality opens them up to the emergence of all sorts of singularity.
Examples in Antonioni cinematography - "urban waste ground where buildings have been demolished, and rebuilding has not yet taken place, provide the sense of indetermination and openness that is central to the Deleuzian notion of 'any-space-whatever'. Just as the determined spaces of classical cinema allow for an ordered development of the narrative, the sense of indetermination conveyed by 'any-place-whatevers' contributes to put it in crisis, creating an instability that contaminates the identity of the characters and the rational coherence of the plot."
I suspect I should really read this book every year whilst I am studying. There is a lot to take in and not all of it makes complete sense to my ageing brain...
It provides an intro to analysis of visual culture, by seeking to increase visual literacy. "It does not aim to provide solutions to the meanings of specific visual texts, but instead to equip students with the means to discover for themselves what and how such texts communicate."
"A primer for the practice of looking."
The book tackles theories of visual analysis and aggregates a variety of approaches.
The first half provides strategies for the analysis of visual texts.
1. Looking at the content of a work of art - the practice of iconology
2. Looking at the form rather than the content of a visual text
3. The usefulness and limitations of art history in reading visual texts
4. Art interpretation via ideology; gender-based film study and sociological models for cultural texts
5. Semiotics
6. Hermeneutics
The authors call for "an interpretative and multilayered approach to the discover of meaning in visual texts.
The second half of the book moves from general theories to an analysis of specific media:
7. Fine art
8. Photography
9. Film
10. Television
11. New media
Considering the breadth of the information and the complexity of some of these ideas, this book is quite palatable. It is well laid out with a summary at the beginning of each chapter to help with orientation. Each section ends with a 'Key Debate' topic and plenty of suggestions for further reading.
The Film chapter discusses the connections between film and reality, specifically focussing on time and space. It compares film with theatre and with the novel (with which it has much more in common). The authors then go on to break film down into basic grammatical units (the shot and the edit), showing how editing allows it to break loose from worldly constraints, contributing to its narrative complexity. Film can move us from physical state to psychological insight instantly.
"...because it appears to free the viewer from the constraints of both time and space, which are so fundamental to the physical world, film at the same time appears to free us from reality altogether."
"Film is an artificial medium that goes to considerable lengths to conceal its own artifice."
"If we fail to notice the way in which real-life time and space have been left behind, the director's work has been professionally accomplished."
What may first appear to be the most realistic of media turns out to be the opposite. "We are drawn into a fantastically crafted construction and, while always intellectually cognizant of its artifice, we are still emotionally manipulated by its apparent realism."
"Among the pioneers of film semiotics are Christian Metz and Peter Wollen who argue that film communicated with three different types of sign: the icon, the index and the symbol."
"Where film particularly lends itself to Geertzian hermeneutics is in its narrative form. If cultural texts are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, then explicitly narrative forms (which, like film, benefit from the added dimension of time) are likely to be especially rich in cultural meaning. And because hermeneutics acknowledge ambiguity and layers of meaning beyond the literal, it is possible (for example) to interpret twentieth-century films about an alien invasion of the earth as metaphors (whether intended or not) for Western fears about communism and the former Soviet Union. The content and the meaning are never necessarily the same thing."
Marc Auge, French anthropologist created the terms 'espaces quelconques' to refer to homogeneous and anonymous spaces (such as airport terminals, metro stations) that rob people of their individuality. Translates as 'any-space-whatever'. Gilles Deleuze sees these same places not as de-singularizing but as spaces whose apparently homogeneous universality opens them up to the emergence of all sorts of singularity.
Examples in Antonioni cinematography - "urban waste ground where buildings have been demolished, and rebuilding has not yet taken place, provide the sense of indetermination and openness that is central to the Deleuzian notion of 'any-space-whatever'. Just as the determined spaces of classical cinema allow for an ordered development of the narrative, the sense of indetermination conveyed by 'any-place-whatevers' contributes to put it in crisis, creating an instability that contaminates the identity of the characters and the rational coherence of the plot."
Understand Film Studies by Warren Buckland
Understand Film Studies by Warren Buckland, Hodder Education, 2010
A great little book as an intro to film studies - it provides a series of concepts to help filmgoers analyse artistic, technical and storytelling decisions.
It covers:
There are also some detailed analyses of specific techniques and scenes which are very instructive.
Notes
Christian Metz: "The cinema is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand."
'Significant form' distinguishes good art from bad - where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Stefan Sharff: "Significant form is the opposite of pedestrian rendition... Images for together so magnificently that they ascend to a higher level of visual meaning." (Elements of Cinema)
Debate: Should women specialise in making feminist films? Kathryn Bigelow argues that the job of a director is genderless.
Five categories of documentary (according to Bill Nichols):
All in all a very good resource. It helped give me the confidence to begin to critique films, something I would like to develop further.
A great little book as an intro to film studies - it provides a series of concepts to help filmgoers analyse artistic, technical and storytelling decisions.
It covers:
- Aesthetics; formalism and realism
- Structure: narrative and narration
- Authorship: the director as auteur
- Genres: defining the typical film
- Non-fiction: five types of documentary
- Reception: the art and profession of film reviewing
There are also some detailed analyses of specific techniques and scenes which are very instructive.
Notes
Christian Metz: "The cinema is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand."
'Significant form' distinguishes good art from bad - where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Stefan Sharff: "Significant form is the opposite of pedestrian rendition... Images for together so magnificently that they ascend to a higher level of visual meaning." (Elements of Cinema)
Debate: Should women specialise in making feminist films? Kathryn Bigelow argues that the job of a director is genderless.
Five categories of documentary (according to Bill Nichols):
- expository
- observational
- interactive
- reflexive
- performative
All in all a very good resource. It helped give me the confidence to begin to critique films, something I would like to develop further.
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