cin final Flashcards
Screening: Us
d. Jordan Peele, US, 2019
Screening: Clean
d. Oliver Assayas, France, 2004
Screening: Goodfellas
d. Martin Scorsese, US , 1990
Screening: All About My Mother
d. Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 1999
Screening: What Time Is It There?
d. Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2001
Screening: La Ciénaga
d. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2001
Screening: Stories We Tell
d. Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012
Screening: Irma Vep
d. Oliver Assayas, France, 1996
Screening: Meek’s Cutoff
d. Kelly Reichart, US, 2010
Screening: Blockers
d. Kay Cannon, US, 2018q
“Media archeologist Erkki Huhtamo has described the proliferation and coexistence of screens of greatly dissimilar
dimensions as the ‘Gulliverisation’ of our modern environments, ‘a two-directional optical-cultural mechanism that worked
against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale’” Martine Beugnet, “The Gulliver Effect,” 306-307.
Butterfly, d. Atom Egoyan, Canada, 2019
Signifier
- what is materially presented to a viewer
- an object, a person, or a combination of them
Signified
The meaning that the viewer gives to the signifier
Sign
the relation of signifier and
signified
Style
The particular way a filmmaker organizes cinematic signifiers
Shot
- An unbroken span of action captured by an uninterrupted run of the camera
- lasts until it is replaced by another shot of a cut or a transition
The duration of a shot is indicated by “take”
long take, a shot that lasts a minute or longer
Close-up
Nichols:
- Close-ups fill the screen with an object or figure of
significance
- typically the face but the shot is also used for important objects such as a
key, knife, or letter
- The shot leaves no room for doubt where the viewer’s attention should be directed
Medium long shot
the body is visible from the ankles or knees up
Medium Shot
the waist up
Medium close shots
presents the figure from mid-chest up
Long Shot
shows the central characters as small figures relative to their surroundings
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” P. 38 (1997 ed.)
W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
“A camera is an opening in a box: that is the best emblem of the fact that a camera holding on an object
is holding the rest of the world away. The camera has been praised for extending the senses; it may, as the
world goes, deserve praise for confining them, leaving room for thought.”
Stanley Cavell
Rhetoric
The art and techniques of persuasion
Continuity
The unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over time. (OED)
Continuity Editing
- standard rhetorical form of editing
- creates a smooth sense of flow so that the story
takes priority over the mechanics of storytelling - Viewers do not notice most of the edits; attention goes to the characters and actions, situations and events that take place in the story, be it fictional or non-fictional
Match Editing/action
- element of the shot from one shot is carried over to the next shot to smooth the
transition - Matches using movement are the most common, but other choices include matching the position of the
object in the frame
Screen Direction
The onscreen direction in which characters are looking (e.g. screen right, screen left)
Master shot
camera is positioned at a sufficient distance from the actors to cover all their movements and gestures
Establishing Shot
provides an overview of the scene
Over the shoulder shots
filming over each character’s shoulder in succession
Inserts or cut-aways
- separate shots that are inserted into scenes
- normally closer shots of objects that can be shot at an entirely different time or place, and then inserted or cut into the scene at the appropriate point
Shot-reverse shot pattern
- One of the characters talks
to the other, who is off-screen - The next shot reverses the
view and shows the other
person talking to the first
person, who is now off-screen
Tilt
the camera moves in vertical direction
Pan
Horizontal movement; the camera scans left or right
Zoom shots
- shots that changing the focal length of the lens rather than moving the camera.
- the perspective changes
- It does not conform as closely to human perception as a tracking shot
- They can be more impressionistic
Dolly Shot
A Wheeled platform that rolls the camera to a new location
Tracking Shot
A shot where the camera is moved from place to place while continuously filming
Steadicam
A harness, used during tracking shots, that absorbs the jerkiness of human movement
Point-of-view
Shot that shows what a character sees, usually to produce subjective identification with the characters
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which knows each object encountered in life through and adventure in perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green?” How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?
Stan Brakhage, from Metaphors on Vision
Colour is Relational
- Our perception of colour depends on the relation between two or more colours
- No colour appears the same way in every context nor in every different relation
Natalie Kalmus “colour consciousness”
Klumas was the Colour Supervisor for Technicolour from 1934-1939
Colour as Mood: Warm & Cool Colours
(Natalie Kalmus)
- colours fall into 2 groups
- “warm” (red, yellow, orange)
- advancing colours
- excitement, activity, heat
- “cool” (green, blue, violet)
- retreating colours
- rest, ease, coolness
- white
- youth, gaiety, informality
- gray
- subtlety, refinement, charm
- black
- strength, seriousness, dignity
Figure/Ground Relations
Relating to or denoting the perception of objects
as they appear to be separated from the background
Colour Stenciling
An early colour process where colour was stencilled onto black and white films
Necessity
When something cant not occur
Contingency
Something may occur, but it is not guaranteed to occur
Time
period and context
Period
a particular span of time; e.g. ten weeks, one hour, one decade
Historical context
major events, cultural norms and expectations that define a certain period
Heterogeneous time
- Time is multiple, non-coincident, and not restricted to the traversal of space
- There is always more than one time in place
Citation
a direct quotation, insert, or reference to another work
Allusion
- An indirect reference to another work
- we understand on the basis of a visual similarity
Intertextuality
- a relationship that is established between two works of art
- begins as citation or allusion
- so much so that what happens in one film affects the way we think about the the other
“In theperformance arts, rhythm is the timing of events on a human scale; ofmusical sounds and silencesthat occur
over time, of the steps of a dance, or the meter of spokenlanguage and poetry. In some performing arts, such as
hip hop music, the rhythmic delivery of the lyrics is one of the most important elements of the style. Rhythm may also
refer to visual presentation, as “timedmovementthroughspace” (Jirousek 1995) and a common language ofpattern
unitesrhythmwithgeometry.” OED
Martin Arnold, Passage à l’acte (Martin Arnold, 1993)
rhythm
“The Roundness of clocks is convenient, but it naturally
misleads us about something clocks tell, because its hands
repossess their old positions every day and every night.
The reels on a projector, like the bulbs of an hourglass,
repeat something else: that as the past fills up, the future
thins; and that the end, already there against the axle,
when the time comes for its running, seems to pick up
speed.”
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed,
Colour as Leitmotif
as a theme that recurs through a musical or cinematic work
Diegetic Sound
sound that appears to naturally in the story world
- Traffic noise, dialogue
Extradiegetic Sound
Comments on the story world and belongs to the narration
- voice over narration, film score
Subjective Sound
Sound rendered as a character hears it rather than as an objective auditor would hear it
Point-of-audition v. Point-of-view
Contrapuntal music
two or more independent melodic lines
fiction - liter
- literature in the form of prose
- describes imaginary events and people
Fiction pt. 2
- something invented or untrue
- a belfie or statement that is false but is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so
non-fiction
noun prose writing that is based on facts, real events, and real people, such as biography or history
fact
- a thing that is known or proven to be true
- information used as evidence or as part of a report or news article
The reflexive mode
It makes the viewer aware of the conventions, the expectations, and assumptions that usually go unspoken
nounthe ideals of journalistic accuracy and objectivity
impartiality, absence of bias/prejudice, fairness,
fairmindedness, equitableness, equitability , even-handedness, justness, justice, open-mindedness, disinterest, disinterestedness, detachment, dispassion, dispassionateness, neutrality
“The three premises of the auteur theory
may be visualized as three concentric
circles: the outer circle as technique; the
Middle circle, personal style; the inner
circle, interior meaning.”
Andrew Sarris, The Auteur Theory
“If an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things that he has written or said, left among his papers or communicated to others? Is this not properly a work?”
Michel Foucault, What is an Author?
Discourse
a way of speaking or organizing signs that determine what will be legible or sayable at a particular moment in time
Foucault continued: Author and Discourse
- Texts (or films) must be eliminated from the list of works that are inferior to the others.
- Those texts whose ideas conflict with the doctrine expressed in the others are eliminated.
- Those texts that refer to events subsequent to the author’s death are eliminated.
Clean central preoccupation
Cosmopolitan difference as the ground of forgiveness
Irma Vep (central preoccupation)
Global media as a source of conversation and the recognition of difference
Summer Hours (central preoccupation)
Generational change and national belonging
Genre films
- Films that share thematic and stylistic features which become known as conventions, such as shoot-outs in westerns.
- These conventions establish sets of constraints, and opportunities, that individual
films explore in distinct ways
Auteurism
An approach to the study of film that seeks to identify the central preoccupation of a single director, thematically and stylistically.
Outer Form
- The iconic objects and/or relations that identify a film’s belonging to a genre.
- setting, clothes, “tools of the trade,” particular objects
Inner Form
refers to the unique way in which those iconic objects are assembled so as to indicate variation (the single film) within sameness (the genre, as such)
The Political
- a representational order that imagines what goes missing in the social
- The political is the ground of the social
The Social
lived ways of being, doing, and saying in a culture as they currently exist
Hegemony
- An equivalent relation is where members of a society are united by what they share rather than what is different between them.
- Hegemonies express a shared relation to a cultural value
Generic Variation
When the Political Becomes the Ground of the Social
