Exam

Question 1

Form

Answer 1

an overall set of relationships amongst its parts. This includes visual style, music cues, editing choices, character development, and more.

Question 2

Narrative

Answer 2

a chain of events linked by cause and effect occurring in time and space.

Question 3

Non-narrative

Answer 3

images and sounds strung together with (seemingly) no logical connection between one another.

Question 4

Suspense

Answer 4

an element of a film that is suspended; either a component of a narrative pattern is purposefully left out, or our urge to complete a narrative pattern is delayed in some way

Question 5

Tracing

Answer 5

our ability to think about earlier events in a film’s diegesis (flashbacks are the most common form of tracing)

Question 6

Conventions

Answer 6

a tradition, style, or popular form; have been normalized over time (and, can be broken)

Question 7

Genre

Answer 7

a type, or category, of film (or TV, or literature, etc.); rely heavily on standardized conventions

Question 8

Causality

Answer 8

Is another way of describing a linear narrative pattern. Essentially, this is cause- and-effect. Cause is what catalyzes, propels, or motivates an action, reaction, or behavior in a film’s narrative, which creates effect, or an action, reaction, behavior, or event that results from some event or behavior.

Question 9

Spatially

Answer 9

Is the space setting of a film. This can refer to geographic location or the interior or exterior of some location of individual scenes (or, a film’s whole narrative).

Question 10

Temporality/time

Answer 10

Is the time seang of a film. This can refer to: when a film is taking place, how much time progresses in a narrative and its respective scenes, story order, and frequency (or, how often a scene is shown).

Question 11

Goal oriented plot

Answer 11

Is a common device in which a character takes steps to achieve an object or condition.

Question 12

Story

Answer 12

a chain of events in chronological order or, in other words, the sum total of all the events in a narrative.

Question 13

Plot

Answer 13

the way that a narrative is presented: action is visibly and audibly present in the film before us; it includes all of the events that are directly depicted in a film, plus the information that characters may supply about earlier events in the story world.

Question 14

Referential meaning

Answer 14

Concrete, close to bare-bones plot summary dependent upon the spectator’s ability to identify things or places already invested with significance in the real world. Often, this is established through film’s subject matter.

Question 15

Explicit meaning

Answer 15

What a film seems to be trying to get across. Our interpretation is sBll rooted in concrete reality, but instead refers to what the characters learn, aka. the “moral of the story,” so to speak. With this approach, we need to look at how this central message is counterbalanced with other elements in the overall form.

Question 16

Implicit meaning

Answer 16

More abstract and plural. In this instance, the audience ascribes certain interpreta-ons (ways of understanding or interpreting meaning) to a given film; this is guided by the overall film form, but differs depending on the spectator’s frame of reference. Indeed, this meaning is dependent upon subtexts (underlying, sometimes intentional implications) and themes (broader concepts).

Question 17

Symptomatic meaning

Answer 17

Also more abstract, plural, but more common in theoretical readings of films. This refers to the meaning of a film as representative of a set of values characteristic to a whole society, communicating an ideology, or a set of values springing from culturally specific beliefs about the world.

Question 18

Documentary

Answer 18

the presentation of factual information about real people, places, and events, generally – but not always – portrayed through the use of actual images and artifacts. It is not a genre!

Question 19

Film mode

Answer 19

A DOCUMENTARY IS A FILM MODE, which suggests the purpose or function of a film, which in this case is to inform, educate, and/or motivate an audience.

Question 20

Naturalist/romantic

Answer 20

which is rooted in anthropology and ethnography. This tradition involves life being observed in its own natural environment.

Question 21

Newsreel

Answer 21

which is rooted in journalism. This tradiBon involves reportage and presenting snippets of life with a clear thesis statement.

Question 22

Propaganda

Answer 22

which is rooted by and large in political thought. This tradition involves explaining new beliefs, explaining political change, and motivating the masses to support this change.

Question 23

Realistic / continental

Answer 23

which is rooted in modernist visual arts circles. This tradition involves a creative way of portraying and interrogating “reality”

Question 24

Poetic

Answer 24

subjective, creative, and non-narrative forms of portraying reality.

Question 25

Expository

Answer 25

specific argument or point of view with an authoritative, resonating narration

Question 26

Observational

Answer 26

capturing the subject/story in an uninterrupted way (like a “fly on the wall”)

Question 27

Participatory

Answer 27

incorporates the subject (usually via interviews) in the documentary- making process

Question 28

Reflexive

Answer 28

showing the person behind the camera (the filmmaker)

Question 29

Performative

Answer 29

personal, autobiographical

Question 30

Cinema verite

Answer 30

a French postwar movement using film as a science. To achieve this, filmmakers take on a “fly in the soup” approach, inserting themselves directly into the action, through discussion, interview, and performance). As a result, the director explains some sort of truths on the meaning of life.

Question 31

Direct cinema

Answer 31

a North American postwar movement using film as an art form. To achieve this, filmmakers take on a “fly on the wall” approach, having no interference at all with the action on screen. Therefore, life unfolds naturally on camera, explaining fundamental truths on its own terms.

Question 32

Screen reality

Answer 32

consists of principles of time, space, character behavior, and audiovisual design that filmmakers systematically organize in a given film to create an ordered world on screen in which characters may act and in which narrative may unfold. In essence, how folks construct the world of a given film, adding a level of validity or plausibility.

Question 33

Realism

Answer 33

referring to the ways that any medium portrays “actual” people, places, and events

Question 34

Ordinary fictional realism

Answer 34

the world on screen closely resembles the one that the viewer inhabits

Question 35

Historical realism

Answer 35

recreating some sort of distant past

Question 36

Documentary

Answer 36

presenting factual information about plausibly real people, places, and events

Question 37

Expressionism

Answer 37

stylized mode of screen reality in which filmmakers use visual distortion to suggest emotional, social, or psychological disturbances or abnormalities.

Question 38

German expressionism

Answer 38

A biproduct of _____________________, a movement in the visual arts, and later, silent cinema, that emphasizes exaggerated and distorted seangs, colors, shadows, performance, and emoBonal states.

Question 39

Fantasy

Answer 39

approach to screen reality wherein seangs and subjects, characters, and narrative time are often displaced from the viewer’s own realm into other realms, sometimes futuristic ones, where normal laws of time and space may not apply.

Question 40

Self reflexivity

Answer 40

reminds viewers that what they are watching is, in fact, a movie. A great example of this comes from fourth-wall breaking, where characters directly look into the camera and address the audience, poking fun at film’s artifice and establishing immediacy in the process.

Question 41

Animation

Answer 41

sill images that are manipulated to appear as moving images