Film Glossary Flashcards
Key issues and concepts
The style and ‘look’ adopted by a filmmaker.
Aesthetic
Alignment
How the spectator is physically positioned with the character to identify with them.
Identify three techniques to achieve alignment.
Close up
POV
Close microphone
How the spectator is ideologically or emotionally positioned with the character to identify with them.
Allegiance
Auteur
A filmmaker with a signature style across several films. Usually referencing a director but can also be an editor or cinematographer.
When characters, representations or ideologies are set up against one another, creating conflict, positioning and the possibility of resolution.
Binary Opposition
A wide screen format developed by 20th Century Fox and used in Hollywood up until the 1960s.
Cinemascope
The person responsible for the look of a film, in charge of the camera techniques and translates the director’s vision. Advises on camera angles, lighting and special effects.
Cinematographer aka Director of Photography (DP)
The predominant style of editing in a narrative - creating a logical coherence between shots and continuous narrative action. Typical features include shot/reverse shot, the 180 degree rule and match-on-match action.
Continuity editing
Films & other art works which offer a subjective and often distorted reality for emotional effect.
Expressionist
A specific example of expressionism, emerging from the aftermath of the Great War. Robert Wiene & FW Murnau were leading exponents.
German Expressionist film
Social and political movements which advocate for equal rights for women.
Feminism
A key movement of cinema in France in the 1950s and early 1960s. Jean-Luc Godard & Francois Truffaut were leading directors
French New Wave or nouvelle vague
Ideological critical approach
Analysing a film from a particular ideological perspective to reveal dominant values in a film or to offer a critique of it, e.g. a feminist reading
When a film makes reference to another media text. The filmmaker may be paying homage to another film.
Intertextuality or intertextual reference
Juxtaposition
The positioning of two shots, characters or scenes in sequence to encourage the audience to compare and contrast them.
The influential magazine that Andre Bazin, and Francois Truffaut wrote for.
Cahiers du Cinema
Magical elements are added to a realistic depiction of the world and are presented as normal and realistic. This can be used to portray an alternate reality so we question the accepted one. Used effectively in Pan’s Labyrinth.
Magic realism
A series of shots edited together to condense time or create a specific meaning, sometimes with a musical track.
Montage
A period in American film history after the break-up of the studio system era, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s.
New Hollywood
A genre of Chinese martial arts cinema in which characters are able to channel the life force in order to levitate and even fly.
Wuxia
A broad late 20th-century artistic and critical movement that departs from the modernist ideas of objectivity, originality, and single truths. This type of cinema is characterised by fragmentation, playfulness, heavy stylisation, intertextuality, a blurring of high and low culture coupled with genre hybridity.
Postmodernism/postmodernist
A film style which aims to create the effect of reality or verisimilitude, often using deep focus and long takes as realistic devices which mimic the eye. This style also tends to favour continuity over montage editing.
Realism
How particular groups, people & places are depicted. In film we explore these via the use of film form, focusing on age, gender and ethnicity.
Representations
A particular type of representation in which individuals and groups are reduced, via repetition, to a few recognisable characteristics which are then use to define everyone within the category.
Stereotype
A style of filmmaking where the audience is made aware of the process of filmmaking and the film’s artificiality. It is closely associated with Brecht.
Self-reflexive
This term refers to the act of watching a film. As a concept, it explores how films address and positions the individual through the construction of the film.
Spectatorship
The ________ _________ is the business model in Hollywood from 1927 to 1948 where a small number of studios were dominant.
Studio System
Name the ‘Big 5’
20th Century Fox, RKO, Paramount, Warner Brothers and MGM.
Name the ‘Little 3’
Columbia, Universal and United Artists.
The huge German Studio responsible for films such as Murnau’s Faust and Lang’s Metropolis was called…..
UFA - Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft!
What is Vertical Integration?
When a company controls the different stages of a product’s process or construction. In Hollywood, this included ownership and control of film studios and cinemas.
An international 20th century movement of artists, writers and philosophers who focused on the unconscious mind and dreams. Heavily influenced by Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as mind-altering substances.
Surrealism.
A left-wing ideology which views capitalism as an economic and political system which creates class struggle, where the ruling classes dominate and oppress the working classes.
Marxism
