Films Watched in Lecture Flashcards
American In Paris (Vincent Minnelli. USA, 1951)
- on set (less costly)
- background is a painting
- too clean + neat
- postcard vision of Paris
- Gene Kelly gives stylized performance
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard. France, 1959)
- on location-less reliance on props, spontanaity
- characterized by deep space
- more naturalized
- natural light is imperfect
- reflectors toward face
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
- signing scene: parents on opposite ends, Kane in the middle, mom is in charge (in foreground, largest figure)
- nondiegetic music, hushed noise, shoes klick klack, groan by door, echoes, march like music=large institutionalized, cold, reverential: reflects character
- Kane+Susan: incompatible pitches, loudness, timbre: reflects harsh contrast
Ivan the Terrible, Part Two (Sergei Eisenstein. USSR, 1958)
- filters
- signal change in consciousness
- sees his future, someone trying to kill him
Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk. USA, 1956)
- filters
- blue filter to show night
- diegetically motivated
- crosscutting, happening at the same time
The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman. USA, 1926)
-stylized acting
Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann. USA/Australia, 2001)
-stylized acting
Persona (Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1966)
sets us exploration of character of woman, he uses situation as an opportunity to dwell on complexities of identity
•we don’t see the doctor, the one controlling the conversation for a long time, rejecting shot reverse shot, credits: confronted with a lot of very short random shot, has emotional confusion effec
switch in angle, framing of sister alma, rejecting 180 degree line, focusing on duality, camera rotates around her
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy. France, 1964)
-on location shooting
The Killers (Richard Siodmak. USA, 1946)
- low key lighting
- film noir
- nonsimultaneous sound
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles. USA, 1958)
- long take
- zoom in on bomb
- crane + tracking
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir. Australia, 1975)
- slow mo
- dissolve
- weird movie with girls on a rock
Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky. USA, 2000)
- fast motion
- fish eye view
- perception of being on drugs
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, UK, 1985)
-wide angle lens
Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger. USA, 1969)
-telephoto lens
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick. UK/USA, 1985)
- zoom
- 18th century war
The Insider (Michael Mann. USA, 1999)
- selective focus cinematography
- office scene
Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson. Sweden, 2008)
- rack focus
- rack focus on boy
The Mothering Heart (D. W. Griffith. USA, 1913)
-iris
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir. France, 1939)
- offscreen space
- everyone came everywhere greeting him
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1974)
- pan
- panning of the room
The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles. USA, 1942)
- tilt + tracking shot
- nondiegetic voice-over (Orson Welles) narration in beginning
Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly. USA, 1952)
- crane shot
- imaginary musical number
- asynchronous sound: funny scene with girl + gene kelly in their movie
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick. UK/USA, 1980)
- Steadicam & aerial shot
- low camera
Russian Ark
- super long take
- 1 shot=multiple scenes
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1963)
-straight cut & accelerated editing
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch. USA/Japan 1995)
- fade-in/fade-out & elliptical editing
- Johnny Depp, trains
- straight cuts when in same scene
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch. USA, 1932)
- wipe
- old comedy
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1992)
-iris-in & graphic match
Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1951)
- graphic repetition with difference
- 2 men walking, only see their feet
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa. Japan, 1954)
-graphic match
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1959)
- creative geography
- looks like he came out of building when the interior was a set
Ivan the Terrible, Part One (Sergei Eisenstein. USSR, 1944)
- overlapping editing
- pouring coins
White Heat (Raoul Walsh. USA, 1949)
- establishing shot & re-establishing shot & shot-reverse shot
- prison
T-Men (Anthony Mann. USA, 1947)
- consistent eyelines
- guys looking at each other over pool table
- indicate where man offscreen is
The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith. USA, 1915)
-eyeline match
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks. USA, 1940)
- match on action
- moves from desk to phone
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
-graphic discontinuity
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu. Japan, 1953
- crossing the axis of action
- having tea in japanese home
The Limey (Steven Soderbergh. USA, 1999)
-temporal discontinuity
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks. USA, 1946)
- pitch
- same pitch=compatible
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany, 1979)
- dense sound mix
- sound of guns, babies, screaming
- all same volume
- equal acoustic priority+dense=chaos
Stagecoach (John Ford. USA, 1939)
- selective sound mix
- Western film
- music in the beginning
- sound effects loud
- other sounds lower volume once dialogue starts
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati. France, 1953)
- fidelity
- lack of fidelity to perceived source
Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce. USA, 1999)
-music switches diegetic and nondiegetic music in parking lot + roller rink
Orlando (Sally Potter UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands, 1993)
- offscreen sound
- sound of train offscreen as 2 ppl ride their horse
- tracking + panning betw. tilda + guy toasting
- turns into shot/reverse shot midway, disrupts pattern
- stylistic shift=conversation shift
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1960)
- internal sound: voice in Norman’s head
- accelerating editing carries violence, cuts up Janet’s body, climactic
- sound high pitch, unnerving, repetitive, disturbing
- usually work together in tandem
The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
- sound bridge & dialogue overlap (Clarisse + Hannibal convo)
- synchronizes Bufallo Bill + FBI, we think same space
- crosscutting: unrestricted narration-doorbell sound bridge)
- expect to see 2 scenes merge
- seems to be communicative, but misleads us
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1979)
-dense sounds
In the Company of Men (Neil LaBute. USA/Canada, 1997)
- two shot whenever planning:
- when in cahoots represented as a pair
- shot/reverse shot when first meeting
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino. USA, 1994)
-we don’t see marcellus wallace, only bruce willis
Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1965)
- figure+camera movement in tandem
- in tandem=choreography
- longs shots because it takes more time to process
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel. France/USA, 2007)
- subjective narration
- switches betw. subjective + objective
- waking up from the coma
Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1964)
- relatively communicative: tells us what her plan is + info she needs, what’s gonna happen
- uncommunicative narration: don’t see Marnie (lack of frontality) or know who the guy is talking about
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson. USA, 2009)
-self-conscious narration: knows it is explaining the game with diagrams
A Man Escaped
- restricted: deliberately limits knowledge to character-surprise
- communicative: tells us what he is doing as he is doing it, but restricted
Do the Right Thing
-unrestricted: greater knowledge than character=suspense
In the Mood for Love
-uncommunicative
Y tu mama tambien
- communicative voice over
- uncommunicative: weren’t told about Louisa’s cancer
- non diegetic voice over=self-conscious narration
Moonrise Kingdom
-film talks directly to us (red gnome, letters)
Indochina, the village of Namo (Auguste & Louis Lumière. France, 1897)
- filmed African children running toward camera
- actuality
Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty. USA/France, 1922)
- first real documentary
- feature real ppl
- assumes self-conscious narration
- intertitles: tells us what we see
- reality effects: maps, charts,,tables=sense of authority(empirical nature)
- tells us it is imparting info+we see it
- creative treatment: heavily edited (only highlights)
- says more about Flaherty: racist assumptions
- shaping (representing info to represent it as pop culture views)
- detachment + voice-over narration
Primary (Robert Drew. USA, 1960)
- observational documentary
- political campaign of JFK
- handheld: not precise, but reactive
- ppl don’t look at camera
- lots of editing from diff. camera
- ambiguous: a little disoriented
- more work deciphering
- sound diegetic: conveys lots of info
Roger and Me (Michael Moore. USA, 1989)
-participatory documentary
Rashomon
- 8 testimonies of irreconcilable accounts
- woodcutter knows more than he revealed
- structured around flashbacks
- contradictory accounts
- POV of judge, static camera, high key lighting
- sparse dialogue, strategic use of light, shadow, tonal values, choreod cinematography + editing
Roger and Me (Michael Moore. USA, 1989)
- participatory documentary
- more interrogative than declarative
- part of process
- interview Miss America
Delicatessen (Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France, 1991)
- rhythm
- rhythm of sex dictates rhythm of other actions
- cuts + movement get faster + faster until climax
- sound rhythm influences editing rhythm, incorporates more sound, actions speeds up, shot scale gets smaller, camera moves quicker
Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu. France/USA/Mexico, 2006)
- multistory plot
- focused perceptual engagement in club
- acid alters perceptive faculty
- close up let us know it is her experience we are seeing
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov. USSR, 1929)
- associational form
- categorical
- organized material in associational form
- experimental
- editing plays with graphic relations to evoke certain concepts
- everything in stasis, a city asleep
- then everything becomes animated, wake up
- a day in the life
Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer. USA, 1972)
- transformation of narrative
- love triangle
- nondiegetic tells us what 2nd woman is saying
- waivering camera movement
- inter titles
- we know it is being told to us
- condense story of man can’t choose betw. 2 women in movement
- relationship through dance
- way story is told influences what story is + how we relate to it
- radical questioning of narrative conventions
A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès. France, 1902)
- first film where director edited together shots to create a narrative
- regarded film as a spectacle + fantasy
- laid groundwork for imaginative cinema
- characterized by artifice, actors only authentic
- not limited by real world rules
- stop motion + superimposition (layering of film) to create fantastical world
- umbrella turned into mushroom: freeze then change then continue action, only one thing changes
Meat Love (Jan Svankmajer. UK/USA/West Germany 1988)
- pixillation
- stop animation
- meat dancing
Neighbours (Normal McLaren. Canada, 1952)
- pixillation
- animating ppl in a real world setting
- high ppl over flower
Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. USA, 2001)
- deviates from our world (has talking ogres + donkeys), creates fantastic world
- created world that is familiar, simulates live action techniques
Windsor McKay + his moving comics
- teach animation process
- shows how painstaking + time consuming animation is
- metamorphosis
Charlie chaplin - Modern Times
concerned with political effects of capitalism, modern times, repetitive task of tightening bolts
•Worker becomes appendage of the machine, worth nothing more + nothing less than wage
Chinatown
style of the past
•Neo-noir film: new spin on old film genre that emerged in 40s
•Film noir: femme fatale
Community
constant pastiche, storyline in some established form
•Referring to post apocalyptic thriller
•Mixing of multiple styles
Scott pilgrim vs. the world
oCredits part of diegesis
oPlasticity of living room space
oInclusion of text that identifies characters
oUniversal 16 bit
oGraphic novel features: sound represented graphically
oDialogue is artificial
oSelf reflexivity used to position this film in larger context mediascape
oAssumption that we’re gonna get all the intertextual references
oShows its savviness on popular culture
oMeant to be fun, it’s just a film, don’t have to take it seriously
Shane
oShane is wearing white hat, antagonist wearing black
oShane is low angle, always looking up
non diegetic slow drumming that builds tension, speaks to the presence of native American community
oMost commonly orchestral music
oShane: becomes part of community, finds out about the threat, eradicates threat, rides off into the sunset
This Is the End
playing versions of themselves
•Reinforce/undercut their performance
•Seth Rogen: playing to type perfectly
•Acknowledges that it’s what he’s known for: guy’s guy
•Michael Cera: different + antithetical
•Acknowledging personas as something constructed
Risky Business
generic 80s rock music, raciness + excitement, erotic, no sense that it’s a transaction, elliptical editing, high points in sexual activity, comes out of nowhere, body’s focused on in long shot, from perspective of Tom Cruise’s character, we are identifying with him, conventionally attractive to hollywood standards, low key + side lighting glamourizing prostitute
Working Girls
more nondiegetic sound effects, noises + uncomfortable, doesn’t pull us in the mood, pragmatic, focus on money, economic transaction, get a real sense of the procedure, systematic routine of prostitution, different treatment of bodies, body is very different, bright + flat, high key, hard, not flattering to actors, average looking body, no eroticism through ambience
•Understanding of interaction + what prostitution involves is very differently represented
•Estrangement similar to radical film
Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977)
concerned with state of women’s life in contemporary context
•Radical film made with a feminist agenda
•Laura Mulvey explains what they are attempting to do: sphinx part of Oedipal myth that we don’t talk about
•Sphinx speaks in question: question after question is raised
•13 sections: each question is composed of single 360 degree pan + voice over tacking series of issues related to women’s lives
Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977)
- never settling: very brief shots of women – way of filming women that doesn’t serve to objectify them/in a position to be appearing for audience
- glimpse of women engaging in their environment: we don’t objectify them/scrutinize them
Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977)
- challenging conventions in terms of content + form
- not accessible to most audience: not widely distributed, margins of commercial cinema, you have to seek it out, unenjoyable to a lot of ppl, you have to understand theoretical debates + political issues
Pepe le moko
integrated himself in Casbah – white european protagonist set against exotic backdrop
•Pepe integrated into community, becomes more inscrutable, dangerous, yet still not the same, but set off
•Not relegated to backdrop/margins of the screen
•Negative associations with nonwhite characters
•Object of suspicion + agression
Walkabout - Nicolas Roeg
come across an aboriginal boy in a walkabout, encounter between 2 cultures
•Assumption he hasn’t evolved
•Enchanted with aboriginal boy – pure, good, not tainted by modern life (alienation, mechanization), being celebrated for things that they were criticized for
Bon Cop Bad Cop
hollywood genre + set of conventions + displaces it in Canada giving it a Canadian inflection
•Tensions fom specifically Canadian experiences + lives
•Most popular Canadian film
