Movies Flashcards
who coined the term “Modernity?”
Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is typically considered:
to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
The term “modern” (Latin modernus from modo, “just now”) dates from:
the 5th century, originally distinguishing the Christian era from the Pagan era. Cassiodorus appears to have been the first writer to use “modern” (modernus) regularly to refer to his own age (Freund, 1957, cited by O’Donnell, 1979, 235, n. 9).
The word “Modern” entered general usage only in the:
17th-century quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns—debating: “Is Modern culture superior to Classical (Græco–Roman) culture?”—a literary and artistic quarrel within the Académie française in the early 1690s.
The distinction between “modernity” and “modern” did not arise until:
the 19th century (Delanty 2007).
Jonathan Culler (2001) describes narratology as:
comprising many strands ‘implicitly united in the recognition that narrative theory requires a distinction between “story,” a sequence of actions or events conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse, and “discourse,” the discursive presentation or narration of events.’
Narratology is:
both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception.
How has the meaning of the term “modern” changed over the years?
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What does “classical modernity” mean
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How does Clement Greenberg define “modernism”?
“the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”
What, according to Kovacs, is missing from Greenberg’s definition of modernism?
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What are some of the ways in which the term “avant-garde” has been defined?
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What is Peter Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde?
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What is the relationship between “modernism” and “the avant-garde”?
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“modernism” and “the avant-garde”, Do they refer to the same thing or are they opposed to each other?
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Should “the avant-garde” be defined as “political activism” or “aesthetic radicalism” (15)?
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What are the three main ways in which cinema became ‘modern’ in the 1920s?
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What are some of the characteristics of ‘French impressionism”?
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Why does Kovacs argue that French Impressionism was “the most synthetic phenomenon of early modern cinema” (19)?
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The last film that was screen in class was Jean Epstein’s The Three-Sided Mirror (1927). What makes this film a good example of French Impressionism?
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What were the major stages in the institutionalization of art cinema?
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What is the relationship between the following three terms: “avant-garde,” “experimental,” and “underground”? What kind of film practice do they refer to?
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What is Peter Wollen’s theory of “the two avant-gardes”?
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Why does Kovacs argue that the distinction between modernism and the avant-garde does not apply to cinema?
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what is the difference between Film Theory and Film Critisism?
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what is generally considered the “Apparatus of going to the movies?”
Projection + Public + Paying
What is the “Cinema of Attractions”?
a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.” This meaning that cinema could be created, not necessarily as an entertainment function but more along the lines that a film would attract its spectators by presenting something exclusive, something unique.
in an article by Gunning he states that Eisenstein states:
“According to Eisenstein, theater should consist of a montage of such attractions, creating a relation to the spectator entirely different from his absorption in ‘illusory imitativeness.’ I pick up this term partly to underscore the relation to the spectator that this later avant-garde practice shares with early cinema: of exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.”
Cinema after 1906, according to Gunning:
pushed towards the structure of linear narrative, and away from the immediacy of the “spectacular image”. He states, “Film [after 1906] clearly took the legitimate theater as its model” (68).
from the notions of he cinema of attractions wiki article, the adoption of narrative remade film as a:
medium of tradition and emulation, placing movies alongside the stage in the artistic establishment.
When Gunning notes that, “It was precisely the exhibitionist quality of turn-of-the-century popular art that made it attractive to the avante-garde,” he links early cinema’s refusal of narrative to a:
refusal of the previous foundations of artistic communication.
To the progressive artists of the early 20th century, film had the ability to produce:
“exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorbtion” (66), and as such, had the ability to affect audiences with power, radical images in motion.
Gunning’s observation that film was potentially robbed of its immediate effectiveness due to the emphasis of narrative over spectacle implies:
that audiences would be less affected by narrative cinema, and thus more accepting of the events taking place within the structure of traditional narrative. Politically, the implications of the insulating narrative extend to the exploitation of familiar linearity to promote quiet acceptance, rather than the inevitable questioning and recontextualization provoked by the “cinema of attraction”.
Recontextualization
definition:
to place (as a literary or artistic work) in a different context.
diegetic absorbtion
definition
absorbed within:
1.
the telling of a story by a narrator who summarizes events in the plot and comments on the conversations, thoughts, etc., of the characters.
2.
the sphere or world in which these narrated events and other elements occur.
Diegesis is:
a style of fiction storytelling which presents an interior view of a world and is: that world itself experienced by the characters in situations and events of the narrative. telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting. In diegesis the narrator tells the story.
what is significant about the date of May 20, 1895?
the Latham Family, using a device called a panoptikon, progected a film of a boxing match before a paying audience in Broadway,.
What is significant about the date of late September 18
C.Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat showed films with thier Phantoscope to paying audiences in Atlanta.
Eidoloscope/Panoptikon
definition
a prototype movie projector. it is perhaps the first widescreen film format, with an aspect ratio of 1.85. It had a film gauge of 51 mm and an aperture of 37 mm by 20 mm. It was instrumental in the history of film in that it created what became known as the “Latham loop”, which are two loops of film, one on each side of the intermittent movement, which act as a buffer between continuously moving sprockets and the jerky motion of the intermittent movement. This relieved strain on the filmstrip and so enabled the shooting and projection of much longer motion pictures than had previously been possible.
Phantoscope
definition
the first projector to allow each still frame of the film to be illuminated long enough before advancing to the next frame sequence. This was different from Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, which simply ran a loop of film with successive images of a moving scene through the camera shutter, which gave a jumbled blur of motion. The Phantoscope, by pausing on each frame long enough for the brain to register a clear single picture, but replacing each frame in sequence fast enough (less than a tenth of a second), produced a smooth and true moving picture.
In the history of film theory the combination of these aspects has crystallized in two main patterns of theorizing cinematic modernism.
One depicts modernism as the result of the aesthetic and technical evolution of the cinema while the other considers it as an alternative stylistic movement appearing in different forms in certain moments of film history.
anti-cinematic definition
Any form of cinema that defies cinematic conventions.
How does the evolutionists’ approach to the classical-modern distinction differ from the style analysts’ approach?
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How does Deleuze understand the classical-modern distinction?
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What dotheorists like John Orr mean when they argue that modernism is “an unfinished project”?
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In the final analysis, how does Kovacs understand the classical-modern distinction?
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What are the major characteristics of classical Hollywood cinema?
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How does North by Northwest exemplify these characteristics? Do you see any ‘modern’ elements in the film or is it entirely ‘classical’?
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What are the two major approaches mentioned in Kovacs’ “Screening Modernism” chapter 2?
Evolutionist Approach
Stylistic Approach
Evolutionists say that the development of modern cinema is from:
the evolution of film language
the Stylistics say that the development of modern cinema is:
that modern cinema is an alternate cinema and co-exists with classical cinema.
The French New Wave is part of the:
Evolutionists.
What is Eric Romare’s position mentioned in “Screening Modernism”?
That Modern Cinema replaces lyric poetry as art
