The Classical Film Flashcards
What was the purpose of serial manufacturing?
The studios were more inclined to produce a lot of movies that were similar in order to continue to appeal to an audience
What was different about the employment of studio workers in this era?
The studio system hired employees on contracts, mainly European immigrants
What did the producer-unit system lead to?
Lead to the standardization of form: the producer oversees all stages of the filmmaking process
What was the restriction of individual crafts?
The filmmakers had little say on what projects they could work on, and what they could do stylistically to the film
The classical film derives from what?
From classical Hollywood cinema during Hollywood’s Golden Age
What does the classical style possess?
Decorum, tradition, craftsmanship that does not call attention to itself, imitates reality, control of the beholders’ response
What are the characteristics of classical Hollywood cinema?
- Bound by rules that limit individual innovation
- Characterized by formal unity
- Purports to be realistic
- Strives to be comprehensible and unambiguous
- Possesses a fundamental emotional appeal
- Regards telling a story as a film’s chief concern
- Conceals its artifice
- Dominant & important narrative logic
What kind of act-structure does the classical film possess?
Three-act structure… equilibrium – disequilibrium – equilibrium
in media res -> unified chain of causes & effects -> closure
psychologically based character pursues goal -> encounters obstacles, which produce conflict -> and then achieves resolution of some kind
Define causality
Entire narrative chain of events bound together by cause and effect
What is the stylistic system of the classical film designed to achieve?
- Orient the viewer in the diegetic world both spatially and temporally
- Foreground characters and reveal their psychology (reliance on costuming and staging)
- Ensure comprehension of the narrative
- Style is supposed to support the story and appear minimally
