Unit 2 Exam Flashcards
Study Guide for the final
Be able to name a female filmmaker whose work was screened this semester and what she made.
Agnes Varda made Cleo from 5 to 7.
French New Wave and Traits
- Auteur-director (Authorship)/“Camera-stylo” (Camera-pen)
- Personal films
- Location Filming
- Using Natural Light
- Nonprofessional actors or newcomers
- Innovative use of sound and editing | Rejection of Conventions
- Ordinary characters with Everyday Situations
- Relevance to Youth audience
- Highly reflexive – self-aware –aware of Cinematic medium – playfully self-referencing
Film examples (The 400 Blows, Jules et Jim)
Italian Neorealism and Traits
- Creators with years of experience from 1930s
- Ideology: a need for renewal for people and society
- Films dealt with problems of time, offering optimistic solutions
- 3 big names: Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti
- Non-professional actors
- Location Shooting and Natural Lighting
- “Slice of life” narratives, focusing on everyday people and events
Film Examples ( Rome, Open City, The Bicycle Thieves, Pather Panchali, Killer of Sheep)
Germain Expressionism and Traits
- UFA studio founded in 1917
- Highly stylized aesthetics
- Director and Unit Teams -> Tightly knit group of creators
- Technical Experimentation and Creative Freedom
- Flashback/Framing/Nested Narrative Structures
- Highly expensive
- Competing with films from abroad (Esp. U.S.) and critics from within Germany
Film Examples (Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
Understand the general confines to Hollywood film existent under the Production Code.
- No sex or suggestions
- No child births
- No complete nudity
- No illegal drugs
- No showing how to do a crime
- No crimes going unpunished
- No ridicule of religion
Meshes of the Afternoon
https://ku.kanopy.com/video/meshes-afternoon-0
digital aesthetics and how they function
- Transcoding: Reflects the entanglement and coproduction of computation and media; results in modularity, the quality that makes digital media easier to store, access, transmit, and manipulate (a mixing of cultural and computer layer)
- Modularity: parts remain distinct from any large whole into which they are assembled-consider the relationship between pixels and digital (as opposed to analog images
- Convergence: thanks to modularity, the many modes of media production and expression are now less discrete than they once were—consider websites, which may include text, image, video, audio, etc
- Hypertextuality: denotes an increasingly dynamic and nonlinear navigation of media texts, marked by links; reflects the increased intertextual quality of postmodern aesthetics. Much like media convergence and modality, texts become less discrete than they once were.
-Interactivity: similar to hypertextuality, interactivity denotes the dynamic
and participatory elements of new media texts—consider not only
your online/digital textbook as compared to the printed copy,
but a text like a wiki page that allows users to actively shape a media text.
- Networks: following from interactivity, networks enable the dispersed, collaborative, and interconnected qualities of media texts. Instagram posts exists not just as images on your profile, for example, but as images in the hundreds if not thousands of unique image patchworks of other feeds.
- Virtuality: enabled by the above qualities, virtuality characterizes the highly mediated quality of experience and social interaction via digital media. It signifies a quality of being real but not actual material, and is associated with immersion in simulated environments, but can refer to mediated social immersion as well (how your smart device multiplies your immersion in social networks via several media platforms, as opposed to the sensory immersion of a typical VR experience).
Historical circumstances surrounding the end of the Studio Era and rise and characteristics of New Hollywood
The Studio System:
- The Studio’s Hierarchy and Control
- A few executives at the top make all the big decisions on production, distribution, and exhibition.
- Everyone is under strict contracts. They are employees and property of their Studio, not artists.
- A set of standardizations return after the transition to sound and the rise of the PCA (Production Code Administration)
New Hollywood (started in 1965):
- Influenced by the French New Wave and other International New Wave movements
- The First Generation of Film School Directors: Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, etc.
Aesthetics:
- Location shooting
- Abstract sequences
- No happy endings or unresolved endings
- Depicting a counter-culture or revolutionary underpinning in U.S. Society
- Rejecting Hollywood’s practice of making filmmaking invisible and focusing on innovating
Rise of sound film
The Transition to Sound: Aesthetics
- Scenes were more theatrical and staged like early cinema due to the constraints of the sound and camera technology.
- The camera had to be placed into a box in order to prevent the film recording noise from being picked up by the microphones
The Transition to Sound- Economic
-An economic strain to install all this new sound technology BUT sound brought more people to the theaters. Hollywood cannot resist money.
The Transition to Sound: Social
- For some silent stars and creators, their careers were over. The recent film The Artist (2011) retells this history through the fictional story of a silent film star who flopped with the emergence of talkies and a young actress who rose to prominence in the wake of sound.
- Sound allowed a revamping of what could be done and told with cinema.
Nichols’ 6 modes of documentary, how the modes approach topics, and consider when/why they might be used
Expository: Focused on explaining something to the viewer
Observation: “Life as it is” type of approach
Poetic: Focus on Capturing moods over reality
Participatory: Filmmakers interact with the subjects being captured and are a part of the film
Performative: The filmmaker’s interaction with the subject impacts the way the film is received and the film takes a more subjective and personal approach to the subject that is less concerned with documenting reality and more with expressionistic methods that evoke an emotional connection.
Reflexive: Reflect on and critique the documentary form itself
TV Shows attempt to make money
Commercials and Subscriptions
MTV BRAIN
Characteristics of Experimental Film
M-Mental Imagery/psychological, to evoke responses from viewers
T-Technical innovation/experimentation
V- Voidance of Verbal Language
B-Brevity (the films tend to be shorter in duration)
R-Reflexivity
A-Acollaborative (not collaborative, Auteur films)
I- (highly) Independent in nature (usually not funded by organizations)
N-Non-Narrative structures (often don’t tell stories or the stories are not foregrounded)
three major TV Networks
ABC, NBC, CBS
TV broadcast production process
- ) Development (production companies)
- ) Pilot (network)
- ) Programming (network)
- ) Upfront (advertisers)
- ) Syndication (stations/affiliates)
vertical integration
Own all the means of production through Exhibition
Together the Big 5 and Little 3 studios in the Golden Age of Hollywood formed an oligopoly and were vertically integrated
