Film Lecture Notes1 6

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WEEK ONE:
Lecture:
Aesthetics: What has absorbed you into this movie? What makes you like it?
- Something that looks nice
- What makes the work work
- Beauty, appeal, connection to work
4 aspects of film:
1. Technology - Industrial Revolution
a. 19th century spirit - inventions, belief of inevitability of technological prowess,
machination.
b. Movies: recreate life in motion.
c. Movies in the air, being created all over at around the same time.
i. 1. P ersistence of vision - still images played quickly and our brain mind
eye puts it together. We connect image A to image B.
1. Thaumatrope: To turn out wonder.
ii. 2. S till photography
iii. 3. Motion camera
iv. 4. F ilm stock/celluloid
v. 5. Motion Picture Printer
vi. 6. P rojector → send strip of celluloid placed in front of light to screen.
d. Technology creates wonders, stimulates experiences
i. 1927 sound
2. Business
a. Movies are thought of as REAL.
b. Bring people together.
c. Taught how to act in society, how to be a part of culture.
d. Put people with their own instincts, dreams.
e. Movies are DREAMS. Better than! → watch a movie = dream together.
f. Roles
i. Producer - financial
ii. Distributor - spreads
iii. Exhibitor - shows
g. Movies in palaces
i. First in 1914.
ii. 1960s television - fall of television
iii. 1970s Lucas and Spielberg - brought movies and theater to the forefront
again.
h. Movie is not controllable. “Let it work it’s power. Don’t interfere.”
3. Entertainment & Art Form
a. Entertainment - tenio tenere - to hold. “That which holds us.”
i. “Jangles nerves,” “warm your heart” → new experience.
1. Something deep inside calling into something deep
a. Abyss into abyss = art.
2. All art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art.
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ii. Literature, Theater, Painting, Music, Dance, Architecture, Sculptures.

Movies are all of these, yet different because it is all seven and yet is also
a technology. Different also because it is modern and is a mass medium.
4. Cultural Product
a. Social dimension → movies made by groups of individuals.
i. Many aspects come from social and cultural environment. Then shows
social and cultural environment and becomes a part of it.
b. Our cultural footprint, our legacy - movies.
Casper wih Edwards 1-30

Cinema invited in 1890s.
-lantern slides.
Isolated figure: Emile Reynaud. → built projecting praxinoscope: spinning drum
(viewers see moving images in a series of mirrors, unlike Zoetrope, which is through slots.)
Edison Kinetoscope→ early way to watch movie (through peephole)
Lumiere Cinematographe. (16 frames as opposed to Edison’s 46 frames/sec.)
Latham Loop → longer loops
Vitascope and Mutoscope.
Singin’ in the Rain
- Offers perspective towards movement from silent to talking film
- Hollywood farcical relationships
- Sound
- Birth of musicals
- Grueling sound recording
The musical number: furthers plot, crystallizes
Singin’ in the Rain (1952) : childlike Don. psychological portrait. “Being in love is
like dancing around in the dark and cold rain.
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
- Aging process the primary concern. Main character is old-fashioned actress →
exaggerated movements and what not.
- Testament to film.
WEEK TWO:
Lecture:
The script
Original - written for the screen
Adaptations - other form based upon
- Can be faithful (tight) or loose
Is Talented Mr. Ripley the movie faithful or loose?
Writer script - “framework” - springboard, catalyst.
- Writer =/= author of movie because a lot of things happen to movie’s script before it
becomes the film itself.
- Development process - other writers change/add
- Writers put themselves in parameters, set genres → write to kinds of films
- Genre is a writer of the script
- Culture (issues, problems, appeals that entail) influences script

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1. Action
2. Characters
3. Dialogue
4. Setting
Director script - “annotate”
- Strong director - Hitchcock (?) → influences writing of movie
- Hires writer, have writer come to house, writer writes, Hitchcock edits,
proofreads
- Is the director the writer of the movie? In a sense, yes.
- Actor could be a writer of the script
- Chaplin - write, direct, act
- Some scripts written around an actor → determines writing
- Audience can determine
- Screenings, people, ending changed.
Text script
Published script
Writers, producers, directors - hold it all together

- After sound cinema - great power and respect of writers
- Back then, the stage respects writer
- 1981 - Jerico Stone 7 years and 77 writers to work on script about child abuse
- 1988: Melodrama released: My Stepmother was an Alien
- "Paddy" Chayefsky - his last movie, took name off credits because the movie had
changed so much it was no longer his writing.
Title:
- Singin’ in the Rain - writer decides
- Zany, weird, singing, musical
Writer also gives subject and the theme.
- Subject - what something is about
- Theme - attitude towards the subject
Life happens to us in two ways:

1. Routine, habitual, we pay no attention
a. Happens again and again, yet very complex
2. Accidents, surprises, unexpected
a. We never fully assess both cases.
How do we assess?
Step back, recall, relive it. How? Story form. Stories make something mean something.
- Much of our lives does with stories - news, games, books...
Writer tells a story:

Stylized life like a story - profound - storytelling thought of sacred - magic
- We cannot exist without stories
- All life can be put into story
- Further stylization applied → plot → history of events that transpire in a certain work

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Plot necessities
1. Causality - events need relationship with space and time for c ontinuity
2. Character - dream, hope, vision → events happen to them → we see whether
visions are realized→ watches them grow (progression, regression…)
3. Climax
4. Antagonist - can be person, group of people, event of nature, social institution →
creates conflicts in which goal of protagonist is not realized
5. Setting - incarnated in specific time and place
Aristotle - watched plays from 150 years ago.
Why did they work?
- They fit in a linear, Aristotelian, classic structure → eventually got more specific
(genre fitting) and more complex.
Episodic structure - gaps in between - connected but not connected
- Kubrick’s Space Odyssey
Contextual structure - even looser - held together by mood, theme.
- DW Griffith’s Intolerance - lots of stories held together
What is the structure and why?
- Takes us deeper into movie
Narrative
- How the story is told, the arrangement used to unfold the plot.
Character -
- revealed by what they do and say and what others do and say
- color/clothing
- camera angle
- lighting
- editing
- music
- age of an actor
- action/reaction
- talking/silence
Set - space and time

- Time (temporal setting)
1. Time period
2. Duration
3. Seasons
Point of View - physically and ideologically situates us space and time of movie.
1st person - I
Why rare? → You’ll never see actor unless in mirror.
3rd person - he or she “limited”
Omniscient - see what characters can’t see.
Motif
- That which recurs.

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- To emphasize and s tructures
Allusions
- A reference to something
- To replicate emotion, to create character backstory, extends meaning
Casper and Edwards: 34-68

Poetics - Aristotle
- Epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, music of the flute, of the lyre
- All general conception modes of imitation
- Differ in
1. Medium
a. Music of the flute and of the lyre → harmony and rhythm
alone are employed
b. Dancing → rhythm alone without harmony
c. tragedy, comedy, and other kinds of poetry → rhythm,
language, and harmony are all used. In some cases, as in
lyric poetry, all three are used together, while in other
cases, as in comedy or tragedy, the different parts come in
to play at different times.
2. Objects
a. Objects imitated: tragedy and epic poetry deal with
characters who are better than us, while comedy and
parody deal with characters who are worse than us.
3. The manner or mode of imitation
a. many poets tell straight narratives while Homer
alternates between narrative and accounts of speeches
given by characters in his narrative. In tragedy and
comedy, the poet speaks exclusively through assumed
characters.
b. Personal or impersonal
All forms of art are in some sense mimetic.
- We love imitations and representations - we can enjoy and learn from them.
As poetry evolved: tragedy of the lofty tradition and comedy of the mean tradition.
4 innovations of tragedy (having reached its final form):
1. Aeschylus is responsible for the first innovation, reducing the number of the chorus and
introducing a second actor on stage, which made dialogue the central focus of the
poem.
2. Second, Sophocles added a third actor and also introduced background scenery.
3. Third, tragedy developed an a ir of seriousness, and the meter changed from a trochaic
rhythm, which is more suitable for dancing, to an iambic rhythm, which is closer to the
natural rhythms of conversational speech.
4. Fourth, tragedy developed a plurality of episodes, or acts.
Comedy deals with the RIDICULOUS.
- Ridiculous - kind of ugliness that does harm to anybody else
How tragedy and epic poetry differ

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1. Tragedy can have several different verses, told dramatically, not narratively
2. Tragedy confined to a single day (typically) - shorter
3. Tragedy has its own unique elements
Tragedy involves:
1. Mimesis
2. Is serious
3. Action is complete and with magnitude
4. Made of language of rhythm and harmony
5. Separated throughout
6. Performed rather than narrated
7. Accomplishes catharsis
6 parts of a tragedy
1. The spectacle - 6th
2. Melody -5th
3. Diction - 4th
4. Character - 2nd
5. Thought - 3rd
6. Plot → considered most important.
Characters must drive action, not vice versa
Magnitude - can’t be too long - must fit in the eyes of the audience (for tragedy, the memory of
the audience)
Unity of plot comes from connecting episodes of a life into a coherent story.
History vs poetry:
- History deals with what has been, poetry deals with what might be.
- History deals with cases while poetry deals with universal truths
- History < poetry
*As a medium that arouses pity and fear, tragedy is most effective when events occur
unexpectedly and yet in a logical order. The ideal is to have the audience see the final outcome
of a tragedy as the necessary consequence of all the action that preceded it, and yet have that
outcome be totally unexpected.
Complex plots may have both p eripeteia (reversal of fortune) and a nagnorisis (discovery or
recognition)
- + suffering
Tragedy parts -
These are the Prologue, Episode, Exode, and a choral portion consisting of Parode and
Stasimon. In addition, some tragedies have songs from the stage and a Commos, a lamentation
sung by both actor and chorus. The Parode is the first full statement of the chorus; everything
that precedes it is Prologue. The Stasimon is a choral song in a certain meter, while action that
takes place between choral songs is Episode. Everything that follows the last choral song is
Exode.
The best kinds of plots are those that arouse fear and pity.
3 plots that should be avoided-
1. A good man going from happiness to misery.

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2. A bad man going from misery to happiness

3. A bad man going from happiness to misery
Best plot - a man that is neither good or bad whose downfall comes from hamartia (error
in judgment)
1) It must focus around one single issue
(2) the hero must go from fortune to misfortune, rather than vice versa
(3) the misfortune must result from hamartia
(4) the hero should be at least of intermediate worth, and if not, he must be better—never
worse—than the average person.
Pity and fear must come from plot not spectacle.

- We feel pity/fear when family or friends hurt each other (knowingly/unknowingly)
4 requirements of a tragic hero:
1. Must be good
2. Good-like qualities must be appropriate
3. Must be realistic
4. Must be consistent
Lusis - denouement - should come n aturally through plot.
6 types of anagnorisis (discover or recognition)

1. Recognition by means of signs and marks
2. Contrived by author
3. Prompted by memory
4. Through deductive reasoning
5. Through faulty reasoning on part of a disguised character
6. Through the natural sequence of the plot, of the events of the play
Aristotle makes seven final remarks about how a poet should go about constructing a
plot: (1) The poet should be sure to visualize the action of his drama as vividly as possible. This
will help him spot and avoid inconsistencies. (2) The poet should even try a cting out the events
as he writes them. If he can himself experience the emotions he is writing about, he will be able
to express them more vividly. (3) The poet should first outline the overall plot of the play and
only afterward flesh it out with episodes. These episodes are generally quite brief in tragedy but
can be very long in epic poetry. As an example, Aristotle reduces the entire plot of the O dyssey
to three sentences, suggesting that everything else in the poem is episode. (4) Every play
consists of d esis, or complication, and lusis, or denouement. Desis is everything leading up to
the moment of peripeteia, and lusis is everything from the peripeteia onward. (5) There are four
distinct kinds of tragedy, and the poet should aim at bringing out all the important parts of the
kind he chooses. First, there is the complex tragedy, made up of peripeteia and anagnorisis;
second, the tragedy of suffering; third, the tragedy of character; and fourth, the t ragedy of
spectacle. (6) The poet should write about focused incidents, and not about a whole epic story.
For instance, a tragedy could not possibly tell the entire story of the Iliad in any kind of
satisfying detail, but it can pick out and elaborate upon individual episodes within the Iliad. (7)
The chorus should be treated like an actor, and the choral songs should be an integral part of the
story. Too often, Aristotle laments, the choral songs have little to do with the action at all.
Parts of diction (sound): letter, syllable, conjunction, article, noun, verb, case, and speech

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- Express self with clarity and not meanness.

- Not too much ordinary prose
- Not too much foreign metaphors
1. Epic poetry must maintain unity of plot - Homer’s Iliad = excellent

2. Epic poetry share many elements of tragedy
a. Differences: epic poetry is much longer and epics are in heroic meter while
tragedy is in iambic
Not all poetry is about the probable.
Tragedy > epic poetry

First, it has all the elements of an epic poem and has also music and spectacle, which the epic
lacks.
Second, simply reading the play without performing it is already very potent.
Third, tragedy is shorter, suggesting that it is more compact and will have a more concentrated
effect.
Fourth, there is more unity in tragedy, as evidenced by the fact that a number of tragedies can
be extracted from one epic poem.
Critical Film Analyses

- Mildred Piece (1945) - example of movie better than book
- L.A. Confidential (1997) - hard to adapt such a complicated book
- Took out all plot lines without the three main
- Won Oscars - critically acclaimed
- The Hours (2002) -
- Dichotomy of time: the structure vs actually living
- Several different narratives, unconventional, not chronological narrative
structure
- Temporal tension -
- Intensified by abrupt cuts
- By melancholic arpeggios
Bordwell 72-98: Narrative Form

Narrative is the fundamental way that humans make sense of the world.
- We feel driven to know how the action develops, how characters react, how it all ends.
Principles of narrative form
- We expect connected series of incidents
- We assume characters and the actions they will take
- We expect conflicts to arise and eventually be resolved.
- End satisfies or cheats expectations
Narrative - a chain of events linked by cause and effect and occurring in time and space
- Series of changes occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect.
- NEEDS cause and effect → connections create story.
There are many choices in telling a story
- How you want to order it

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- How to organize flashbacks/chronology

- Who’s viewpoint
- Important to consider how these CHOICES affect VIEWERS.
Story - chain of events in CHRONOLOGICAL order.
Plot - the choices about organization of telling a story.
- Consists of the action that happens before us
- Differs from story through causality, time, space.
Diegesis - the total world of the story action
Cause and Effect-
- Characters create causes and register effects.
- Have traits (usually more obvious than in real life)
- Sometimes causes are hidden for audiences to figure out
- Sometimes effects are hidden but later become major causal and thematic motif
Time -
- Order - (flashback or flashforwards.)
- Flashbacks can shape the viewer’s expectations across a whole film.
- Duration-
- A protagonist’s life or a span of 4 days
- AND screen duration → time in movie theater.
- Condensing and expanding possible
- Frequency-
- Allows us to see same action in different ways
Space -
- Locales, “setting”, story can lead us to imaginary spaces too
Opening -
- Raises expectations (setup)
- May arouse curiosity with in medias res (beginning the middle).
Development-
- Change - change in knowledge
- Goal-oriented plot → in search for an object (Lost Ark)
- Time and space central to plot formatting
Climax and Closings-
- Climax brings about tension and is the final chance to resolve conflict.
- Narrows range of possible outcomes - succeed or fail
NARRATION - what information to give the spectator?
Range of information-
- The Birth of a Nation - unrestricted - our knowledge is broad.
- We know and hear and see more than any of the characters can
- Omniscient.
- The Big Sleep - restricted - our knowledge is limited to protagonist’s knowledge
- We know and hear and see only what one character can
Range of knowledge-
- Oscillation between restricted and unrestricted in films - limits our knowledge
Who knows what when?
Depth of Story Information-

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- How “far” to plunge into a character’s psychological state

- Objective or subjective?
- perceptual / mental subjectivity
- POV Shots (can technically refer to both range of knowledge or depth of
knowledge)
Narrator-
- May be a character in the story or outside, omniscient.
- Can just be a voice
- Can be highly subjective and narrate based on what only one character knows
WEEK THREE:
Discussion:
First paper -
- First person inside vs first person outside
- Faithful adaptation - balance between loose and strict
- Configuration vs structure
- Configuration - the way the story is put together - chronology - finer details like
dream sequences blahblah → details used to obtain structure
- # of lines of action
- Chronology
- Objective or subject take of material
- Structure - larger organization
Aesthetics:
- Something that looks nice
- What makes the work work
- Beauty, appeal, connection to work
Eadweard Muybridge - photographer - persistence of motion - 24 cameras to sequentially take

pictures to prove that the horse has all four legs off the ground - led to idea of cinema as cinema
being a series of photographs
The Nickelodeon - first home of motion picture - first in Pittsburgh
Subject: what the film is about

Theme: the attitude towards the subject
Life: habitual and unorganized - messy, non sequitur

Story: moments of life that we pick out of the chaos - certain memories are associated
Plot: how the story develops : the structure that envelops story
Narrative: the way that a plot unfolds
Lumiere brothers: put technologies together to record

Made c inematographe - very lightweight, easy to travel with, shoot + print + project all
in one machine.

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The Arrival of a Train at the Station - one of the first films - the mythological event in the
history because when they saw the train onscreen the audience thought it was going to burst
out from the screen - myth debunked.
Significance of location?
On platform - like the rest of the people
Introduction of an o ffscreen - people leave the screen and the train does too
Lecture:
Performance - film begins a human face - primal desire to connect with other human beings
- Everyday life - we act to interact with world
- Hard to talk about performance
- visual/oral elements of the movie - actor controls action, character, dialogue
- Dialogue - voice of the actor - intonation (rise and fall) - beats and meaning
- “What are you doing” - all different meanings
- Pauses - pace - meaning
- Silence
- Action - meaning created/changed by
- gesture
- Posture
- Business - fills up space as character talks
- Jasmine - swaying around - unconfident in her new environment
- Straight up and proper - arms touching pearls and hair -
keeps them tightly to her sides - closed off, defensive,
she’s holding herself together
- Repetition - convincing herself of what she’s saying
- Chatty - way to keep her in reality
- When hitting rock bottom - tone soft yet harsh.
- Character - played by actor
- Properties (persona - mask - Greek) of the player
- Physicality - sound, body, face, age, voice… (distinct)
- Don’t necessarily need expressive (something picked up by camera,
draws attention to audience) voice
- Comfortable in body, knows how to MOVE
- Close-up - extraction - face (eyes) extracted for audience.
- Good acting begins with good bone structure (genetics)
- Personality - quality/aura/metaphysicality - picked up by camera
- Talent - act or sing or dance or what
- Mythology - stories about the player
- Real life (interviews, what we know, biography)
- Work on-screen - the characters she plays
- Writer often writes with a persona in mind
- Persona is a determining factor in production
- Hitchcock - “casting is characterization”
First and last sequences - most important
- How the actor first shows up is integral (entrance) - sets persona - first impression
- Ending - lasting impression - what we remember

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Mirrors culture - shows best and worst
Non-professionals on film is okay because:

- Silence and reaction - actors don’t have to say much + do much
- Multiple takes
- Dubbing
Professional
- Can act, can emote
- Can build a certain persona
Star
- Persona is character
- Indelible persona - can entertain and appeal
- Movie is an industry, stars used to sell “product”
- We want to see face, body, voice - can carry our collective consciousness
- Creates desire
- Larger-than-life
Star-Actor
Acting styles
- Primary: pantomimic presentation
- Imitation - actions indicative of meaning
- Silent films
- Delsarte - book has picture of posture which ties to a certain procured emotion
- representational/realistic
- Business, facial expressions, gestures….
- Builds outside in
- Method acting
- Builds character inside out
- Study gestures with perceptual observation
- Look to create character
- Emotive memory
- Procures memory of feeling a certain emotion
- Ensemble - collection
- When you don’t have the action, you react
- When you don’t have the words, you listen
- University-trained players - learned every style of acting - classic
- Same personas for different styles
- Improv
- Let actor transcend screen and script
What makes a good performance?

- Expressive coherence
- If actor playing the role looks and sounds like a character should
- Ensemble
- To play together

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- fitting in a certain setting/period/occupation

- Comfortable in setting, interacting with decor, props
- Consistent
- Display a degree of androgyny
- Matt Damon as Ripley
- Convey thought without doing or saying anything
- Emotions as well (plethora of emotions)
- Beats - ahead, on, behind, off
- Different effects
- Long take or not
- Real life - no breaks, no takes
- When director holds on to actor for a long time - more lifelike.
- Did the character on screen make you FEEL
Director directs the actor’s performance

- Several takes - final take decided by director
- Director explains sets, describes shot sequences…
Casper with Edwards pg 65-116

What is acting?
- Chaplin - one who mimes, mimics, or imitates “real persons.”
- Just like we do in daily life
- Difference between real life?
- As Goffman puts it, it is the arrangement which separates the watchers from the
performers.
- Gestures make distinct separations
- Kuleshov experiment - inexpressive look + various objects = feeling as if
he looked like he was emoting
- Performative writing - writer becomes performer when he “evinces his power of
conducting meaning.
Rhetoric and expressive technique
- Theater - voice more projected and formalized while movement is less frequent and
more emphatic
- Tv news - speak directly to audience, single person anchor
- TV talk show - sit right, enter stage, shake hands without bumping into furniture, make it
look natural
- Dramatic theater -
1. Representational - speaking to self - like audience
2. Presentational - loud, oratory performance - stays in character
- Dramatic movies have characters step outside ongoing action and becoming
commentators
- Two players in parallel arch - equal relation
- But when in diagonal, one player will look “weak” therefore the player
with more important narrative will get focus
- cinema
- pantomime first - move parallel to camera, stood in three-quarter profile

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- later on, distance between actor and camera went from 12 foot to “nine foot”
- enabled more movement in foreground/background…
- later directors started shot/reverse shot style
- the idea that camera could embody player in the scene, look another player in
the eye as well
- close-up for emotion and feelings.
- on stage, eyes follow whoever is moving or talking, but on film, the camera dictates
what is seen
- tight framing leads to actors having to stand still and closer to each other than in
normal encounters.
- each little gesture has to be done right - actors learn to control and modulate
behavior to fit a variety of situations
- each player must be visible - leads to awkward position - groups leave an
opening on the sides for camera aka hypothetical viewer - not natural.
- staginess penetrates real life - can have highly theatrical moments
- naturalistic types of performances - like in Godfather - talking while eating, slurring
lines, pausing…
- great deal of improvisation - spontaneous acting
- improv is still developed as a rhetoric as monologue towards camera
- we can see someone with great disorderliness in order - a character who is
awkward and a player in theatrical control.
- circus acrobatics, vaudeville comedy, jazz music all contribute to the way people stand
and move in films.
Two types of techniques to produce expressions

1. Learned, kinesics, movement vocabulary
- Pantomime - “each emotion had its appropriate gesture and facial expression
- Until recently, the “cookbook of acting” almost defined acting
- Francois Delsarte - Parisian elocutionist - made early attempts to codify
expressive gestures - carried over to America by Steele MacKaye
- Phantom of the Opera cast - influenced
- In films they look at Aubert’s book of expressions to mimic
2. Naturally emote. “Living the part” → proven by William Archer with Mask or Faces? A
study in the Psychology of Acting.
- To disprove Diderot’s argument that players are unaffected by the emotions they
play.
“The construction of plays, the technique of the actors, the age’s growing interest in
psychological science and detection of all sorts, invited the audience to listen for movements
beneath the characters’ public performance.”
- Result: greater emphasis on idiolect of the performer
- Focus on biological symptoms - veins pulsating - convince that it’s not simply imitation
- Old fashioned pantomime can feed our thinking about newer performance techniques.
A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method

- Lee Strasberg popularized term “the Method” - chief proponent from 1920s to 1982.

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- Affective memory - channel memories of emotion in a role

- Method - process of using affective memory to create reality on stage
- Improvisation meant to deal with the exploration of the actor’s and the character’s
feelings.
- Commedia dell’arte - spontaneity with improv - fun, fresh, realistic
- Problem: anticipation
- Player already knows what will happen. Even if he plays with surprise, character
will not have a true response.
- Improvising provides that everything is logical and in response, not just the
player already looking towards the end
- Affective memory
- Ribot - “Psychology of Emotions” - wondered if it was really possible to revive
past emotions
- Mental memory: simple details
- Physical memory: how to control muscles
- Affective memory: sense and emotional
- Very hard to do without interruption.
Bette Davis
- Projecting her personality on screen, then stayed a star by learning the acting craft
- Now Voyager (1942) - challenged producer Hal willis that she could play neurotic
spinster - Academy nomination.
Two kinds of successful actors and actresses
1. Those who project by craftmanship an image to which the public reacts favorably
2. Those who project such an image by sheer force of personality
Bette Davis succeeded at first by projecting an image that was the essence of personality and
survived as a star because she was hard-working enough to learn the acting craft.
- Idea of “new woman” - popular with women.
- Ability to convey psychological aspects of the transformation from ugly duckling to
beautiful swan that makes her role as Charlotte (in Now, Voyager) both challenging and
impressive
- At first wears bulky, dowdy dresses but after 3 month makeover, wears slim
dresses to show slim figure.
- Represented “new women”
- Powerful force of feminism.
- Eyes signified intensity and passion at key moments
- Mr. Skeffington (1944) - goes from ravishingly beautiful to ugly as sin - wide range
- She deals with gaining control of her life, personally and professionally, in real life
- She challenges directors and studio heads
- The Corn is Green (1945)
- Bette wanted to use thirty pounds of padding and a grey wig - heavy make-up to
render realistic performances
- Instead of a strong woman, she plays a martyr
- Still, her personal of the dominant ambitious woman pushes through as
she’s put to the service of the society
- Displays confidence with steady gestures, confident persona
- Superb usage of gestures in All About Eve (1950).

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Clift
- Personality = shy, introvert, troubled, not a man of action, masculinity questioned by the
roles he played
- As George Eastman in A Place in the Sun (1951) - minimalist and subtle- EYES - magnetic
- in shadows - plays behind beat
- Conveys everything in a look
- Conveys his character’s evolution with posture
Elizabeth Taylor
- Personality = has Scarlett O’Hara quality - beautiful, assertive, bossy even, capable of an
ultimately selfish devotion.
Together - they have awesome chemistry
Michael Caine
- The Quiet American (2002)- he BECOMES Fowler
- Demonstrates what is universal and what is particular about human
relationships and cultures
- He seems less like Fowler than being
- “In movies, it is reaction that gives every moment its potency”
Bordwell pg 134-139
Actors, in regard to mise-en-scene, must fit the overall visual design
Mise-en-scene - to put into scene - control over film’s frame (lighting, setting, costume
and makeup, and staging and performance
- Use of faces - expressions
- The eyes - crucial information conveyed in direction of glance, eyelids, shape of
eyebrows…
- Actors must stare at each other, locking eyes and seldom blinking
- Hopkins “if you never blink you’ll keep the audience mesmerized.”
- Combination of facial expressions, tilt, eyebrows convey attitude
- Body used to act too
- Attitude = the way a person stood
- Hands are to the body as what eyes are to the face
Two dimensions of acting
- Individualized - unique character that is not too exaggerated or too underplayed
- Like Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone - different from standard mob boss
- Fit in typecasting - broad ideological stereotype roles
- Stylization - some films want more emotion in dialogue than normal, some films want
more frequent gestures and movements to add plausibility to humor
- Emotion - masked or burst
WEEK FOUR:
Lecture:
Visual Design - Decor, set dressing, the props - any part of a decor that is handled by the actor
(studio built, computer generated…), the setting itself, lighting, color, title design, special effects
Costumes - clothes and accessories, hairstyles, makeup
- Meet Me in St. Louis - created primarily by visual design

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- Episodic structure built around SUMMER - one look and feel - different looks and
feels for each season - colors, textures…
- Each episode built around special occasion
- 1903/1904 - World’s Fair
- Director Minnelli revolutionized visual design - set decorations….
- He started with vaudeville then Broadway shows then went to MGM.
- Created set and characters and decor that CAME TO LIFE.
- Revolutionized musicals too.
- So successful because we were at war - home threatened - family going through
losses - Nazism rampant.
Lighting - photos - light graphine - to write
Photography - to write with light
- Sets mood
- Three point lighting system with variations
- Key light - main source of illumination within image - directed towards principal
subject. Placed on either side of the camera
- Fill light - fills in the shadows created by the key light. Enhances detail, creates
overall harmony. Placed 90 degrees from the key light.
- Back light - main source of illumination from behind a character or object.
- Direction - the way the light falls upon the subject - creates different meanings and
psychological effects
- When backlight brighter in a close-up - creates halo - looks great
- Separates him from the background
- When light comes down up
- Looks scary, ominous, freaky
- When main source is from the front
- Makes face look very flat
- When light comes top to bottom
- Quantity - amount of life
- High-key lighting - happens when we have a lot of key and fill light. EVERYTHING
IS LIT.
- Low-key lighting - when we have a lot of fill but little key.
- harsh/hard - imperfections, details revealed
- Noon - harshest light
- soft/diffused - reflective, blemishes not revealed
- 20 minutes after sunrise and before sunset - softest light
- Stock - registers sharpness or lack of clarity of an image - ultimately - amount of
detail/resolution
- Fast stock - very sensitive to light - very grey - very indefinite
- Short stock - very insensitive to light - loss of light - very clear and defined edge.
- Gauge + stock affects resolution.
- Gauge - graininess - digital resolution where there is a certain amount of
data/information in the frame - the more gauge the more information
- Sizes -
- Increase size - brighter, clearer, more defined - 70mm more detail
- Color -

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- Too many colors in documentary - overwhelming

- Artistic enterprise - colors are not real - all have been planned out and stylized.
- Light reveals everything.
- Director takes light and stylizes.
- Something deep inside artist -- emotions and feelings has
gotten inside of us
- Who the main character is just with color - contrast
- Which is more real - color or black-white
- movies - we see colors in dark - more bright
- Black-white - there are several gradations between black black and white
white.
- Black-white more dramatic?
- Black-white accentuations contrasts
- Color - able to convey more emotion, shows feeling
- Neither is more real or dramatic… all it depends on is the subject matter
- Title of the Movie
- Credit design - Talented Mr. Ripley - what does it reveal?
- What are the green/purple lines about - emotional or signifying wealth
- Fragmented lines revealed Ripley’s fragmented nature
Special Effects
1. Special effects makeup
a. Character makeup - done in studio/set - practical
b. Special effects makeup - great change/transformation in body “turning into
werewolf” - digital
c. Street makeup
2. Mechanical special effects
a. Stage techniques - pyrotechnics - explosions
3. In-camera special effects
4. Post-production special effects
a. Computer generated images
i. Can change time of day - lighting
ii. Can put characters in setting
iii. Can create entire set and background digital
iv. Correct mistakes
Define character in the frame

How do clothes, lighting… direct attention to single character
Setting - when and where
1903 St. Louis - Most important decor in the first scene - the HOUSE
Anything about decor that announces conflict - horse-drawn carriage and car driving
past - America is changing - Industrial Revolution
mood - feeling of the movie

Atmosphere - visual design creates atmosphere which creates meaning

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Objective correlative - abstract concrete
Motif - visual motifs - Meet Me in St. Louis - the house = subject

Color - move characters close or far from a situation
- Has symbolic resonance - yellow - happiness/disease
- Aesthetics is based on the real world - human psychology
Discussion:
Pantomime - motions that convey emotion
Cure - visual design + performance creates sense of claustrophobia, uneasiness
- Glass of water - metaphorical to himself
- Hypnotizing, mesmerizing others
- Props
- Relation to one another - distance highlights separation - sudden closeness is strange

Meet Me in St. Louis
- Structure of 4 faded seasonal photographs - film is a memory and establishes nostalgic
tone of the piece
- Decor: Vincente Minnelli finds decor integral to his work
- Can’t separate characters from their milieu → surrounding is all part of a
character’s personality
- Carrier of context → shapes story’s spatial-temporal dimension
- Minnelli goes beyond - creates spatial-temporal atmosphere that has
something to do with the olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic sensations as well
as the visual and aural ones - also with sentiment and emotion
- Delineates character - bust of couple - mirrors the girls’ pose
- Signifies how people of this period copied the art of the times
- Projects states of soul - Autumn and the swirling leaves and dust, the wiry
branches of the black trees… express wild/sinister imaginings.
- Minnelli musicals: window + balcony - contains “dialect of
immanence-transcendence, present-future, reality-fantasy
- Ponderances for dreams
- Color: records and reveals - builds scene in spatial-temporal dimensions, atmosphere,
mood, character
- Integral part of structure
- Affecting emotions + serves as expression of plot, conflict, characters,
theme
- Four seasons are designated colors - summer red, autumn orange, winter blue,
spring white.
- When all seems lost, color drains from frame
- DARKNESS - climax comes about as color rushes through the house.
- Opening Musical Sequence: Meet Me in St. Louis
- Touches every dramatic base:
- Advances plot by introducing house and its members
- Establishes conflict

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- Provides context and mood

- Faded photograph turns to color - breathes - moves a bit - comes to life
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

- Driven forward by tension of knowing what is real and what is not
- Action takes place in new apartment - Guy and Rosemary redecorate dark
apartment with bright colors.
- Beautiful but… not quite right
- Camerawork - Fraker snakes through the halls of the apartment at low angle
- Bodies loom larger, heads and shoulders disappear - introducing disconcerting
atmosphere
- 25 mm lens - develop familiarity of apartment through narrow halls and
doorways
- Unusual frame compositions + depth of field = emphasize increasing emotional
distance growing suspicion between Guy and Rosemary
- First sexual encounter in new home - distance between the couple remains
- Color + costumes
- Rosemary appears in yellow like the dream apartment - fragile doll in dollhouse
- Hairstyle + makeup
- Rosemary first sports girlish pony-tails and bangs - she gets a pixie cut
- Rejection to her new identity as a mother
- Marks point where health declines
- Makeup darker - looks sick, pale, and skinny
- Polanski sketched designs all by himself, hence great visual coherency
- Great reviews - said to have inspired “devil children” films
Babette’s Feast (1987)

Danish writer - writes about food short story - then Danish director-screenwriter Gabriel Axel
turns it into a hit.
- Opens in flat plane of gray sea
- About two girls + Babette who forsake outside extravagances in favor of ascetic
living
- Babette wins lottery faced with choice of leaving or not
- Repression vs expression
- Juxtaposition of ascetic lifestyle and outside world pleasures
- Village limited to color palette of grays and browns - plain clothing --
sparse interiors - weather remains under gray cloud cover
- Outside world - ornate, brighter, color palette starts off dark green and
pale blue - sense of elegance
- Babette as physical manifestation of conflict
- Appears at sisters’ door in hooded black coat - air of mystery
- In Jutland, her clothing is simplistic BUT auburn hair and color on lips
hint restrained warmth
- Consistently photographed in direct sunlight - centralizes character as
major agent of change.
- Climax (narratively and visually): anniversary dinner

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- Splendor comes from meal’s details

- Not meant to be a lot of dialogue - there’s hardly a story- just a series of portraits.
Est-Ouest (East-West) (1999)

Opening of blue-gray ocean waves establishes color scheme and visual motif
- Desaturated colors will predominate
- Underscores somber mood and bleak atmosphere of Kiev
- Lighting is diffuse and flat - bland, claustrophobic feel. Exterior shots shot in gray
cloud cover
- Water will come to represent hope
Red quickly changed from representation of Western consumption to visuals of pain and
Stalinist power in Russia (Socialist banners)
Changes in lighting and colors are very pronounced
- suggests instances of happiness
Visual components key to establishing spatial-temporal components of a period piece setting
- Costume, hair, make-up all create believable Russia AND underscore grueling passage of
seven years Marie must endure in her quest for escape.
- Greasy, limp hair and pallid face of Marie helps imply all she has gone through in
a single image
- Catherine Deneuve’s Gabrielle - she emphasizes the separate world she lives in
with her clean clothes, fancy dress amid the poverty and austerity of the
threadbare garments and pale visages
- Certain props are significant
- Marie’s French passport - link to former identity - being ripped up = loss of
former self
- Pile of dusty books - in French and come to replace passport as link to Western
identity and source of comfort
- Critically acclaimed - got Academy and Globe nods as best Foreign Film in 2000.
Bordwell pg 112 - 159

Mise-en-scene - most obvious
“Putting into scene” → considers aspects of film that overlap with the art of theater:
setting, lighting, costume, makeup, staging, and performance.
- directors plan in advance the kind of shots they want to shoot
- George Melies - stage magician and caricaturist - noticed how a bus turned into a hearse
when the camera jammed in between - cinematic conjuring
- Built one of the first film studios (Star-Film) - made hundreds of short fantasy
and trick films based on strict control over every element in frame
- IMAGINATION
- Setting - “some film masterpieces use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in
counterpoint to nature, which is the true leading character.
- Can choose location or construct setting.
- Can overwhelm actors or can be reduced to nothing
- Reduced to nothing like Bram Stroker’s Dracula - darkness voids setting
- Color is an important component - color palettes suggest mood and change in
color suggests change in mood or some narrative development.

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- Use of miniatures - economize

- Digital special effects works wonders too
- Use of props - object in the setting that has a function within the ongoing action
- Can become motif (color adds to it, too)
- Costume and Makeup -
- Costumes can play causal roles - Speed - Annie’s Wildcat jacket gives clue for
Jack to outwit the bomber.
- Can also be motif, enhancing characterization and tracing changes in attitude
- Coordinated with setting or sometimes purely for graphic qualities
- Color design is important - what colors stand out of neutral backgrounds
- Women in Love
- Opening: shallow character lives conveyed with saturated
primary colors in costume and setting
- Middle: characters discover love - pale pastels predominate
- Ending: characters’ ardor cooled - colors have almost
disappeared, scenes are dominated by pure black and white
- Technology can graft virtual costumes onto CG characters
- Makeup used to make actors look like historical personages
- Makeup seen mostly in horror and scifi
- Rubber and plasticine create bulges, bumps, extra organs, artificial skin…
- Today… idea of makeup is to pass by unnoticed - quietly accentuate qualities of
actor’s face
- Males usually wearing makeup as well.
- Eyeliner and mascara enhances direction of glance
- Expressively shaped eyebrows - lengthened eyebrows enlarge face while
shorter brows make the face more compact. Slightly rising curve implies
gaiety while slighting sloping implies sadness. Thick straight brows are
commonly applied to men to reinforce impression of a hard, serious gaze.
- CG can do some cool body stuff
- Lighting
- Lighter and darker areas in frame help create overall composition of each shot
and guide our attention to certain objects and actions
- Shadow can conceal, light can reveal
- Lighting can also articulate textures
- Highlight - patch of relative brightness of a surface
- Shadows - patch of darkness (shading) or cast shadow onto something else
- Creates shape: the proper use of light can embellish and dramatize every object -
Josef von Sternberg
- Sets up scale of importance - most clearly lit figure may be most important
- Four aspects of lighting
1. Quality
- Intensity of illumination
- Hard creates defined shadows, crisp textures, sharp
edges
- Soft creates diffused illumination
2. Direction

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- Frontal light - gets rid of shadows

- Sidelight - sculpts character’s features
- Backlighting - creates silhouettes
- Paired with frontal lighting, can create contour - rim
lighting
- Underlighting - distorts features, create dramatic horror effects
- Top lighting - can create glamorous image, can convey harshness
3. Source
- Setting has many lamps and lights, but they don’t produce the
actual lighting, and are backed up by studio lighting
- Key light provides greatest illumination and casts strongest
shadows
- Fill light - less intense illumination that fills in, softening or
eliminating shadows cast by key light.
- Custom of using three lights: key, fill, back
- High-key lighting - overall lighting design that uses fill light and
backlight to create relatively low contrast between brighter and
darker areas.
- Low-key lighting - stronger contrasts and sharper, darker
shadows
- Chiaroscuro - extremely dark and light regions within the
image
- Applied often to somber, threatening, or mysterious
scenes
- Often, directors make it so that as character move, the light
changes to match equal intensities, although not realistic
4. Color
- White of sunlight or yellow of incandescent room lamps
- Abrupt change in color can be used to highlight emotion
- Light and shade hard to deal with
- Staging: Movement and Performance
- Directors control the figures (which can be animals, puppets, animation, robots,
monsters, blahblah) we see onscreen and what they do.
- Most of the time… it’s about an actor’s performance (appearance, gestures, facial
expressions, voice, effects)
- Acting approached as a question of realism
- Acting now seems real, but looking back, acting thought of as real
in the past now seems greatly deliberate or stylized.
- Comedy - surface realism
- Fantasy and action films, too, encourage stylized performances
- Acting should be examined according to its functions in the film’s
overall formal design
Two dimensions of acting
- Individualized - unique character that is not too exaggerated or too
underplayed

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- Like Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone - different from

standard mob boss
- Fit in typecasting - broad ideological stereotype roles
- Stylization - some films want more emotion in dialogue than normal,
some films want more frequent gestures and movements to add
plausibility to humor
- Emotion - masked or burst
- Motion and performance capture
- Dots on face help capture movements of facial expression and movement
- Motion - entire body
- Performance - face
- Predigital, actors would have heavy prosthetics and makeup in fantasy
films
- Some films underline how actors are a graphical element in a frame
- Some alternative takes of a shot can allow for the editor to select best gestures
and expressions and create a COMPOSITE performance better than any
sustained performance
- Camera techniques
- Camera can be at any distance from a character
- If far away, actor may need to gesture broadly
- If close up, a twitch will come across clearly
Putting it all together:
Psychologist Tim Smith had viewers put on glasses that would track eye movement
while watching There Will Be Blood
- Primary areas of interest are FACES and HAND GESTURES
- Dialogue important - character speaking prominently watched
- Directors direct attention
- Through lighting, positioning of actors, camera angles, directors make us watch
what they want us to watch
- Space - each frame is like a painting
- We tend to view upper half, because that’s where faces are
- Bilateral symmetry - balance between right and left halves.
- Compositional balance most simply achieved by centering frame on
human body
- Unbalanced shots create strong effects - create suspense or to make a point
- Contrast draws attention to the eye
- Showy, colorful costume will draw attention in front of a subdued setting
- Warm colors like red orange yellow tend to attract attention
- Subtle differences are enough for us to detect
- Monochromatic color design - filmmaker emphasizing a single color -
varying it only in purity or lightness
- MOTION draws attention to audience
- Scene Space - depth cues to represent shapes on screen as three dimensional
- Depth cues - space has both volume and several distinct planes
- Familiar objects give us a sense of volume

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- Otherwise, volume is suggested by shape, shading, and

movement
- Planes are layers of space - determined by how far away from camera
- Foreground, middle ground, background
- Overlap - something that overlaps more area is considered closer
to us
- Lighting defines planes
- Color creates overlapping planes - background cooler
colors and warm colors come forward
- Movement - ties planes and volume together
- Aerial perspective - hazing of more distant planes
- Overlap of edges, cast shadows, size diminution
- Linear perspective - parallel lines converging at a distant
vanishing point conveys depth
- Monocular depth cues ^ - illusion of depth requires input from only one eye
- Stereopsis - binocular depth cue - two eyes see world from slightly different
angles
- 2D films have no lens and thus no stereoptic effect
- 3D films use two lenses, imitating separation of eyes
- 3D glasses create stronger illusion of depth
Mise en scene serves to create a dynamic relation between foreground and background
Shallow space composition - comparatively little depth - most distant planes seem only
slightly separated
Deep space composition - significant distance between planes
- Time - directors govern what we see when we see it and for how long we see it
- Speed cues - we pick it up
- We scan a shot for information - modified expectations as eyes roam around
frame
- Scanning greatly affected by movement or lack thereof
- We also scan the depths - background can be used to create expectations
- “With the same frame, the director can organize the action so that
preparation for what will happen next is seen in the background
of what is happening now.”
- We think that faces reveal more than backs do, so we tend to gloss over
backs and focus on frontality
- Different people turning away at different times gives attention
to these different characters
- Frontality is powerful when integrated into the scene’s
unfolding drama
- Denying frontality is powerful as well
- Suspense of reveal
- Withdrawal of face into the darkness can mean shame
Narrative Functions of Mise-en-Scene in Our Hospitality

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- Directorial choices about Mise-en-Scene can advance narrative and create pattern of
motifs all while creating gags (Our Hospitality is a comedy)
- Cause and effect narrative of the movie accentuated by setting, lighting,
costume…
- Motifs
- Couple fighting - narrative unity strengthened while also being a joke on
the contradictions surrounding the idea of hospitality
- Love Thy Neighbor sampler - change in action motivated by item of
setting
- Comedy arises most out of staging and performances
- Buster Keaton uses Mise-en-Scene to create all sorts of gags
- Setting, costumes (woman disguise)
- The fish on the line
- Willie is fishing and hauls up a tiny fish, soon he is pulled into the water
by a giant fish
- Motif as in climax - he realizes that as Canfield is falling so must he - he
ends up dangling over a waterfall from a log.
WEEK FIVE:
Lecture:
Composition of light
- Taking an image that is flat and making it full of depth
- Film 2 dimension into 3 dimensional
- 3 aspects of composition
1. Framing
Framing - boundaries of the picture - art - select and order
- Gives image a structure, structural unity
- Classical frame - Meet Me in St. Louis, Singing in the Rain- dimensions 4:3 or 1.33:1
- Mid50s - widescreen - dimensions 5.5:3 or 1.85:1
- 50s - anamorphic - dimensions 7:05:3 or 2.35:1
- We frame our pictures so they stand out
- Direct interest in the frame - CENTER - or purposely off-center to create suspense
- When most of action is going on the top half of the frame - we feel overwhelmed.
- The edge - tension drama - being on edge = stressful, easy to lose balance
- Which side is stronger? - right, because we read from left to RIGHT
- Fracture/splinter frame - visual design, in performance…
- Frame changes shape - meaning is being conveyed - you frame the ESSENTIAL - you can
break the rule though - 6 zones of offscreen space that film utilizes - sometimes essential
is found there
6 zones: above, below, right, left, in front of the camera, behind the set
- How to use: things can come in, sounds can come from offscreen
A Place in the Sun (1951) - why are the 6 zones used - putting the world of the other dancers in
offscreen space - they don’t matter - only face, eyes - takes more and more space - shows love -
they transcend the world, nothing else matters -

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2. Staging - arrangement of a player with another player in relationship to the four

walls, set dressing, decor, props, and lighting scheme
How meaning is created - PROXEMIC PATTERN
- distance, the space in between two actors
- Shapes -
- LINE - How everything is lined up -
- Horizontal - sleeping, dead - conveys peace, tranquility
- Vertical - cities - commanding, strong, power, energetic
- Diagonal - unstable, dynamic, emotional, unstable
- Jagged - disorder, confusion, chaos
- Planes - the more planes, the more space is opened, creating depth
- Through sometimes, you want one plane - flatness
- Flat space vs deep space
- People in frame still or static -
- Right to left movement or left to right?
- Right to left - moves against our normal eye movement - creates
attention
- Toward or away from camera?
- Forward is confrontational
- Top to bottom - you get power, bottom to top, you lose that power
A Place in the Sun (1951) - proxemic pattern -
- They get away from the ballroom dancers - movement from right to left - stronger
motion
- The two characters get closer and closer
- Shapes - shapes get bigger - closeness
- Lines - diagonal and jagged - why use these to show intense love? - things will get hard,
hectic, anticipation of what is to come.
- Planes - reduction of planes - from three planes to two planes
- Movement - no movement with two characters, ballroom dancers in the background -
static
3. Photographing - camera decides closeness (proxemic pattern of how close WE

are the onscreen subject)
6 proxemic patterns
1. Extreme long shot - most buildings, trees
2. Long shot - closer to character
3. Medium long shot - knees up, background much smaller
4. Medium shot - waist up
5. Close-up - shoulder up, just the face
6. Extreme close-up - one aspect of the face
Time and Space are relative - anything you do with space affects time
- The more we see, the shorter time feels
ANGLE: Camera normally placed 5 feet, 5 inches off the ground

- Average height
- Sometimes camera can be high or low angle

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Which one plays faster, normal angle or high or low?

High or low - plays faster because it’s more interesting
MOVING THE CAMERA: pan, tilt, track….
A Place in the Sun (1951) - Photography

Proximity - we get closer and closer to the two characters
Angle - At first normal, then low angle - to create tension and to idealize them
Camera movement - not very much, mostly still
Perspective - camera can be objective/subjective - can confine us physically in the space and
psychologically affect us
Subjective - we enter the mind/thought of character we see from
Composition creates space. We can never slow down time, with camera, we can slow it down
with slow-motion, freeze time. We can also freeze and confine space. - WHY
Discussion:
Mise en scene - when, where and how you see what you see
- Made up of visual design, composition, temporal design
- French for placing on stage
- Arrangement (composition) of everything within the frame (visual design) in
terms of camera movement and according to an interval of time (temporal)
Composition vs. Visual Design
- How does the frame showcase visual design vs what’s in the frame
- Composition: framing/staging/photography
- Framing: select and order, separate and emphasize, offscreen space
- Classical rule = show what is essential
- Staging: proxemic patterns, lines and planes, performer movement

Composition:
- Lens have their own focal length - above 50mm = very long/ below 50mm = very wide
- normal/middle focal-length lens (approx 50 mm)
- Reproduce depth relationships much as they are seen by the human eye -
eliminates distortion
- telephoto/long focal-length lens (more than 50mm)
- Magnifies size of an object at great distance while it flattens depth
relationships; movement toward and away from camera appears to be
slowed down when this type of lens is used.
- wide-angle/short focal length lens (less than 50mm)
- Allows the camera to photograph wide area - deepens depth
relationships; straight lines near the edge of the frame are warped and
movement toward and away from the camera appears to be faster
- EXTREME Wide angle - fisheye effect
- These are PRIMARY LENSES^

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- Variable focal length - zoom lens - variable as wide as 35mm to 400mm

- Approaches object to accentuate it, or leaves it to minimize it.
- Suddenly - crash zoom
- Image is not as crisp
- Rack focus - blur focal planes in sequence and force spectators to watch
areas that come into sharp focus
- Follow focus - focus ring of lens, you follow action or object in motion
- Camera movements
- Handheld - strapped to waist/shoulders - fairly steady
- Steadicam - lightweight frame, tension arm, movie camera, Small TV monitor -
smooth filming
- Dolly - wheeled vehicle that follows action
- Crane - airborne shots using a mechanical arm - descend or ascend 20 feet
- Jib crane - counterweighted arm 25 feet
- Aerial - camera on heli
How Green Was My Valley (1941)

- First person narrative form - story told in reverie
- Huw - coal mining life - “story of how the black coal retrieved perilously from the
earth darkens the lives of those who dig it and befouls the verdant valley in
which they live
- Movement in a right-left direction - into the past
- Film cuts from long shot to medium shot to close-up
- Frame : line of houses bounds frame - don’t know the other side.
- Dark areas confine and limit the frame, characters pressed against the
ceiling by an extreme low angle - defining world from the perspective of
a boy
- Relationship between father and sons is indicated by composition
- Father in the center, but as hierarchy changes, he is no longer
- Scenes become progressively darker
Casablanca (1942)
- How objects are arranged, what is not shown - all as important as what appears
- Casablanca uses composition to provide subtle cues (provides information yet is
undetected)
- Movie starts off with audience having no idea what’s going on, who to follow
1. First scene of dialogue follows a man’s hand to his face - composition leading us
“the announcement is more important than who reads it”
2. Couple that camera lingers on will be significant
3. Camera pans over the heads of many from the sky - medium close-up - while
only 15 people, it feels like a lot more (assume people offscreen)
4. Shot tells us who is important - important characters get their own shots - side
characters always accompanying important characters within
- Through line of employees, we follow until we are introduced to Rick - establishes
power and authority + figure of mystery
- We receive some clues about the type of person he is through props and what
others say about him

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- Shots convey theme of individual vs community, of official hero vs outlaw hero
Bordwell pg 160-216
The Photographic image:
Filmmaker - how will this creative choice (regarding camerawork) affect the viewer?
- Cinematography - writing in movement depends on photography - writing in light
- Tonalities - matter of considering how the light registers on the film
- Person lit by sunny window, too bright - blown out
- Contrast - comparative difference between the darkest and lightest areas of
frame
- High contrast - often seems stark and dramatic
- Low contrast - often seems more muted emotionally
- Controlled by lighting, filters, film stock, laboratory processing,
post-production work
- Exposure - regulates how much light passes through camera lens
- Too bright (overexposed) too dark (underexposed)
- Underexposure and overexposure create expressive effects
- Affected by filters - glass/gelatin to reduce certain frequencies…
- Blue filters in sunlight - night scenes
- Post production -
- Add color to black-and-white images through tinting and toning
- Tinting - dipping developed film into a bath of dye (light areas
pick up the color)
- Toning - dye added during developing of positive print - darker
areas colored
- Digitally - lots of tools for COLORIST to make precise adjustments
- Can even make it look like night
- Speed of motion
- Depends on 1. The rate at which the film was shot and the rate of projection
- Fps
- Standard rate for film-based shooting: 24fps
- 35mm cameras today: 8-64fps
- For movement to look accurate on screen: rate of shooting = rate of projection
- Silent films look jerky when presented in 24fps
- Film rate < projection rate → screen action looks speeded up
- Film rate > projection rate → slower screen action
- Ramping - varying frame rate during shooting
- Varying frame rate changes exposure - lighting levels have to be
coordinated.
- Timelapse - one frame per minute, hour, day
- High speed cinematography - thousands of frames per second
- Controlling speed after filming with optical printer
- Rephotographs film, copying all or part of each original frame onto
another real of film

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- Can reverse, speed, slow action (or freeze frame)

- Perspective
Lens creates perspective image - transmits light from the scene
Focal length - distance from the center of the lens to the point where light rays converge
to a point of focus on the film
- Lens length shapes experience - can make object or character blend or stand out.
- Depth of Field and Focus
- Focus - some things are fuzzy, some are focused - due to focal length
- Depth of field - range of distances within which objects can be
photographed in sharp focus, given a certain exposure setting
- Wide-angle lens generally has greater depth of field than
telephoto lens
- Selective focus - only one plane focused - we direct attention to it
- Deep focus - shorter focal length lens, more sensitive film stock, higher
light levels = great depth of field
- Very stylistic in the 1940s and 50s
- Racking focus - pulling focus - switch attention between foreground and
background
Special Effects
- Perspective relations can be shaped by superimposition
- Images laid over one another
- In the past, done with composite - separately photographed images are blended
in a single composition
- Rear projection - setting footage played in the background with actors acting
behind it
- Matte work -
- Matte - portion of the setting photographed on a strip of film, usually with part of
the frame empty
- Joined with another film strip containing actors
- Traveling matte - allows for movement in screen - object/character
filmed in front of blue/black screen + then joined with strip of film
- Visual perspective is to be stylized, imaginative, and blatantly unrealistic if the
filmmaker wants.
Framing
- Lumiere - the Lumiere camera - Arrival of the Station
- Framed at oblique angle - dynamic composition as train arrives diagonally
- Allows us to see people’s faces, foreground, background…
- Frame Dimensions and Shapes
- Aspect ratio -
- Edison, Lumiere, early film inventors did 1.33:1
- 1930s - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established the
Academy ratio of 1.37:1 (allowed room for soundtrack)
- Mid 1950s - 1.85:1 new norm

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- Nowadays we use all sorts: 1.85:1 (common American ratio), 1.75:1

(common European), 2.35:1 (anamorphic), 2.2:1 (70mm)
- Some shots are shot full frame (1.37:1 - 1.17:1) and the use of hard matte
to mask to cover and make wide
- Anamorphic process - special lens squeezes film horizontally (printing or
filming)
- Wide frame - frames characters on things in the distant a bit more
off-center
- Masks and Multiple images
- Masks blocked passage of light
- Iris - moving circular mask that opens to reveal or close to conceal a
scene
- Use of multiple-frames, split-screen
- Builds suspense, we are omniscient, viewing everything that is
happening at once
Onscreen and Offscreen Space
- We assume that if we move away from a person in a shot, that person is still walking
about, OFFSCREEN
- Filmmaker can imply presence of things out of frame (reaction, gestures, sound)
- Offscreen exists behind parts of settings too
- Even characters that have not been seen (we embody their optical
viewpoint but they are offscreen)
Camera Position: Angle, Level, Height, and Distance of Framing
- Angle: straight-on, high, low
- Level: parallel to horizon, canted (Dutch angle)
- Height: higher or lower than subject, eyel level
- Distance: close to subject or far away - camera distance
- Extreme long shot- human figure lost or tiny
- Long shot - background dominates
- Medium long shots - human figure framed from about knee up
- Medium shot - human body from waist up
- Medium close up - body from chest up
- Close up - just showing head, hands, feet, or small object
- Extreme close-up - singles out a portion of the face or isolates and magnifies an
object
- Functions of Framing
- Framings don’t carry absolute or general meanings
- Richness of cinema doesn’t come from recipes
- Must look for functions of techniques through the particular context of the total
film
- “There’s only one right spot for the camera in each job, and it’s my job to find it.”
- Mark Zuckerberg’s genuine smile is shot in a long shot - careful to
distance audience from sympathizing with Mark.
- Framings can be motifs
- Framings add visual interest
- Close-ups add special weight

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- Long shots permit exploration and searching of details.

- Framing can work with Mise-en scene to create pictorial humor, to do unseen
effects…
The Mobile Frame
- Pan - swivels camera on a vertical axis - horizontally “turning head”
- Tilt - rotates camera on a horizontal axis - “nodding head”
- tracking/dolly shot - camera changes position - traveling any direction along the ground
- Crane shot - camera moves above ground level
- Zoom -
- Zooming while filming = mobile framing
- Difference between zoom in and tracking
- Genuine camera movement has static objects in different planes passing
one another at different rates, we see different sides of objects, and
backgrounds gain volume and depth
- Zoom enlargement doesn’t alter the aspects or positions of the objects
we see
- Warp-o cam - zooming and tracking in opposite directions to convey a
character’s dizziness or confusion
- Functions:
- Increases information about the space of the image
- We see camera movement as a substitute for our movement
- Handheld can create subjective pov or convey anxiety.
- Continually changes angle, level, height, or distance of framing
- Consider - how much movement - follow action?
- Reframing: slight pan/tilt to follow slight movements
- Can move away from character/action to reveal something else
- How quick the movement is can lead to more information, be the reaction to
some source
- Similar camera movement can be a motif too
When and why to start a shot and when and why to end it.
- Filming “real time” means recording actual duration
- Most of the time, it is (but can be sped up or slowed down, and condensed with
cues of lighting, setting, and sound)
- Long takes - powerful
- Director can choose between long take or a series of shots
- Digital blending can make it look like two separate shots was one long take
- Some long shots have their own internal development (beginning, middle, end)
- Creates suspense to see how the take will end
WEEK SIX:
Lecture:
Temporal Design: Editing
- Start and stop times decided by director and editor
- Start when intensity or content curve begins to rise aka when audience is about
to receive important information
- Stop when intensity or content curve reaches peak
- Guy performing action appears faster than guy speaking

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- Camera movement plays faster than static

- How close a shot is or how far it is
- Illustrates and space and time correlated
Shot - basic temporal unit of a film
- Average of 10-20 seconds
- Shot held for a long time - long take
- Relationship between shots - creates movement, pace, rhythm (experienced
intrinsically, extrinsically of REPEATED PATTERN)
- Movements of film
1. Actors movement
2. Camera movement
3. Editing movement
Scene - a series of shots in a same place
Sequence - series of scenes, each new sequence puts the film on a new gear
Relationship between pace and rhythm - pace affects rhythm
Editing breaks space and time

- easier to follow characters/information/story
- More lifelike
- Use to say it’s could be like theater
Scenes connected with:

180 degree line - have to stay on the same side
Each shot should be more than a 30 degree difference to register a change
Cut on movement, cut on form, cut on color, cut on line, cut on texture
Shot-reverse shot
- Rules may be broken to take audience out of the story, upset…
Scene - we can break space and time - show just most important
1. Perspectivation - Two people in a scene - can’t give them same image size
a. We won’t know where they’re positioned with one another
2. Displacement - If anything comes off or goes on, it has to be shown
3. Two people in dialogue face-to-face - position each person in front of camera 5 degrees
right/left
4. Establishing shot then cuts to smaller shots then a re-establishing shot
action/reaction
Action - detail
Cut-away
Multiple points of view
Cross cut
- Same time same space
- Different time same space
- Same time different space
- Different time different space

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Thematic montage - same characters, same meaning
DW Griffith - collision montage - juxtaposition of opposing thematic images
Types of transitions
- Cuts - most jarring
- Dissolves - pretty slow
- Fade in/fade out - take a rest - typically to denote end of a sequence
- Superposition
Ask why this type of transition is used?
Time - period, duration, season - in terms of setting

Running time - duration of movie
Psychological time - subjective experience of time
- Enjoyment would equate time ostensibly passing by faster
- We experience space subjectively too
Mise-en-scene - putting into place - for setting stage

- Performance, design, composition, editing
- Use and organization of one player in relationship to the other players, the decor, the
lighting schemes within the frame and outside the frame and from frame to frame to
frame in a set of time
Discussion:
- Props
- Cellphone, gun - centered. Gun as a means of dominance.
- Set dressing
- Vault but prison-like
- Decentering vs centering
- Edges = uneasy. Dalton centered to establish power
- Edges of frame
- Peter pushed to edge to establish his uneasiness
- Off-screen space
- Proxemic patterns within the frame
- Close together = intense
- Multiple planes
- Ties to proxemic patterns in the sense that distance creates suspense before
Dalton brings Peter into his own plane.
- Movement (characters and camera)
- Move from close to far, far to close
- 6 basic perspectives
6 rules of editing
1. 180 degree line

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- Violation of the rule can exemplify some sort of shift in the narrative or tone or in the
relationship.
2. 30 degree rule
- not having the 30 degree angle shift each cut makes it seem like the same frame, very
jarring… can be violated to subvert continuity editing
3. Eyeline match
4. Shot reverse shot
5. Cut on movement
6. Graphic match
Collision montage - juxtaposition of rapid shots to invoke ironic - meaning derived from
juxtaposition
- Sergei Eisenstein - collision montage in strike likening peasants to butchering of cow
Thematic montage - drugs scene in Requiem of a Dream - linked by a certain idea
Hollywood montage - time compressed in a sequence of shots

Two For the Road (1967)
- Intercut of 5 different periods of a couple’s ten year relationship - Resnais-like narrative
form attributed to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance
- Random cuts between time periods
- Metaphor of the road as personal relationship - structures space and time in the film
- Various means of travel display economic and emotional status
- Relationship changes though two people remain the same
- Ambivalent portrayal of marriage
- Sharp cutting on dialogue, directions of movement… energizes film
- Leads: Audrey Hepburn and Finney
The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938)

- Errol Flynn
- Stunning visual design - verdant forests, cavernous castle sets
- What makes it exciting, lightning fast… is its temporal design
- Very finely tuned in editing
- Action sequences are tightly edited
- Establishing shot lays out spatial dimensions
- Dialogue follows leisure tempo, cuts made based on graphic matches
- shot/reverse shots and eyeline matches predominate
- Establishes spatial relations between characters
- Pace quickens when Robin Hood is making his escape
- Nondiegetic music starts - goes with tempo of cuts = FAST RHYTHM
- A lot of cuts are motivated by sound and musical cues
- Crosscuts exist to heighten excitement
- Montage - relay important information across a long time in a short amount of time

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- Highest budget of that time for WB, but was highest grossing ever for WB that year
- Won oscars, including for Film Editing
Bugsy (1991)
- Fade in fade outs mark progress of time
- Only essential parts of action are presented to the viewer - fragments of action flow
seamlessly and naturally - minimal details tell linear story
- Compresses life of Ben Siegel - compression of Bugsy’s life into 2 hours requires spatial
and temporal editing
- Time editing motivated by characters’ movements, action, progress of narrative
- Closing of door cuts to the first shot of the next scene
- Seamless editing with forward movement
- Use of montage sequences - series of images not really connected spatially or
temporally juxtaposed with dissolves, fades, superimpositions
- Editing not only compresses time and articulates spatial relations
- Also heightens dramatic effects and enhances meaning of images
- Collision montage - juxtaposition of shots with diametrically opposed
thematic elements
- Gangster embodies American dream as well as its perversion
- What we watch is not “realistic” but Hollywood’s own fascination and its myth-making
process
Carlito’s Way (1993)

- Film opens with the end of the story - Carlito getting shot
- De Palma starts opening credits in Carlito’s perspective, slow motion,
melancholic music
- Ends with same opening sequence - repetition of same event + extended
flashback conveys sense of doom and Carlito’s existential alienation
- De Palma proves himself to be an auteur with the camera - adept at scene construction
- De Palma trademark in scene construction - through editing
- Coherent spatial relations maintained with shot/reverse shot + eyeline match
- Use of crosscutting
- Rhythm escalates - more frenetic cuts
- Choreographed action cut with graphic matches
- Collision montage
- shot/reverse shot synonymous with gunshots
- Characters “dance” with the rhythm of character movement and
editing
- “Beautiful violence.”
- Ostentatious display through seamless shots and edits,
flawless choreography
- Traveling shot during climax - sophisticated - follows character movements
perfectly
- Long take followed by final shoot-out - consisting of quick cuts
- Sound - De Palma hardly uses dissolves, fade in/out, superimposition… and uses sound
as transition device instead

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Bordwell pg 218-264
Editing is VERY powerful -
Typical movie contains 1000 to 2000 shots - actions can have 3000+
- Decides overall form of film - shapes responses to individual scenes and the entire movie
- Unlimited possibilities
- Ends up posing the question “why”
What is Editing
- Ordering, trimming, selection of shots
- Daunting - lots of footage to choose from - Social Network 2 hour movie but had
286 hours of footage.
- Cut - common join of instant change from a shot to another
- Fade-out - gradually darkens the end of shot to black.
- Fade-in - lights a shot from black
- Dissolve -superimposes end of shot A with beginning of shot B
- Wipe - shot B replaces shot A by means of a boundary line moving across the screen
- Before 1990s, done by splicing two shots together with tape
- Fades, dissolves, wipes done on optical printers
- Allows for manipulation of time, space, and pictorial qualities
- Cuts may not be necessarily, but directors use them to forcefully direct attention
with EMPHASIS
- Movement of camera or complicated blocking could work, but it wouldn’t
have the “sudden breaks” that cuts produce
- Sense of abruptness
Dimensions of Film Editing
- Graphic relations between Shot A and B
- Patterns of light and dark, line and shape, volumes and depth, movement and
stasis
- What is important is centered - graphic continuity
- Putting two shots together creates interaction between the PURELY
PICTORIAL qualities of those two shots
- Color contrasts, movement…
- Mise en scene + cinematography qualities
- Graphic match - when shots are linked together by close graphic similarities
- Opposite can be done for effect
- Graphic discontinuity can still create symmetry and balance
- Extreme discontinuity can note conflict between past and present
- BIRDS - Melanie’s head - no movement vs the fire - lots of movement
- Countermovement = powerful
- Rhythmic Relations Between Shot A and B
- duration of shot in relation to other shot creates rhythm, rhythm creates
meaning
- Flash frames - sudden whiteness - can mark collision in action scene, can
mark transition, can signal flashback
- When shots are all similar in length, there is a steady rhythm

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- Gradually lengthening shots can slow rhythm… likewise.

- Short cuts - lots of action - intensity followed by long shot - pause and
suspense
- We don’t normally count frames but we can feel the tempo
- Spatial Relations between Shot A and B
- Two disparate shots can be cut together to make it look like they’re in the same
space
- Intra-frame editing - different parts of shots combined into a single shot
- Kuleshov Effect - cutting together portions of a space in a way that prompts the
spectator to assume a spatial whole that isn’t shown on-screen
- Constructive editing - withholding establishing shot
- Extreme spatial discontinuities can be created, too - no idea how close characters
actually are
- Temporal Relations between Shot A and B
- Order, duration, frequency reinforced by editing
- Order - editing decides order of shots, hence chronology of story
- Flashbacks
- Flashforwards - present to future back to present
- Teases outcome
- Duration -
- Elliptical editing - action presented in a way that consumes less
screen time than it does in the story
- Ellipsis signalled by dissolves, fades, wipes that connects
shot of start and shot of end
- Walk out of beginning frame then cut to walk into last
frame
- Empty frames cover elided time
- cutaway/insert - shot of something else happening in
between beginning and end
- Overlapping editing - prolongs by having the end of a shot
repeated in the beginning of the next shot
- Frequency -
- Same thing can be shown more than once to add tension, to add
information, to add dazzle
Continuity Editing
Since 1900-1910 - development to approach to editing has been standardized into narrative
continuity aka continuity editing
- Graphic qualities roughly continuous - balance and symmetric, overall light tonality
remains constant, action occupies central zone
- Long shots left on screen longer, medium shots longer than close ups.
- Seeks to present story clearly and forcefully
Spatial Continuity - 180 degree System

- Scene space built around axis of action - center line
- Any shot filmed beyond the axis of action would basically be deemed wrong
- Ensures relative positions in the frame remain consistent

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- Ensures consistent eyelines

- Ensures consistent screen direction
- If the characters are moving, filming beyond axis will make character
look as if walking the other direction
- Integral for viewer to know where the characters are in relation to one another
and to the setting + where he or she (the viewer) is with respect to the story
action
- Continuity Editing in The Maltese Falcon
- Establishing shot - shows overall space - no profile for 180 line yet
- shot/reverse-shot - back and forth along established 180 line
- Eyeline match - shot A someone looks at something offscreen/shot B shows what
is being looked at
- Together, helps give understanding of where characters are in space
without them being in the same frame
- Reestablishing shot - reestablishes overall space
- New 180 line
- Analytical editing - cutting that analyzes space vs constructive editing, which
constructs space
- Match on action - carrying movement across a cut
- Editing and cutting here, instead of one long shot, helps draw attention to one
particular character’s dialogue, the character’s demeanor, and the others’
reaction/response
- Shots create cause/effect flow - spatial continuity created to present story action
- Some Fine Points
- When characters are arranged in a circle, axis runs between the most important
characters at the moment
- Sometimes spatial relations are so consistent establishing shot is never needed
- cheat cut - mismatch positions of characters or objects
- Crossing the axis - scene occurring in doorway, staircase… allows for breaking of
line
- On the line - for transition: head on shot or tail-on shot
- On the axis - POV
- What a character sees
- Subjective cutting - good for tension, surprises because we’re
limited to one character’s view
- Crosscutting - creates omniscience - alternates between shots of story events in
one place with shots of another event somewhere else
- Spatial discontinuity but unrestricted knowledge
- Action normally simultaneous but not necessarily.
Temporal Continuity: Order, Frequency, and Duration
- Order and Frequency: standard is chronological and one for one frequency
- Duration:
- Continuous - plot time = screen time = story time
- Elided - story time > plot time = screen time
- Temporal continuity
- No gaps in narrative progression

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- Soundtrack - sound issuing from story space (diegetic sound)

- Match on action - creates spatial and temporal continuity
- Temporal ellipsis
- A few shots could indicate an entire process
- Can condense years, centuries…
- Changes in locale, lighting, character position cues us that time has
passed
- Dissolves and fades used to be used
- Montage Sequences: brief portions of a process
- Often wrapped with music
Alternatives to Continuity Editing
- Graphic and Rhythmic Possibilities
- Films can be joined purely by graphic or rhythmic qualities, independent of the
time and space they represent
- High speed rhythmic cutting
- Spatial and Temporal Discontinuity
- 360 space - semi-circle space - films from almost every side - stories don’t
become unintelligible
- 180 not a necessity
- Jump cut - cut together two shots of the same subject, if the shots differ only
slightly in angle or composition - noticeable JUMP
- Used for moments of surprise, violence, psychological disturbances
- Nondiegetic insert - cut from scene to a metaphorical or symbolic shot that
doesn’t belong to the space and time of the narrative
- Prompt a search for implicit meanings
- Altogether can stir imagination rather than confuse - if done right

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FILM REVIEW
- Find direct cut, fade, dissolve examples in films - why use
- Jk it’s too specific
Content review:
Week 1:
- Lumiere Brothers - inventor of the cinematographe - made the first actual film that was
displayed - The Arrival of the Train at the Station
- Thaumatrope - cage-like tool that shows persistence of vision
- 6 key inventions that made cinema possible
1. Persistence of vision - still images played quickly and our brain mind eye puts
it together. We connect image A to image B - discovery of the illusion of motion
2. Still photography - camera needs to be able to take images.
3. Motion camera - camera that can takes pictures in rapid succession -
continuous burst when running. Usually 24 fps today.
4. Film stock/celluloid - flexible film stock - used to be glass plates (which would
be very expensive, very fragile, not viable) - celluloid small and flexible, durable
and cheaper - developed then to go through projector
5. Motion Picture Printer - printer to print image on the celluloid - turn negative
image to positive. Printer allows for mass reprinting.
6. Projector - Lumiere - mirror of camera in the sense that it runs images through
it, running light through it so that images can be seen.
- Why did cinema catch on?
- Urbanization - film can be entertainment for a mass audience - urban areas can
be entertained.
- Socialization - film shows how people should act - popular with immigrants -
taught how to be American. Taught how to interact with people
- Novelty - brand new, machine that produces movement, holy grail of realism
- Astonishment - to see it would be astonishing - no precedent - people went just
to watch some cool technology
- Taps to Collective Feelings - gives context to thinking about other people and
ourselves. Dreams and movies are very similar. Fulfills some escapism.
- Narrative - we make stories - cinema quickly produces stories - more and more
complex with editing and such
- Affordability - cheap. Nickolodeon - throw a nickel
- Accessibility - almost a theater on every corner. Easily movies reproduced to all
theaters. They were clean, associated with family entertainment
- Sense of Community - feeling like church. Watching through something,
experience something together.
- Producers - money - they find the creative talent
- Distributors - distributes to theaters
- Exhibitors - shows films
Film as Technology
Film as Business
Film as a Cultural Product
Film as Art (questionable first)
- It started out as business

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- Film is c ollaborative while other art is done with one person, or if group, then there is
usually a leader. In film, there are so many different roles that people can do to change
or affect the meaning of film, so no real “leader.”
Week 2: Literary Design

- First person outside vs Third person
- First person involves narration from outside the person (we can see him)
- Third person we don’t have the narration
- Omniscient - God’s POV - we see things out of character’s point of view
- There are moments of limited still, in order to tell the story
- Lines of Action - Several different characters that we follow, skip around at different
times
- Parallel Lines - different lines of action going on at the same time OR can happen
in connection a similar theme. Narrative configured in a way that a story is told
through different lines of action.
- Story - a segment or portion of life to tell
- Plot - the organization of this portion of life - series of plot points (chronology)
- Narrative - how the plot is unraveled or told
- Structure - linear (clear cause and effect), episodic (Blue Jasmine - no real sense
of time), thematic structure (contextual)
- Configuration - choices to tell chronology
- # of lines of action
- Chronology
- Subjectivity or Objectivity
Week 3: Performance
Business vs. Gesture
- Business involves props or what the character is doing - doesn’t necessarily
propel plot (like spinning a pen)
- Gesture - grace of action - speaks the character. Relates more to the plot. The
way a character delivers an action
Know a cting styles:
Non professionals - don’t need many lines, fulfill a casting need
Actor - vast majority of people onscreen - professional job
Star - certain level of notoriety as a professional actor (persona)
Star-actor - distinguished by quality, if critically acclaimed
Week 4-6: Visual Design, Temporal Design, Composition

Montage - series of images, quick cutting, images juxtaposed to create new meaning, to
abbreviate time
- Hollywood Montage - abbreviated time - plays with music - quick progression
- Soviet (collision) Montage - enhance a new meaning through juxtaposition of series of
frames - creation of metaphor or irony
- Thematic Montage - lots of different images that aren’t related but connected through a
single idea - can build atmosphere, mood, idea

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Proxemic Relationships - ways physical objects and people are related to each other on the
frame
- In-frame
- Camera
Mood vs Atmosphere
- Mood - the emotion
- Atmosphere - how the setting constructs mood
- Deals more with visual design, sound design elements
Pace vs Rhythm (editing)
- Pace - how long each shot may be, repetitivity of rhythm
- Rhythm - the beats - structure of edits in some patterned way

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ii. Literature, Theater, Painting, Music, Dance, Architecture, Sculptures.

Casper wih Edwards 1-30

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Writers, producers, directors - hold it all together

Life happens to us in two ways:

Writer tells a story:

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Set - space and time

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- To ​emphasize​ and s​ tructures

Casper and Edwards: 34-68

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2. A bad man going from misery to happiness

Pity and fear must come from plot not spectacle.

6 types of anagnorisis (discover or recognition)

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- Express self with clarity and not meanness.

1. Epic poetry must maintain unity of plot - Homer’s Iliad = excellent

Not all poetry is about the probable.

Tragedy > epic poetry

Critical Film Analyses

Bordwell 72-98: Narrative Form

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- How to organize flashbacks/chronology

Depth of Story Information-

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- How “far” to plunge into a character’s psychological state

Eadweard Muybridge ​- photographer - persistence of motion - 24 cameras to sequentially take

The Nickelodeon - first home of motion picture - first in Pittsburgh

Subject: what the film is about

Life: habitual and unorganized - messy, non sequitur

Lumiere brothers: put technologies together to record

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Mirrors culture - shows best and worst

Non-professionals on film is okay because:

What makes a good performance?

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- fitting in a certain setting/period/occupation

Director directs the actor’s performance

Casper with Edwards pg 65-116

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Two types of techniques to produce expressions

A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method

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- Affective memory - channel memories of emotion in a role

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- Too many colors in documentary - overwhelming

Define character in the frame

mood - feeling of the movie

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Objective correlative - abstract concrete

Motif - visual motifs - Meet Me in St. Louis - the house = subject

Casper with Edwards pg 117-134

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- Provides context and mood

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Babette’s Feast (1987)

- To emphasize and s tructures

Eadweard Muybridge - photographer - persistence of motion - 24 cameras to sequentially take