¡  Here are some main points from Richard Barsam’s textbook “Looking at Movies.” The opening chapters discuss: §  You already know some things about movies, but §  Your knowledge is mostly instinctive §  You probably view movies primarily as entertainment §  Learning more about movies is likely to surprise you. ¡  These are the two key elements of any narrative form, including film. §  FORM: the means through which a subject is expressed. §  CONTENT: the subject of an artwork ¡  The Wizard of Oz ¡  The Documentary, Salesman? ¡  Apocalypse Now? ¡  What expectations do you have of the following forms? §  Romance §  Mystery §  Thriller §  Fantasy §  Children s film §  Instructional exercise video ¡  Patterns are elements that are repeated so that their meaning is expanded and intensified. ¡  Movies manipulate space and time in unique ways. ¡  Movies depend on light. ¡  Movies create the illusion of movement. ¡  Erwin Panofsky: the movies give time to space and space to time by creating the illusion of movement and the illusion of the passage of time ¡  The audience remains fixed while the screen images move in a variety of directions ¡  Film creates the illusion of time passing faster or slower ¡  Literally means light
writing ¡  Began from 1800-­‐1840; proceeded through §  Camera obscura §  Silhouettes §  Glass negatives §  Series photography (Edweard Muybridge) ¡  Slow – intermediate -­‐ fast speed ¡  Film stock speed or exposure index
indicates the degree to which the film is sensitive to light ¡  Fast film stock is used in low-­‐light situations or to capture rapid motion that would otherwise just be a blur ¡  Film comes in analog and digital formats. ¡  Traditional film is still used to shoot most movies. ¡  Increasingly, digital film is being used in both still and motion-­‐picture photograph ¡  Barsam does not devote a lot of discussion to digital film technology, as it is still relatively new. ¡  Gauge equals width of the film ¡  8 mm to IMAX (210mm) in width §  Small-­‐budget or intimate films are generally shot in smaller gauge stock (16-­‐35 mm) §  Big-­‐budget or blockbuster films are generally shot on wider gauge stock (70 mm widescreen or IMAX 210mm) ¡  This website provides examples of a variety of optical illusions, such as motion aftereffect. http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_adapt/
index.html ¡  Persistence of vision (our eyes
tendency to hold over gapped images) ¡  Phi phenomenon (the illusion of movement between adjacent events) §  Critical flicker fusion helps create this ¡  Apparent motion (our eyes
tendency to connect disparate images into a single smooth motion) . . .at the movies, when you watch a character use a computer monitor, and the monitor seems constantly to flicker. Yet when you look at your own computer monitor, it doesn t seem to flicker at all. ¡  Realism is the creation of scenarios that seem plausible ¡  Anti-­‐realism is the creation of scenarios that seem implausible (or defy the laws of physics) ¡  Verisimilitude is the illusion that a one-­‐ or two-­‐
dimensional surface is three-­‐dimensional and actually real A.
Plausible (realism) B.
Implausible (anti-­‐realism) C.
Three-­‐dimensional or real (verisimilar) ¡  Their 1895 film, Exiting the Factory, to which sound has been added, utilizes fixed cameras and tries to capture an everyday event. Here s the You Tube link: ¡  http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=4nj0vEO4Q6s ¡
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Action Biography Comedy Fantasy Film noir Gangster Horror Melodrama Musical Mystery Romance Science fiction Thriller War Western ¡  Which genres does Citizen Kane belong to? How does it experiment with conventions of those genres? ¡  . . .when filmmakers alter generic conventions ¡  Often they do this to meet the expectations of a changing society ¡  What has happened to the western genre in the past two decades? ¡  Factual ¡  Instructional ¡  Documentary ¡  Propaganda ¡  Sometimes, as with fictional films, these sub-­‐
genres overlap or are impossible to distinguish or determine. ¡  How can we determine what is a documentary, what is factual, and what is propaganda? ¡  Animation is created through manipulating artificial characters – drawings, figures, etc. – to provide the illusion of movement and life. ¡  Puppet animation ¡  Clay animation (ClayMation) ¡  Pixilation ¡  Traditional cartoons (like a celluloid flip-­‐book) ¡  Avant-­‐garde films: style becomes subject ¡  These films are often designed to shock or amaze viewers ¡  They can be deliberately anti-­‐realistic ¡  Stream-­‐of-­‐consciousness is an avant-­‐garde technique ¡  Films are created not by individuals, but by large teams of individuals working on special issues: photography, acting, sound, direction, editing, special effects, etc. ¡  Traditionally the director is credited with the overall vision of a particular film. This view of film is called auteur theory (author theory).