Hitchcock As Auteur
As I discussed in chapter 7, the New Wave theorists distinguished between those directors they considered auteurs, whose unique style and vision marked their films, and those directors who were merely faithful adapters of their literary sources or of other writers' screenplays. The Hollywood directors the French critics praised as auteurs include Howard Hawks, John Ford, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Orson Welles, and above all, Alfred Hitchcock. The French auteur theorists and...
Dialectical Form
The film is structured throughout as a constant play of opposite modalities clashing against one another. In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee returns to the dialectical methods of Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s, who, inspired by the writings of Hegel and Marx, created a cinema that involves a constant juxtaposition or clash of opposites a thesis and an antithesis , the goal being the creation of a new synthesis or higher consciousness in the mind of the viewer. Spike Lee's method was the same as...
Defining Postmodernism
Postmodernism is such a notoriously slippery term that the word has become almost meaningless. This is ironically appropriate, because mean-inglessness is a core concern of postmodernism. On the Internet, I came across the following quotation, which nicely sums up the indeterminacy of the term To some it's an excuse to pile together oodles of wild and crazy d cor, to others it's another example of the weakness of standards and values, to others a transgressive resistance to the sureness of...
Inspiration
When I was a child, I was fascinated with Ruth Draper, so I thought about monologues, but it didn't seem like something someone did in modern times. I hated the idea of a one-woman show. A one-person show just seemed like something that couldn't be done. You needed two actors for a play to happen. The only one-woman show I ever saw that I liked was Pat Carroll's Gertrude Stein. I liked that show very much, was very impressed with it. It was an inspiration to me. To be honest with you, I decided...
The Role Of The Film Medium In Chaplins Realist Film Art
Although Chaplin's films look artless in the sense that they do not call attention to the film medium, the film medium does in fact play a large role in the success of Chaplin's comic art. Chaplin, Bazin observes, was a clown of great genius, as evident from his fame as a music-hall performer, but he needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena.20 In order to appreciate the role of the cinematic medium in...
Spike Lees Refusal Of Melodrama
D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, like Do the Right Thing, was also a political film which intended to justify the use of violence. Griffith sought to justify the Ku Klux Klan's violence against blacks who came to power during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. The rioting black soldiers whom the Klan rides in to subdue are melodramatically presented as purely evil in their single-minded determination to sexually possess white women. The Klansmen who demolish the power of the...
Epilogue
Digital Video and New Forms of Narrative in Mike Figgis's Timecode As I conclude this book on the art of narrative film techniques, I am aware that the medium I have been writing about may well be on the verge of becoming extinct, a casualty of a new technology which threatens to replace it digital video. Since we are only at the beginning of a new technological age, the question of how new electronic ways of creating moving images will ultimately affect our moviegoing experience and the form...
Modernist Aspects Of Fellinis Style
Federico Fellini's 8 1I2 1963 is a radical departure in style and content from mainstream cinema. Unlike the typical Hollywood film, which has its roots in the clearly defined characters and unified, coherent plots of nineteenth-century popular fiction, 8 1I2 is a European art film, inspired by the forms and techniques of twentieth-century literary modernism.1 Modernist novelists such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and James Joyce adopted complex and often difficult new...
Sequence Analysis Stealing The Key
A close analysis of the sequence in which Alicia, under Devlin's orders, steals the key off Sebastian's key ring just before a reception to celebrate their recent marriage illustrates how Hitchcock's deft manipulation of film techniques induces the spectator to identify with Alicia as she undertakes her risky mission. Hitchcock could easily have captured the action of Alicia's stealing the key in one shot, but chooses instead to break up this action into twelve separate shots. Of the twelve...
ian mackillop and neil sinyard 1
To counterbalance the rather tepid humanism of our cinema, it might also be said that it is snobbish, anti-intelligent, emotionally inhibited, willfully blind to the conditions and problems of the present, dedicated to an out of date, exhausted national idea. Lindsay Anderson Who will ever forget those days at Iver when, cloistered in the fumed oak dining room reminiscent of the golf club where no one ever paid his subscription , frightened producers blanched at the mere idea of any film that...
Expressive Miseenscene In The Last Laugh
While I have been primarily emphasizing the way Murnau uses photographic effects, that is, cinema-specific means, to project the subjectivity Figure 18. The grandeur of the city created through special effects the use of model shots and forced perspective. The Last Laugh, 1924, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung. of his character, no assessment of the visual power of The Last Laugh would be complete without a discussion of the film's mise-en-scene. The look of The Last Laugh set a new standard...
An Enlightened View of Immigration
The first position is perhaps the one most closely tied to the theme of the stranger and the migrant, and here I want to focus on what one might call the Tony Blair-Gerhard Schroeder enlightened view on immigration, that is the social-liberal one, which maintains that altogether, immigration is a good thing, and that Europe, and in particular Britain or Germany, have to honor their obligations and responsibilities of asylum. Thus, they make distinction between different kinds of immigrants,...
Black Urban Action Films and Mainstream Images
The creative, pioneering efforts of Van Peebles, Parks, Davis, and Poitier were not just transitory occurrences that had no impact on the Hollywood scene. It wasn't that Hollywood was contritely endeavoring to make reparations for its legacy of African American screen images, nor was there a particular era of egalitarianism that white studio bosses were opening up for black filmmakers. By the early 1970s, it became a clear business strategy that black screen images offered a means for tapping...
Blackmail
Production British International Pictures, black and white, 35mm running time 96 minutes. Released 1929. Filmed in studios in London and on location in the British Museum. Producer John Maxwell screenplay Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Bennett, Benn W. Levy, and Garnett Weston from the play by Charles Bennett photography Jack Cox editor Emile Ruello production design Wilfred C. Arnold and Norman Arnold music Campbell and Connely, finished and arranged by Hubert Bath and Henry Stafford, performed by...
Cameras On Vehicles
When it is time to go mobile, Hollywood has a fleet of vehicles and numerous camera mounts to take the camera along. An insert car is the optimum choice when you want to film a car through the front windshield. This is a specially designed vehicle that can carry not only the camera mounted on the outside, but additional lighting, as well. The insert car it is more like a pickup truck, actually has speed-rail bars attached all 16 Steadicam does make smaller versions that you can rent or buy....
Towards another state of perception liquid perception
This solution, however, only relates to a nominal definition of 'subjective' and 'objective'. It implies that the cinema has reached an evolved state, having learned to mistrust the movement-image. But what happens if we take as our starting-point a real definition of the two poles, or of the double system Bergsonianism suggested the following definition a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image an objective perception is one where, as...
Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan
Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan have been making documentary and fiction films for more than 20 years. Jeannie recently served as series producer of PBS's Postcards from Buster. Her previous credits include coproducing and directing Running with Jesse for the PBS series Frontline, editing two films for the acclaimed series Eyes on the Prize, and editing dramatic films including Blue Diner, Lemon Sky, and Concealed Enemies. Steve Ascher's work has appeared on networks around the world, and his...
Auteurs and Artists
As the longevity of assignations such as neo-realism, nouvelle vague, New German Cinema, New Basque cinema proves, the diversity of national cinematic traditions within European cinema is impressive, and there is good reason to study them individually and in their particularity. But this insistence on both national specificity and the relative autonomy of film movements since 1945 in European countries nonetheless leaves several factors unaccounted for Firstly, the national movements and auteur...
The Creative Process
One day, after a powwow with the MegaPhone director of marketing, the suits tell the creative director that the client wants to air a thirty-second TV spot. Now, you can't just go off willy-nilly and dream up a TV spot. It has to be built on a strong foundation. So, the first thing the two camps at the agency do is get together and hammer out two important documents that will provide the basis for the advertising and the guidelines for its execution. They are a strategy statement, which lays...
Chapter DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
Pennebaker began in film over forty years ago. With a background in engineering from Yale, M.I.T., and the Navy, his expertise made him extremely instrumental in developing equipment for recording sound synced to the pictures captured by a film camera. Together with Albert and David Maysles, Richard Leacock, and Robert Drew, Pennebaker developed the first fully portable 16mm synchronized camera-and-sound system, revolutionizing the way films could be shot. Now they didn't have to rely on...
Two Generations Of Female Stars In Hollywood
At the beginning of the 1980s, Quigley's top ten, which lists the stars considered by exhibitors as the biggest box office attractions of the year, included as many as four women, yet afterwards there were at most three, and usually only one or two in 1983 there was none at all Moser, 2000 14 . With the exception of Bo Derek, the female stars ranked in the top ten during the 1980s were in their thirties and forties Jane Fonda born in 1937 , Barbra Streisand 1942 , Goldie Hawn 1945 , Bette...
Camera Placement And Pace The Intervention Of Subjective States
Numerous filmmakers have used a subjective camera placement and or shifts in pace to alert us that the narrative has shifted into a subjective or dream or unreal state as opposed to the in-the-world, real state that has preceded it. Beginning with Georges Melies, best known for his film A Trip to the Moon 1902 , subjective states have been a narrative concern and creative challenge. Luis Bunuel simply ignored the distinction between the objective and subjective from his first film, Un Chien...
Problems and Cautions
Good interviewing is the hallmark of the best documentarists indeed, some have taken interviewing into the upper realms of filmic art. In England, one of the best practitioners of the form is Alan Whicker, whose series Whicker's World was essential and delightful viewing for years. Whicker was the urbane, soft-spoken, dark-suited interviewer who could go anywhere and ask the most outrageous questions. He got away with it because his questions were witty and down-to-earth, and wherever he went,...
Filmmaking In Quebec
Canada is officially a bilingual country and recognizes the province of Quebec as a ''distinct society.'' Quebecois cinema faced some of the same obstacles as English-Canadian cinema, but its development was also hindered by the Catholic Church, which through the 1950s was the major cultural force in Quebec culture. Although separated from the rest of Canada by language and culture, Quebec eventually developed its own distinctive cinema as part of a belated embrace of modernity. In the 1920s...
Color Systems
There are two basic systems for organizing and mixing color additive and sub-tractive. Although these two systems share terms and certain characteristics, each must be considered separately. The additive system of color involves the mixing of colored light. Colored light is mixed by taking a light of one color and a light of another color and beaming them onto a common surface. Where the two colors of light overlap or mix, a third color is produced. The additive system is used most often in...
GEORGES MLIS b Paris France December d January
Famed for his elaborately staged fantasy films and whimsical trick films, Georges M li s has often been described as the antithesis of the Lumi re brothers, his fictional flights of fancy viewed as the inverse of their slice-of-life actualites. Nonetheless, one can overstate M li s's contribution to the development of film narrative for example, his famed substitution splice'' operates according to the logic of trickery rather than continuity and demonstrates how his early career as a magician...
List of Articles
action and adventure films Yvonne Tasker africa south of the sahara Sheila Petty african american cinema Frances K. Gateward auteur theory and authorship Jim Hillier canon and canonicity Lisa Dombrowski Catherine L. Benamou and Andreea Marinescu collaboration John C. Tibbetts and Jim Welsh colonialism and postcolonialism Corinn Columpar Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto gay, lesbian, and queer cinema Harry M. Benshoff mgm metro-goldwyn-mayer Thomas Schatz native americans and cinema...
The Contract System
As mentioned above, the American film industry was rationalized and subject to scientific management techniques. This included a highly specialized division of labour designed to facilitate mass production of films. Accordingly, during the years 1930 to 1949 the studios employed all personnel, even their stars, on long-term or permanent contracts. The stars, directors and crew were contracted to a particular studio and even those who had established a reputation in the industry were employed on...
Becoming Unrecognisable
I remember staying up through the night to watch CNN's live coverage of Yitzhak Rabin's burial service and how it was a speech given by his granddaughter at that event which brought me closest to the significance of his death.i The granddaughter explained to the world watching that the memorialising images of Rabin's face was not the face she knew. This was not her grandfather we saw on the screen. On the contrary, in death Rabin was, for her, unrecognisable - 'a smile that is no longer'. While...
charlayne woodard
Charlayne Woodard's first play, Pretty Fire, which she wrote and performed, enjoyed successful engagements at the Manhattan Theatre Club and at the Seattle Repertory Company. It was published by Penguin Press. Her second play, Neat, also enjoyed sold-out runs at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Seattle Repertory Theater, and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. As an actress, Ms. Woodard performed in the original cast of Ain't Misbehavin' on Broadway. Off-Broadway, she performed in such shows as...
Security Interest
a. To the extent, if any, that the Producer owns any right, title or interest in the Collateral, the Producer hereby grants to the Guarantor a security interest in the Collateral to secure repayment of the Secured Sums, if any. Said security interest shall be subject to the Prior Rights, but shall have priority over any other rights or security interests of any other person, company or entity in or with respect to the Collateral, including deferments and gross receipts or net profit...
King of the Children China Director Chen Kaige
Production Xi'an Film Studio Eastmancolour, 35mm running time 106 minutes. Producer Wu Tianming screenplay Chen Kaige, Wan Zhi, based on the short story by Ah Cheng photography Gu Changwei editor Liu Miaomiao lighting Jia Tianxi assistant director Qiang Xiaolu art director Chen Shaohua music Qu Xiaosong sound recording Tao Jing, Gu Changning sound editor Liu Miaomiao. Cast Xie Juang Lao Gan Yang Xuewen Wang Fu Chen Shaohua Headmaster Chen Zhang Caimei Laidi Xu Guoqin Lao Hei Le Gang Cowherd Tan...
International History Of Costume Design
While it is sometimes difficult to be sure of costume design information because the silent-film period gave designers no screen credits and, during the 1950s, the studios disposed of many records, four elements can be said to form the foundation of film costume design as it is in the early twenty-first century the establishment of its own studio department the freedom given to designers to create extravagantly the influx of, and competition with, international influence and the recognition of...
The La Rebellion
As these veterans of the cinema created socially significant feature films that were aesthetically grounded in African American and in some cases African cultural forms, a new group of filmmakers would emerge, trained in university film schools located primarily in Los Angeles. Their educations in graduate programs went beyond technical training. Their ''coming-of age'' coincided with the push for ethnic studies programs on campuses around the country, nationalist movements in the Asian Pacific...
Notes 1
I would like to thank the different censorship classification boards, including those in Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London, and Paris. 1. Report of the Departmental Committee on Children and the Cinema, Secretary of State, May 1950, London. 2. ''Legion Approves Eight of 15 New Productions,'' Motion Picture Herald, March 12, 1955. 3. W. H. M. ''Rebel Without a Cause. The Tidings, Oct. 28, 1955. 4. BBFC file on The Wild One, Robertson 1989 105 . 5. Watkins BBFC to Ayres MGM , March 24,1955,...
Denmark
Production Palladium Denmark black and white, 35mm running time 115 minutes length 3440 meters. Released 8 December 1964, Paris. Producers J0rgen Nielsen with John Hilbard as executive producer screenplay Carl Theodor Dreyer, from the play by Hjalmar S derberg photography Henning Bendtsen with Arne Abrahamsen editor Edith Schl ssel sound Knud Kristensen art director Kai Rasch music and solo numbers J0rgen Jersild songs Grethe Risbjerg Thomsen costume designer Berit Nykjaer. Cast Nina Pens Rode...
The Roster
The Motion Picture Industry Experience Roster is a list of persons, e.g., Art Directors and Assistant Art Directors who, by virtue of their work experience, are entitled to preference of employment over persons not on the Roster. The Roster is maintained by the Contract Services Administrative Trust Fund CSATF and is separate and apart from the Union. To get onto the Roster, one must apply to Contract Services and have worked on a total of no less than 30 days for one or more signatory...
PS Afterthoughts on Gender and Medium
It would seem from the commonalities of these five films that this form of necrophilia'' is gendered. All of the objects of necrophilial desire are women all of their morbid lovers, men. And the gender biases of the classical cinema and its preferred objects are overdetermined by cultural and psychic forces. Elisabeth Bronfen has thoroughly analyzed the imbrication of death, femininity, and the aesthetic in modern literature and art. But it must be added that the cinema can and sometimes does...
Dw Griffiths Background And Early Career
D. W. Griffith, arguably the most influential pioneer in the art of the narrative film, was born on a farm near La Grange, Kentucky in 1875, ten years after the Civil War. He came from a family of wealth on his mother's side. His father, known as Roaring Jake and Thunder Jake for his oratory skills, achieved glory on the battlefield as a colonel in the Civil War. But Griffith's father was also a wanderer and a gambler who left his family in debt when he died. Hence, after Griffith's mother...
God and Gary Cooper Are Dead
Tony Soprano's belief that he inhabits a world of collapsing values is a major theme of the series. The ways he attempts to deal with such a world at first waver between life affirmation and life negation. But as the series progresses, Tony becomes more and more of a nihilist in the most negative and life-denying sense of that term. He is as much a victim of his own psychological weaknesses as he is a man who has been thrown into fated circumstances that weaken him. He is a mob boss whose power...
Generic Conventions and Gender
It should be observed at this point that Millay's intervention in the conflict between Dunson and Matt and the comedic resolution that it makes possible the film's ending in the promise of marriage are clearly inappropriate in terms of the conventions of the Western genre, according to which one of the two men should be killed. Nor is this ending in any way commensurate with the depth of the conflict established between the two characters over the course of the film. More than one critic has...
Acknowledgements
The task of writing a definitive guide on a subject as specialized as art direction is daunting. In order to include as much information as necessary to complete such a comprehensive undertaking, I relied on personal wisdom gleaned from working in the collaborative art of filmmaking, which has taught me to trust the collective experience and knowledge of my peers. Other art directors whom I admire and have helped fill in the gaps are Linda Berger, Gae Buckley, Phil Dagort, Christa Munro, and...
Dutribozione 1
The original version of Big Jim M set during the hysterical Red scare McCarthy years and follows the i of an American government of who is sent to Hawaii to root out-communist cell. Marijuana plays no whatsoever in the original story, I film's Italian distributors felt thati had little relevance to audiences rt so when the film was dubbed the dialogue was adapted so that John Wayne's government agent appears tl be cracking down on the illegal dru trade rather than undercover communists. It was...
Evacuee
Degree of difficulty Surprisingly easy 2 lights, maybe more Little Elizabeth Roscmond Taylor was evacuated to Hollywood during the dark days of World War II. Her first film appeared in 1942, and she was a star at the age of 12 with National Velvet 1944 . In her late sixties she was still 'bankable and the media reported her private life in a manner hardly less breathless than was the fashion of the 1930s. This portrait owes a certain amount to William Morten sen, who advocated very flat...
The Cider House Rules
See Red Apples and Orphans on page 108. In Racing with the Moon, the color of roses transforms a steel railroad car into a valentine to young lovers. Director Kenneth Branagh moved the location of Much Ado About Nothing from dry and dusty Sicily to take advantage of the marmalade-colored Tuscan light. jackets. That's your first clue, or warning. One of the reasons yellow is the color used for caution signs is that it's visually aggressive. It appears to come toward you. We've built it into our...
Feminist Critique
Even as Rosow, Clarens, and Hirsch were summing up an era in crime-film criticism, a new wave of feminist studies was calling into question that criticism's methodology. As an earlier generation of critics had rejected Rotha's tenets of originality and ambition, the new feminist theory rejected the content analysis of Molly Haskell, aptly summarized by Haskell's 1974 summary of female roles in films noirs In the dark melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and she didn't...
Idea Rights Protecting Your Pitches And Avoiding Idea Theft
Without a doubt, a copyright is the best way to protect a screenplay from being stolen. However, a filmmaker may have only an idea for a film or television program a concept that has yet to be turned into a screenplay and copyright law does not protect ideas. In fact, even though they are valuable to the filmmaker, ideas can be very hard to protect legally the law starts with the presumption that ideas are free for anyone to use. Generally, for a filmmaker to protect an idea when he or she is...
Using Sound As Metaphor
The sound of a ticking clock in a scene may be simply part of ambient sound, or, as in High Noon, serve as a metaphor for the passage of time, bringing the hero inexorably closer to a showdown he does not want. Sometimes the long wail of a locomotive reminds us that our character lives near railroad tracks sometimes it serves as a metaphor for a character's yearnings to escape the confines of his or her life. Sound used as metaphor can create a whole dimension of meaning not immediately...
From Storyboard to Celluloid
If, as Cooper and Fincher suggest, the titles for Se7en are to be understood as having been made by Doe himself, it seems safe to conclude that all of the imagery in the sequence has been selected by him and is representative of his interests and obsessions. After all, the sequence offers a fairly straightforward narrative Doe is actively assembling his scrapbooks literally stitching stories together out of the detritus, medical follies, and physical and mental miseries of modern human...
Death by Hanging Japan
Production Sozo-sha and A.T.G. black and white, 35mm, Vistavision size running time 117 minutes. Released 1968, Japan. Cost 10 million yen. Producers Masayuki Nakajima, Takuji Yamaguchi and Nagisa Oshima screenplay Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Michinori Fukao and Nagisa Oshima, from a newspaper story assistant director Kiyoshi Ogasawara photography Yasuhiro Yoshioka editor Sueko Shiraishi sound Hideo Nishizaki sound effects Akira Suzuki production designer Jusho Toda music Hikaru Hayashi....