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...
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...
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...
Visual Design
The production designer deals with one of the most important jobs in a film. He or she is responsible for planning its entire look, from individual sets to overall color schemes. Normally one of the first to be involved in the production, the designer delegates specific tasks to other members of the crew, who are in turn responsible for creating designs on a more detailed level or for supervising or executing the work needed to transform the designs into reality. Set building is the...
Good Cinematography
While an intrinsic part of the viewer's evaluation of a film is often an assessment of the cinematography Good cinematography '' it is actually very difficult to tell when a cinematographer has made an astounding accomplishment in his or her work. This is so largely because cinematographic results generally look wonderful to the untrained eye. In most situations, the professional cine-matographer and gaffers, using a full range of lighting equipment, dollies and cranes, and camera mounts, can...
Moving Image Archives And History
The professionalization of moving image archives has been accompanied by changes in film studies, which have precipitated a new consciousness not only in media historians but also in the archivists themselves. While the previous generation of film historians perceived film history in a teleological fashion, as a progressive evolution toward film art, the new film historians have been much more interested in contextualizing film and television history in the broader arena of cultural studies and...
Trend Setting
Early costume designers, such as West and Adrian, recognized design as a great force in twentieth-century haute couture. Their work, crucial in the establishment of American style as a world competitor, was the first to outstrip the French, who dominated fashion commercially and artistically. By the 1910s, stars were photographed in cinema clothes for fashion magazines and Sears-Roebuck catalogues, and the word film was used as an advertising lure. But the public's desire for these clothes is...
B Movies
The term ''B movie'' is still frequently used to describe any low-budget film. At the same time, it is an appellation saddled with negative connotations, and for many people, the ''B'' in ''B movie'' stands for ''bad.'' But not every low-budget movie is a B movie, and most B movies were not that bad. B movies were, in fact, a fairly shortlived phenomenon, a product of the studio era that disappeared during the 1950s. From the 1930s through the 1950s, all of the major studios made B movies a...
Costume
Costume design is as crucial to the creation of a film as direction, acting, art design, and cinematography. The audience, if it notes costume design at all, sees fashion or period dress, not realizing that a costume is never fashion, period or even clothes and that the designer must achieve these categories without revealing any tricks. The costume itself is a trick, crafted for a single film moment, and despite its brief appearance, can have taken twenty people two weeks to prepare. It may be...
Cartoons 1
Cartoons both amuse and engage they are able to point out the foibles and complexities of humankind in direct, illuminating, and original ways. From humble beginnings, the cartoon has progressed to address social, cultural, and religious taboos in provocative and amusing ways. It is the most subversive of mainstream arts. Though often intrinsically bound up with the Disney tradition, the cartoon has a variety of histories worldwide, and diverse practices reflecting the cultures of the nations...
The Golden Era
In 1923 the Fleischers made the groundbreaking four-reel educational film, Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In the face of increased competition from the technically adept Fleischer Studio, Disney created the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie 1928 , introducing animation's first cartoon superstar, Mickey Mouse. Nine years later, Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1937 , the first full-length, sound-synchronized, Technicolor animated film, along the way making the...
Early Child Stars
Throughout early film history, children were central to some movies, such as the title characters in Jack and the Beanstalk Edwin S. Porter, 1902 and The Adventures of Dollie D.W. Griffith, 1908 , and in such parables as The Land Beyond the Sunset 1912 . Yet as the Hollywood star system developed in the 1910s, many children's roles were filled by established adult actors like Mary Pickford 1892-1979 , who played the title role of a ten-year-old in The Poor Little Rich Girl 1917 at the age of...
Ken G Hall And Cinesound Australias Hollywood Studio
At the nadir of the Depression in 1931, the controlling shareholder of Australasian Films forced the company into liquidation. Immediately, the managing director, Stuart Doyle, formed a new company, Greater Union Theatres, and the following year he created Australia's most financially successful studio, Cinesound Productions, under the supervision of Ken G. Hall 1901-1994 . Beginning with On Our Selection, Hall produced, directed, and was often the writer of seventeen films between 1932 and...
National Cinemas
Although Burkina Faso formerly Upper Volta is one of the poorest countries south of the Sahara, its authorities made an early decision to support their national cinema. Cinema houses were nationalized in 1970 and the Burkinab distribution company SONACIB Soci t Nationale du Cin ma Burkinab was established with th goal of supporting national filmmakers by taxing foreign films shown locally and then redirecting those funds into local production. This system paved the way for the first Burkinab...
NORMAN McLAREN b Stirling Scotland April d January
Norman McLaren was one of the most innovative and influential figures in animation. Throughout his life McLaren worked in any number of techniques, including painting, drawing, and scratching directly onto film pixellation the frame-by-frame animation of staged live-action movement stop-motion chalk drawing multiple compositing hand-drawn soundtracks cut-outs and 3D object animation. Beyond the implicit influence of his work, he also nurtured other artists, and maintained a pacifist, left-wing,...
WAYNE WANG b Hong Kong January
Named after John Wayne, Wang studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he also studied film history and production. Wang worked as a director for a television comedy in Hong Kong in the 1970s before returning to the San Francisco Bay area, working as an administrator for a Chinatown community organization and assisting in the production of children's television programming aimed at Chinese American children. Chan Is Missing 1981 , Wang's breakthrough feature, was...
Romantic Comedy
Whereas romantic and screwball comedy both have fun with the courtship process, romantic comedy is serious about love itself, and screwball comedy treats it as a joke. Consequently, at the heart of many romantic comedies are the painful realities that come from opening one's self to love. The men Tom Hanks and David Duchovny are devastated by the deaths of their beloved wives at the beginnings of Sleepless in Seattle 1993 and Return to Me 2000 , respectively. In Love Affair 1939 and its two...
KEN RUSSELL b Southampton England July
Ken Russell has had a multifaceted career as a dancer, photographer, actor, and producer-director at the BBC, where he was responsible for a series of artist biographies including Elgar 1962 , Bartok 1964 , and The Debussy Film 1965 . French Dressing 1963 and Billion Dollar Brain 1967 were his first films, but it was Women in Love 1969 that marked his coming out as a controversial British filmmaker. Based on D. H. Lawrence's novel and starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Oliver Reed, it...
The Costumes Construction And Purpose
A costume can be built made , purchased, altered, or rented. Often a designer will employ all four methods. A designer always uses a crew. Some crew members, such as pattern cutters, seamstresses, and tailors, are essential to any project. Others are film-specific, such as specialists in beads, embroidery, lace, feathers, leather, plastic, rubber, straw, elastic, or netting shirt, shoe, hat, and accessory makers as well as blacksmiths, armorers, jewelers, weavers, knitters, dyers, or furriers....
The Canadian New Wave
Since the 1980s, a generation of new filmmakers has emerged in Canada who together have taken Canadian films in different directions from the downbeat realism that characterized the first wave of Canadian feature films in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these directors, including Jerry Cicoretti b. 1956 , David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan b. 1960 , Bruce MacDonald b. 1959 , Don McKellar b. 1963 , Kevin McMahon, Jeremy Podeswa b. 1962 , and Patricia Rozema b. 1958 , are located in Toronto. The city is...
China
China is one of the world's leading producers of feature films, yet, except for a handful of recent works by Zhang Yimou b. 1951 and Chen Kaige b. 1952 , Chinese cinema is virtually unknown in the rest of the world. Language has restricted Chinese movies' mobility, especially since most of them are not subtitled, but so have the country's longtime planned economy and socialist politics, and government censorship of works deemed critical and not suitable for foreign screening. In 2004 the...
TRACEY MOFFATT b Brisbane Australia November I
Although the visual artist Tracey Moffatt is far more prolific as a photographer than a filmmaker, the singularity of her vision has won over many moviegoers both in and outside of her native Australia. Her cinematic corpus is characterized formally by a hyperrealist aesthetic, while thematically it examines the ways Australia's colonial past informs the present, particularly that of various individuals who attempt to relate to one another despite their differences. This is an issue in which...
DAVID CRONENBERG b Toronto Ontario Canada March
The Canadian director, screenwriter, and actor David Cronenberg has been one of the most important directors of the horror film renaissance that began in the 1970s. His explorations of biological terror and sexual dread have provided a strikingly original approach to the genre. Beginning his career with a series of effectively creepy horror films, Cronenberg moved from exploitation to art cinema and achieved international acclaim with several challenging and unconventional films Dead Ringers...
Contemporary Hollywood
Although character actors as a group are associated with the studio period, they are also valued in the New Hollywood. In the more naturalistic context of film acting since the 1960s, the ordinariness of character actors is their stock in trade, belying though it does their idiosyncrasy and frequently their range. In one evening at the movies in September 1979 Charles Durning b. 1923 was seen in Starting Over, a film then being sneak-previewed in North Dallas Forty, the theater's regular...
The Classical Studio Era
The star system that developed in the early decades of the film industry prized certain highly photogenic men and women of great physical beauty and charisma. Yet early on, the public also took to its heart actors who were not so much personalities as chameleons capable of creating a range of characters. In the 1920s, Lon Chaney, ''The Man with the Thousand Faces,'' intrigued audiences just as much as Greta Garbo or Rudolph Valentino. The public also embraced actors who looked like people they...
Further Reading Aaq
Gadjigo, Samba. Ousmane Sembene and History on the Screen A Look Back to the Future.'' In Focus on African Films, edited by Francoise Pfaff, 33-47. Bloomington and Indianapolis Indiana University Press, 2004. Gadjigo, Samba, et al., eds. Ousmane Sembene Dialogues with Critics and Writers. Amherst University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Murphy, David. Sembene Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction. Oxford, UK, and Trenton, NJ James Currey and Africa World Press, 2000. Petty, Sheila, ed. A...
Integrating Performance And Other Cinematic Elements
The central place of narrative means that in most films, actors adjust the quality and energy of their gestures, voices, and actions to communicate their characters' shifting desires and dynamic relationships with other characters. At each moment of the film, actors' perfor mances are keyed to the narrative, which provides the musical score for the film's rising and falling action. The scale and quality of actors' physical and vocal expressions are also keyed to the film's style or genre. For...
Childrens Films
Children's films may be divided into two categories those made expressly for a child audience, and those made about children regardless of audience. This distinction is important, as many of the most popular films that feature child actors, like The Exorcist 1973 and The Sixth Sense 1999 , are clearly not meant to be seen by children. Yet it is in such films that the film industry represents children, reflecting society's own notions of childhood. Quite often, the very definition of childhood...
Character Actors
In the casting hierarchy of most films leading men and leading ladies are at the top, followed by actors who populate the cast by colorfully but realistically embodying a range of characters. In films and television virtually all actors below the rank of star and above bit players are supporting actors, although not necessarily all are character actors. The term is ambiguous to many it is an honor to be called a character actor, as it suggests fully developed skills that enable the actor to...
International Films About Children
Hollywood has often presented an image of children that international audiences could easily appreciate, with an emphasis on universal themes such as the thrill of mischief, the hilarity of misadventure, and the need for love. Films about children made outside the United States have not usually enjoyed the same exposure, since other film markets have not maintained stables of child actors and have rarely been able to produce series of films for their respective child audiences. With the...
Themes
Since the late 1980s the anxieties associated with, on the one hand, the stagnation of the pan-Arab project of national self-determination, and on the other, the wave of religious fundamentalism, have been reflected in Arab cinema. Cinema in the region is increasingly reaching toward a national identity struggling to affirm its heterogeneity and to find a new role in the fight for social and national liberation. In Egypt, the film production center of the Arab world, the wave of Islamic...
HOWARD HAWKS b Goshen Indiana May d December
As well as racing cars and planes, the young Howard Hawks also worked vacations in the property department of Hollywood's Famous Players-Lasky studios. After serving as an army pilot in World War I and working in the aircraft industry, Hawks returned to Hollywood in the early 1920s as a cutter, assistant director, story editor, and casting director before writing screenplays and selling the story The Road to Glory 1926 to Fox on condition that he also direct. Thereafter, Hawks worked for over...
Camera Lighting Electrical And Production Sound Departments
The camera crew is headed by the director of photography, who works closely with the director. Together they select the camera s and film stock and plan the camera angles and movements. The director of photography also takes responsibility for selecting camera lenses and designing the lighting. The director of photography may also operate the camera, but normally this task is delegated to a camera operator. For multicamera shooting, several operators are needed, and these may be credited with...
Biography
Biographical films, or biopics, depict the lives or segments thereof of past and present eminent, famous, and infamous people. The boundary between the biopic and other genres is fluid, since biography can include historical film, costume drama, musical, melodrama, western, crime film, social problem film, documentary, and so on. The biopic distinguishes itself by emphasizing the person rather than a history of an era, at least in its title. The genre is not static, but rather sensitive to...
Cannibalism And Tropicalism
The year 1968 fragmented the artistic milieu and nurtured the emergence of new aesthetic strategies of resistance cannibalism, Tropicalism, and the aesthetics of garbage dominated the third phase of Cinema Novo. Cannibalism, inspired by the modernist movement of the 1920s, was a nationalist strategy of cultural anti-imperialism, according to which the culture imposed by the First World should be devoured, digested, and recycled according to local needs. ''Cannibalism is an exemplary mode of...
Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
An imprint of Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation Detroit New York San Francisco New Haven, Conn. Waterville, Maine London Tom Burns, Jim Craddock, Elizabeth Cranston, Kristen A. Dorsch, Dana Ferguson, Allison Marion, Kathleen D. Meek, Kathleen Lopez Nolan, Kevin Nothnagel, Marie Toft, Yolanda Williams Dean Dauphinais, Mary Grimes, Lezlie Light, Michael Logusz, Christine O'Bryan 2007 Schirmer Reference, an imprint of Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation. Thomson and Star...
b William Harrison Hays Sullivan Indiana November d March
Dubbed by Variety as the czar of all the Rushes,'' William Harrison Hays is best remembered for overseeing the creation of the Production Code that would informally bear his name. However, Hays's responsibilities and influence extended far beyond a censorial arena. His centrality in manufacturing positive public relations for the Hollywood film industry, maintaining political contacts through four presidential administrations, and consolidating control of international distribution channels...
Presentational And Representational Acting
Acting styles also exist on a continuum, with extreme presentational styles at one end and extreme representational styles at the other. The distinction between the two is not clear-cut. Viewers' knowledge, experience, and expectations help to determine whether or not a particular performance will be seen as presentational or representational. Moreover, the two styles appear in different films made during the same period, and are often found in the same film. Gradations of presentational and...
Films For Children After Disney
The remarkable success of Snow White one of the highest-grossing films of its era demonstrated that films with a particular appeal to children were a viable source of revenue for the studios. Animated features continued for some time to be the primary genre aimed at children. Thus followed further Disney productions such as Pinocchio 1940 , Dumbo 1941 , and Bambi 1942 , all of which dealt specifically with issues of childhood development. Meanwhile, MGM had initiated a live-action series of...
A Feature Film Industry Begins
The NFB has been drastically downsized since the 1980s, the result of a series of government funding cutbacks, to the point that it has little presence in Canadian culture. Nevertheless, the board's documentary emphasis has left an indelible influence on feature filmmaking in Canada. In the absence of a commercial film industry, the NFB has allowed many filmmakers who would later become the country's most important directors to hone their craft on government-sponsored films. The two films that...
Definition Of Terms
The fact that cinema was invented during the height of Western imperialist expansion and developed most aggressively in those countries with the greatest political reach, such as France, Britain, and Germany, makes it impossible to discuss the development of the medium without taking into account its ties to the age of empire. Thus a number of film historians and film theorists have dedicated themselves to exploring several key issues on the one hand, how film has functioned in the past as a...
Further Reading Kte
Bandis, Helen, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald, and Ra l Ruiz. Raul Ruiz Images of Passage. Australia Rouge Press, 2004. Burton, Julianne. Ra l Ruiz Chile and France Between Institutions. In Cinema and Social Change in Latin America Conversations with Filmmakers, edited by Julianne Burton, 181-194. Austin University of Texas Press, 1986. Pe a, Richard. Images of Exile Two Films by Raoul Ruiz.'' In Reviewing Histories Selections from New Latin American Cinema, edited by Coco Fusco, 136-139....
Race Movies
Hollywood rarely, if ever, offered depictions of African American life and culture with humanity, and as a response, many African American entrepreneurs ventured into filmmaking to correct the negative images. Pioneers included Bill Foster 1884- , founder of the first black film production company, the Foster Photoplay Company, established in Chicago in 1910 Noble Johnson 1881-1978 , the Hollywood character actor who, along with his brother George, led the Lincoln Motion Picture Company in Los...
Beginnings
Cinema first came to the French-colonized territories of Africa south of the Sahara in 1900 when a French circus group projected the Lumi re brothers' L'arroseur arrose Watering the Gardener, 1895 in a Dakar marketplace. The early European films were admired and even feared for their potential to capture people in real-life situations. Distribution and exhibition expanded accordingly in major cities to meet the demands of this novelty. There was no question, however, of sub-Saharan Africans...
THE Bs OF POVERTY ROW
Smaller company Bs were dominated by three companies with a significant output during the 1930s and 1940s Monogram, Republic, and Producers Releasing Corporation PRC . Although a number of low-end studios existed at the end of the silent era, the transition to sound, coupled with the Great Depression, caused most of them to fall by the wayside. In 1929 W. Ray Johnston and Trem Carr transformed their Rayart Pictures into Monogram, with a production studio and a nationwide distribution system....
Chilean Renaissance
In the 1950s and 1960s the film journals Cine Foro and Ercilla began to appear, and a new generation of filmmakers emerged, spurred by the founding of the Grupo de Cine Experimental at the University of Chile by Sergio Bravo and Pedro Chaskel 1957 and the Cine Club of Vi a del Mar 1962 . By the time the Dutch-born Joris Ivens n George Henri Anton Ivens, 1898-1989 who excelled at both poetic and political forms of documentary arrived in Chile in 1962 he had documented political struggles in...
Arab Cinema
The Arab world constitutes twenty-two states spanning an area from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Arabian Gulf in the East, and from the Taurus mountains in the North to the Equator in the South. It has a multireligious and multiethnic population of nearly 300 million. As a mass art form, film was introduced in the main population centers of the region within the first two years of its invention in 1895. Over the following century, only seven Arab states established a significant or...
HENRI LANGLOIS b Smryna Izmir Turkey November d Paris France January
The cofounder of the Cin math que Fran aise in Paris, Henri Langlois belonged to the first generation of film archivists, most of whom were dedicated cinephiles rather than trained archivists. Over a forty-year period he amassed one of the largest cinema collections in the world, but unfortunately a significant percentage decomposed due to poor storage conditions. In 1934, already mad about movies, Langlois started a film club, the Cercle du Cin ma, with his friend, the filmmaker Georges...
Brazil
Despite its scant international visibility, Latin American cinema has a long and complex history bound to international aesthetic movements and local social conditions, global economics particularly the control of distribution by transnational conglomerates and the building of national cultures. These particular dialectics between center and periphery intensify cinema's intrinsic tension between its industrial base and its aesthetic presumptions as well as its dual, contradictory nature as an...