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...
Movement and Speed of Editing
To ensure such 'transparent' editing, it is necessary that the locations, props, actors and movement in one shot are consistent with what has gone before. The speed at which something happens and the space within which it occurs should be consistent across the relevant shots. In effect, continuity editing supports the meanings produced by the audio visual interpretations of the narrative. This principle can be illustrated by reference to a scene mentioned previously, the climactic moment in...
Roland Barthes and Narrative Codes
A second approach which has been called structuralist is that developed by Roland Barthes, a French writer and cultural theorist who wrote widely from the 1950s until his death in 1980. Once again though Barthes did also write about film some of his influential ideas originally concerned narrative in literature, but have been extensively applied to film. In a book entitled S Z, Barthes outlined the workings of five narrative codes while some of the names he chose are Greek and may be difficult,...
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Figure 9.4 Quentin Tarantino or 'Quentin Tarantino' BFI Stills, Posters and Designs Lynch, Jarman or Duras, the idea of the director as the most significant creative influence on a film has passed into everyday mythology while some would have gone to see Eyes Wide Shut for the sex, some for the stars and some more problematically for the genre, few would have been unaware of Kubrick's reputation as a director - or at least of his recent death. Indeed, the increased celebrity status of many...
Genre As Repetition And Difference
Genre is a French word meaning 'type', and film genres have existed since the early days of cinema. Films were frequently categorized as being crime, romance, comedy, fantasy or actuality. It is to be noted though that the descriptions given to particular types of films have frequently changed, along with the identification of new genres. Edwin Porter's The Great Train Robbery 1903 was initially described as a crime chase movie but is now regarded as a western. Similarly, M li s' Journey to the...
Camera Movement
As has already been mentioned in the above example, long takes usually involve camera movement of some sort, as it would be difficult to justify a long take in which the camera was static unless the action within the frame was sufficiently interesting to be able to hold our attention one of the characteristics of early films was long takes with static cameras see Chapter 7 on Early Cinema and Film Form . There are four main types of camera movement in a pan shot the camera rotates horizontally...
Alternative Form And Art Cinema
After his French New Wave films of the 1960s, Godard gained fame and notoriety with his Maoist Marxist-Leninist-inspired 'difficult' period of 1968-72, corresponding to the 'counter-cinema' described above. He was not alone in his politicized rejection of the status quo, but not all film-makers were so dogmatic in their politics. A contrast is provided, for example, by the work of Marguerite Duras, a French writer who turned to film-making in 1971 and proceeded to make some 20 films see p. 163...
Film Form and Conventions
Movement takes place over time and within space. It was necessary that time and space be dealt with appropriately if films were to be able to tell stories clearly. Camera and editing techniques were to provide the solution. The content and function of shots were clarified through the breaking up of scenes into several takes using different shot sizes and camera angles. The increasing use of close ups provided information and detail to the viewer and made it easier to identify characters and...
Formalism And Realism
Two perspectives that are closely linked to the topic of film form are formalism and realism. Each has a particular view of what film should be for and how it can achieve its purpose. Formalism began to take on coherence in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and its two key theorists were Sergei Eisenstein and Rudolf Arnheim. The theorization behind realism gained strength during the 1930s and its later proponents included Andr Bazin and Siegfried Kra-cauer. Although the debate between these...
The Auteur Theory
By comparison with the sometimes obscurely theoretical turn of events in film culture in Britain, the influence of the Cahiers politique in the United States was no less important. It was writer critic Andrew Sarris who, between 1962 and 1968, elaborated the 'auteur theory' which has so often been confused with the original politique. His championing of the auteur idea involved a rejection of the then-dominant 'social realism' writing of most American critics, and was related to the growing...
Effects Approaches
Since the early days of film and of mass media, there has been a strong assumption that media have an 'effect' on the spectator this assumption has been most noticeable in the various moral panics which punctuated the twentieth century, most obviously the early anxiety about film itself, the debate around the so-called 'video nasties' in the 1980s and the more general concern about representations of violence see Martin Barker's A Haunt of Fears and The Video Nasties among the more high-profile...
Exercise Lfl
For any three films of your choice, compare the story time and the plot time. How are they related in each of the films It is also the case that time can be expanded in a film. The Untouchables 1987 contains a shoot-out scene on the steps of a town hall, part of which is shot in slow motion. The sequence lasts 2 minutes, whereas the fast-moving events would probably have lasted less than half that time. The expansion of time emphasizes the speed of the action by only making it comprehensible...
Cahiers du Cinma the Politique des Auteurs and Auteur Theory
The seeds for a reappraisal of the director's role were sown in an article written in 1948 by Alexandre Astruc for Cahiers du cin ma entitled 'The Birth of a New Avant-garde la cam ra-stylo camera-pen '. This established the idea that film-making was analogous to writing, so it was not long before filmic equivalents for the literary author were sought. The moment which sparked a major shift in assessment of a director's contribution to the film-text was an article by Francois Truffaut entitled...
Shot Size and Editing
This particular scene also serves to illustrate another common principle behind editing, the use of a variety of shot sizes. On one level a variety of shot sizes helps maintain our interest visually through avoiding repetition, but it also serves another function. We have already noted the various meanings that shot sizes can produce, and through editing a logical progression is created out of shot size. In the scene from the above example we are provided with an extreme long shot of the...
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Figure 11.4 Kate Winslet in some ways a star, in others not Photograph by Stephane Fefer, courtesy Kobal Willard Christopher Smith Jr was born in 1968 and grew up in middle-class West Philadelphia. He allegedly earned the nickname 'Prince' because of the way he could charm his way out of trouble, and began his career as the rapper 'Fresh Prince' performing with DJ Jazzy Jeff. He then went on to star in his own sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, from 1991 to 1996. In this sitcom he played...
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Figure 8.2 An everyday traffic jam in Godard's Weekend BFI Stills, Posters and Designs The whole issue of how pleasure is produced and why we sometimes experience pleasure and sometimes not is a complex one which will be considered further in chapter 12 below. 7 Fiction versus 'reality' it can be argued that all films, including documentaries, are 'fiction'. Since it is impossible to 'show reality' on film, the aim of counter-cinema has been to force the audience to confront reality the reality...
Conclusion
We have seen in this chapter how Hollywood has changed over time. The American film industry has developed from a highly structured, centralized, factory-style studio system to a more fragmented package unit system in which individual films are pitched by independent producers to competing studios. The result has been a shift from assembly-line production, with its formulaic use of genres, studio styles and stars, to a system in which directors, stars and others have more creative freedom to...
Widescreen
Widescreen refers to any film screening for which the ratio of the width of the projected image to its height called the aspect ratio is greater than 4 3 or 1.33 1 - the standard ratio used in the industry from silent film until the early 1950s, also called the Academy format. During the 1920s there were experiments with several different widescreen systems in Hollywood, such as Magnascope, Fox Grandeur, Vitascope and 70mm Wide Film, but these processes were expensive and did not provide high...
Exercise Khb
Carry out a survey among your class asking why people went to the last film they saw. What factors did they take into account Did they feel that they had a real choice of films or were there many films that they did not want to see Arthouse cinemas began to appear in the early 1950s and by the early 1960s there were approximately 500 in the USA. They are distinguished by their specialist programming policies and the range of films that are shown. They can be defined as cinemas that feature...
Analysis of Individual Films
The most important and productive use of psychoanalytic theory has been in the analysis of individual films and the ways in which they prompt the production of meaning. This has often meant the application of fairly standard psychoanalytic concepts, but these have been adapted to gain insight into specific films. The so-called Oedipus complex is one example. According to classical Freudian theory, in order to become fully socialized heterosexual adults, male and female infants have to...
Sex Pop and Realism
While the Carry On films were light-hearted, cheeky entertainment, a new type of film emerged the following year which took a very different form. Social realist cinema, or 'kitchen sink cinema' as it came to be known to reflect the common use of domestic locations such as kitchens in the films, presented a gritty, raw interpretation of everyday life. Typical themes were alienation, frustration, fighting the system, and ambition for a better life away from the drudgery of everyday life. As John...
Assembly Line Production
During the 'Golden Age' of Hollywood, the studios produced one film each per week per year. At its height, the studio system released 350 films in a single year. The studios were able to achieve such remarkable production figures through rationalization of working practices. Adopting a 'scientific management' approach to film production, the studios began to model themselves on factories, employing assembly-line techniques, hierarchical structures, and a strict division of labour the 1920s also...
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Double Indemnity low key lighting and a femme fatale with murder in mind Figure 10.2 Film noir is strongly identifiable by its iconography regardless of whether it is a genre, subgenre or style of the crime detective genre, it is unusual in that its categorization was created by film theorists as a descriptive tool rather than by the industry as a marketing tool. Visually, noir films, as you would expect from the name, are dark. Low key lighting is frequently used, with resulting silhouettes...
Parallel and Contrapuntal Sound
Usually the sound we hear in a film directly accompanies what we see on the screen it is appropriate sound, it is the sound we expect. The music in Trainspotting matches what we see in the film and seems relevant to the characters, their lifestyles, and the pace of the film. In other words, the music works in parallel with the visual content of the film. However, this is not always the case. In both A Clockwork Orange 1971 and GoodFellas, horrific acts of violence are accompanied by bright,...
Pststructuralism And Recent Developments
Subsequent poststructuralist and postmodern theoretical developments see Chapter 12 have posed further difficult questions about the concept of authorship. Is the 'author' the real person called Quentin Tarantino, is it an effect of the film-text the 'Quentin Tarantino' of Pulp Fiction, say , or is it something that lives in the reader viewer's head Figure 9.3 Indeed, after Roland Barthes, are we not all 'authors' who 'write' our own films in our heads as we watch them And apart from the...
Mainstream and Alternative Film Form
Mainstream Narrative and Film Form 132 Alternative Narratives and Film Form 143 Alternative Form and Art Cinema 149 Conclusion 150 Summary 150 By the 1920s particular conventions had become well established for making films. Mainstream techniques such as the organization of time and space through 'invisible' continuity editing and the verisimilitude resulting from particular uses of mise en sc ne and from cause and effect structures and character motivation began to dominate film-making, as...
Vertical Integration
Vertical integration meant that the major studios dominated film production, distribution and exhibition. They made, released and marketed their films, even owning the cinemas in which they were shown exhibition was the most profitable sector of the film industry. In the days before television and VCRs, box-office sales were the source of income for recouping budgets spent on making films. The heads of the major studios wanted to ensure that there was a constant outlet for their product, and...
Shot Size
Shot size in turn is determined by the framing. There are many possible choices of shot but we can think in terms of five basic shot sizes with intermediate shots in between see Figure 6.3 . Shot sizes can be closely tied to narrative development, notably to the progression of scenes. Typically a film, and often a scene, will begin with an extreme long shot ELS . Just as narratives tend to begin slowly in order to acquaint us with characters and locations, so films visually use an ELS sometimes...
Some Aspects of Style
Narratives can be considered in terms of content and structure. They consist of events which are organized in a particular way. The process of presenting a narrative is called narration, and the way in which a narrative is presented can be identified as its style. The principal components of film style mise en scene, cinematography, editing and sound have been described in Chapter 6 above and much of their relevance to narrative has been considered here we shall briefly consider how a few...
The Nosographic Approach
There has been some writing which attempts more or less to psychoanalyse a film director the director's films can be treated as 'symptoms' which can be used to analyse, for example, the director's repressed sexuality or mother-fixation. Such an approach has been used, for instance, in writing about Alfred Hitchcock and about Howard Hawks. You will often find this attitude underlying film reviews and biographies, but it has not generally been considered a very useful approach in academic work.
Ambient Sound
Ambient sound is also recorded at the end of filming in a location it is what is heard when there is no dialogue or movement. This background sound can be added at the editing stage if it is judged that there is too much silence. A lack of sound can be just as noticeable as the presence of sound, and it is rare that we experience complete silence in a film. A soundtrack is usually essential for a film it creates mood and strengthens meaning. A classic example of incidental music supplementing...
Godard and Counterc i ne m a
While there was no shortage of critics and theorists engaging in these arguments, a number of film-makers - predictably outside Hollywood - put theory into practice and made films which deliberately rejected conventional narrative forms. Among these was Jean-Luc Godard see also pp. 264-5 , particularly in the films he made between 1967 and 1972. In an influential article written in 1972, Peter Wollen advanced the term counter-cinema to describe Godard's and others' anti-narrative films. He...
Apparatus Theory
As we have already hinted, it is possible to see the mechanism of watching a film at least at a cinema as somehow dreamlike, engaging unconscious processes. Indeed, the illusory nature of film viewing was foreshadowed over two thousand years ago by the Greek philosopher Plato in a 'thought experiment' which is now referred to as 'Plato's cave'. Plato imagined a situation in which spectators who can be taken to represent humanity in general sit in an enclosure facing a wall and in front of...