ENGLISH 245 Quiz Flashcards

(1940) dir. by Howard Hawkes: Motif: Hildy’s hat and wardrobe change (shows how Hildy goes from feminine to a less feminine appearance when returning to her “reporter self”.

(1958) dir. by Alfred Hitchcock – the objectification motifs (the colors, the profile shot, etc.)
– (this concept relates not only to Vertigo but also Breathless, Double Indemnity, and Cleo from 5 to 7:
“What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”

(1952) dir. by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan – motifs surrounding synchronization and whether or not a person’s word actually belong to that person, whether or not they’re telling the truth, a kind of mismatch between someone’s voice and where it’s coming from

(1941) dir. by Orson Welles:
-Citizen Kane employs creative storytelling techniques as well. Acting almost as a biopic (biographical film), Citizen Kane portrays a long period of time realistically, allowing the characters to age as the story goes on. Instead of being told in a linear, completely chronological manner, Kane’s story unfolds in overlapping segments that add more information as each narrator adds his or her story.
-Citizen Kane made cinematic advances on many fronts, and its most significant contribution to cinematography came from the use of a technique known as deep focus. Deep focus refers to having everything in the frame, even the background, in focus at the same time, as opposed to having only the people and things in the foreground in focus. The deep focus technique requires the cinematographer to combine lighting, composition, and type of camera lens to produce the desired effect.
– The combination of innovative techniques, not one individual technique, is what makes Citizen Kane such a cinematically important film.
-The storytelling techniques succeed in painting Charles Foster Kane as an enigma, tortured, and complicated man who, in the end, leaves viewers with more questions than answers and inevitably invokes sympathy rather than contempt.

(1944) dir. by Billy Wilder – as an example of film noir; the “unpleasant” sort of aggressive tone, the fatalism, the femme fatale

(1945) dir. by Michael Curtiz – anti- and pro-feminist movie,

(2006) dir. by Richard Linklater – mokumentary, a documentary style film that uses documentary style realism to tell drama

(2008) dir. by Robert Kenner – documentary elements, hyper-realism and animation used to tell statistics, etc.

(1960) dir. by Jean-Luc Godard – French New Wave – the femme fatale, the “image” of a woman as well (think the opening), the repeated gesture of the hand touching the lips as a reference to the noir mobster type image, the ambiguous ending lines, the jump cuts conveying the movie as sped up and “breathless” or without pause or breath

(1962) Agnes Varda – motif of mirrors, of objectification and the concept of the audience framing what Cleo’s personality is, she is an “empty house” without the audience projecting whatever they want on her, her change in character throughout the movie and upon meeting Antoine

(1975) dir. by Steven Spielberg – often thought of as the first high-concept film in that it is a simple concept/premise, a one-line pitch if you will, but also contains scenes of character development and study, which are elements typically found in low-concept films

(1993) dir. by Steven Spielberg – themes and motifs of technology and its evolution; also the concepts surrounding story-telling and traditionalism vs. the rise of technology

(2008) dir. by Andrew Stanton – motifs of creativity being a sort of intrusive discourse, a disruption of the un-thinking flow of the human future human population constantly consuming and becoming more and more complacent; also the concepts of the film being an evolutionary symbol, with the ending signifying the humans starting over and rebuilding the whole history of the world

– Film has an intentional design and purpose and is not a random bunch of
elements strung together
-The way parts work together to create an overall effect. A pattern which includes:
meaning, feeling, expectations, function, and similarity and repetition
-The overall set of relationships among a film’s parts

1) Function:
-What are certain elements doing in the film?
-Why are things the way they are?
-Every element has a specific purpose and has thoughtfully and purposefully been placed there
2) Similarity and repetition:
-Motif: any significant recurring theme in a film. See: Hildy’s hat
-Parallelism: When a theme is echoed.
-Compare 2 or more distinct elements by highlighting some similarity
3) Difference and variation:
-Changing elements around to make things more interesting
ex. Contrast characters and their environments
4) Development:
-Progression from beginning to middle to end
-Progression of film’s patterns5) Unity: When all of the relationships in a film are clear and interwoven; elements work
together
-No gaps in the overall form
-Form develops logically

1) Referential:
-Concrete, close to bare bones summary (setting, time period)
– A viewer unacquainted with information would miss some of the meanings cued by the film. We can call such tangible meanings referential, since the film refers to things or places already invested with significance in the real world.2) Explicit:
-The specific message the film is trying to get across
-This is the blunt meaning of a film. For example, “There is no place like home” is the explicit meaning of Wizard of Oz. This meaning in controlled by the films context; such as, being stuck in Oz and therefore, Dorothy wants to go home.

3) Implicit:
-The meaning is not stated directly, but it is to be interpreted; multiple possible meanings
-This is the secondary meaning of a film after explicit. The example from Wizard of Oz would be “the passage from childhood to adulthood” which we gather because Dorothy wants to be like a kid before she enters Oz. When perceivers ascribe implicit meanings to an artwork, they’re usually said to be interpreting it. Some filmmakers claim to avoid implicit meanings altogether. They leave them to viewers and critics.

4) Symptomatic:
-The film’s meaning is based around a particular set of social values
-It treats an explicit meaning in The Wizard of Oz (There is no place like home) as displaying a set of values characteristic of a whole society. So, it’s possible to understand a film’s explicit or implicit meanings as bearing traces of a particular set of social values. We can call this symptomatic meaning, and the set of values that get revealed can be considered a social ideology.

-cause and effect
-motivation
-goal-oriented protagonist,
-objective and unrestricted narration
-delay, closure (equilibrium, conflict, change, resolution)

1) Diagetic: the aspects of a movie that are seen by the characters and exist in their realm
vs.
2) Non-diagetic: the added material they can’t see (like the titles, the score, etc.)

1) Temporal Order: How events are sequenced
Flashforward/fashback – pretty straight forward
2) Temporal Duration: How long the events take

A chain of events linked by cause and effect occurring in time and
space

presumed and inferred events and explicitly present events

explicitly present events and added non-diagetic elements

How often we see or hear an event

1) objective:Observing the external behaviors of characters
vs.
2) subjective depth: Seeing from a character’s standpoint
perceptual vs. mental subjectivity – (basically the same concept)

1) Restricted: The audience is limited to the knowledge of the character
vs.
2) Unrestricted – We know more, see more, and hear more than any of the
characters can; we are omniscient

a transition that suggests some amount of time has passed. the elimination of parts of the storyline in order to shorten plot time.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MONTAGE!!

a system of cutting to maintain a clear narrative action through match on action, crosscutting, eyeline match, screen direction, shot-reverse-shot, etc… discontinuity editing is this but out of order, not in a clear narrative format

when an expressionless face cut to a certain object, the audience would associate the emotion inspired by the object with the character that was just seen, and said then that the character actually had a matching expression, repeating the same idea multiple times with the same face but different objects to cause people to interpret a different emotion each time

all types of transitions, they’re pretty self-explanatory (specifically jump cuts are within the same scene and the same basic frame and mise-en-scene but with cuts, so there is a noticeable difference between each one, think Breathless)

matching shots in terms of the objects on screen, creating some illusion of similarity (ie, the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when a bone is thrown up in the air, the next shot is of a space satellite that looks strikingly similar)

180 rule suggests there is an invisible 180 degree line between two characters at the center of the action in a scene that must not be crossed unless to signify something else; axis of action is the same type of thing, it’s the axis that the subjects fall on

the most basic way to shoot dialogue, obeys the axis of action and 180-degree rule

establishing shot is a shot which gives the audience a view of the location of a scene before getting up close and personal within the scene. Reestablishing shot re-introduces the overall space that was analyzed into previous shots. The pattern is then establishment/breakdown/reestablishment

a cut in the same scene using a different frame but filmed at a different time, suggesting that the scene is continuous, but there are, as expected, mismatched positions and objects, also characters can get closer to each others and when they are talking. Scene: His Girl Friday restaurant scene

1) Setting
2)Costume and makeup
3)Staging
4)Depth cues
5)Lighting

-Can play causal roles in the film plot
-Purely graphic qualities (costume can be coordinated with setting)
-Make certain characters appear more good/evil

-Controlling placement of actors and objects in the scene

-Space has both volume and distinct planes

Hard/Soft Lighting: refers to the level of intensity a light gives off in a scene
-hard lighting creating sharp-edged shadows
-soft lighting creating a gradual transition from highlights to shadows avoiding
harsh areas
Backlighting – is illumination cast onto the figures in the scene from the side
opposite the camera, creating a thin highlighting outline of the figures
Under-lighting – is illumination from a point below the figure in the scene :used in horror films to create mysterious effect
Top lighting – lighting coming from above a person or object, usually to separate it
more clearly from the background or outline the upper areas of that figure

1) key is the brightest illumination coming into a scene
2) fill is illumination from a source less bright than the key light and it’s used to soften deep shadows in a scene
3) backlighting (above)

high-key means very low contrast- even illumination
low-key refers to high contrast

any shot involving rephotography to combine two or more images into one to create a special effect; also called a composite shot

the height in relation to the width of a frame

-angle
-level
-height
-distance (ECU, CU, MCU, MS, plan americaine, LS, ELS) – plan americaine is when all the characters are placed in on medium shot and are all visible; ECU is extreme close up, MCU is medium close up, MS is medium shot, etc.

-pan-camera body turning right or left
-tilt-camera on a stationary plane and leaning upward or downward
-tracking- camera physically moves with the subject
-crane-a shot using a crane, which follows a character from a high angle etc.

short panning or tilting movements to adjust for the figures’ movements, keeping them on-screen centered

shot with framing that shifts to keep a moving figure onscreen

-telephoto is a lense of long focal length, usually 75mm or more
-wide angle is short focal length that distorts straight lines at the edges of the frame, focal length of about 35mm or less

Done with the lens- magnification

measurement of the closest and farthest planes in front of the camera lens between which everything will be in sharp focus (anything closer than or farther away from two certain points will be out of focus)

-deep focus involves everything in the shot being in equal amount of focus
-deep space suggests different levels of focus among different layers of things in the background and foreground

a shifted area of sharp focus from one play to another during a shot

the camera on a small mount attached to the DOP’s body, easier and more versatile than a crane or dolly but not for large shots, mostly for following characters around

a shot that continues for an unusually lengthy time before the transition to the next shot; sequence means a moderately large segment of the film involving one complete stretch of action

– two tendencies in film: filmmaker’s who put their faith in the image (“plastics,” montage, “adding” something to reality, Griffin, Soviet, Abel Gance, Impressionism) and filmmakers who put their faith in reality (reality “reveals” itself through the a , “specific effects that can be derived from unity of space and time,” Flaherty, Murnau)
– “Hence it is no exaggeration to say that Kane is unthinkably shot in any other way other than in depth.”
– ambiguity, uncertainty of who Kane is
ex. Susan’s suicide attempt scene
– this way of filming has a different effects, different layers of depth
ex. when Kane is taken away from his home as a child
– how the characters are arranged in the frame
– you never lose sight of Kane, who’s playing in the window
– you can notice it or not
– when Kane screams, “Union forever!” it’s a reference to the Civil War but also to the fact that his family “union” is falling apart
– his mother’s cold, but her voice cracks (ambiguity on her part), she’s so determined to do something good for him that she willingly sacrifices her own happiness and has to let go over her emotional turbulence for what’s best for Kane
– it’s a mast, she seems harsh but she’s breaking up inside
– did she really do the right thing? if this is the last moment Kane was happy, was it a mistake to send him to New York? this is deliberately left open for debate

1) Dialogue overlap – the technique involving bits of dialogue transcending the shot that
shows where it’s coming from and carrying over into the next shot
2) Sound bridge – overlapping sound from previous scenes into the next scenes
3) Sound perspective – the sense of a sound’s position in space, yielding by volume,
timbre, pitch, etc.
4) Diagetic sound: The sound has a source in the story world
5) Non-diagetic sound: The sound is represented from a source from the outside world
Ex: soundtrack

term applied by French critics to a type of American film usually in the detective or thriller genres with low key lighting and a somber mood

-Dangerous/Deadly woman
– a sexualized being of manipulation and power, usually the reason for our hero’s psychological distress

· On location, LA, early morning, danger/intrigue
· Hard boiled tradition in dialogue – terse, slangy, verbal wit
· Flashback
· Underlying current of tension – voice over
· Oblique lines, emphasis of atmosphere
· Dialogue – more than one thing going on
· Sexual and criminal subcurrent
· Femme fatale
· Fatalism
· 1st person psychological interiority
· Low key lighting
· Inverts certain Hollywood conventions – happy ending, pro-protagonist
· Tough melodrama
· Juxtaposes sweet and fowl, filmmaking about ugliness· Male POV – women is object of masculine gaze, patriarchal order
· Walter wants to beat the system (authority), Phyllis is a way to achieve that desire
· Tries to contain desire, return order

Richard Dyer (it’s basically the a structure involving having different meanings for different people, like how polysemy refers to something that has multiple related meanings)
– manifest via various methods – films, publicity, promotion, commentary (public/private)

Trying to reveal the “truth” of life – showing
– in the Bazin image analysis
“cinema appears to be the completion in time of photography’s objectivity. A film is no longer limited to preserving the object sheathed in its moment, like the intact bodies of insects from a bygone era preserved in amber. It frees Baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. For the first time, the image of things is also the image of their duration, like a mummification of change” (pg. 9)
– in the Barkhage Metaphors on Vision
“transparent hallucination, superimposition of image on image, mirage of movement, heroine of a thousand and one nights” (2)
“to see is to retain – to behold” (1)
“the ‘absolute realism’ of the motion picture image is a human invention … What reflects from the screen is shadow play” (6)

-Joan Crawford is a made up name, rebranded by the studio system
– all-American athletic quality
– flapper, the embodiment of the modern woman
– also embodiment of female independence, but in the end, she needs to be married; a core contradiction in her star persona
Vida and Mildred scene
– how do you be independent and needy? Vida is a form of that issue
– the film is anti-feminist and pro-feminist film, but neither is sufficient to sum it up; the film came out in 1945, when WWII was over
WWII – split into a homefront
– women were in the work force and had a massive amount of freedom and power
the movie is inadvertently topical, think the Dark Knight example he showed us in class;
tapping phones
– evoking historical context, but also containing it, leaving it unanswered

Difference between Realism & Documentary:
-Realism is still constructed film, as is documentary to a degree
-Documentary uses real people as actors, settings that are real, events that occurred in history. Fidelity to filming. Non-diegetic narration. (Orphan films at times too).
Reproduction vs. representation
1) Reproduction = documentary as truth
2) Nanook of the North.
– poetic mode
– reflexive and performative modes

-Breathless and Cleo from 5 to 7 as examples of films that both engage but also distinguish themselves from typical Hollywood filmmaking practices
Francois Truffat – the “new wave,” French films in the late 1950s, thru 60s
– (some well known names are Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette)
– this idea of the director as the author of the film, like an author, in control, new ideas
– the “father’s” cinema, rebellion, looking for a new kind of realism
– no technical hierarchies in the crew, smaller budgets, abolished the “factor” method
– improvisation, location shooting, actors as friends, like an extended family
– they make films about things they know, small subjects
– lighter cameras, more “realistic” lighting, blurring lines between documentary and fiction
– emulating American cinema, cultural shift, late-modernism, re-evaluation of aesthetic hierarchies
Jean-Luc Godard
– embraces disunity and digressions in film
Breathless opening
– intriguing opening image, opening like Citizen Kane in its distinction
– non-cinematic flat image, sexualized woman, picture transforms to reveal the lead man
– gesture repetition as a reference, film noir, inhabited by the image of screen gangsters
– hand-held camera, different filmmaking culture, open set, chance digression
– extremely fast stock footage; cinema references in the film
– evoking and using conventions but also self consciously manipulating them

seedy underbelly of operations, organizations, situations. If it’s too pretty – it’s not real.
Examples: Double Indemnity, Fast Food Nation, etc.
Food Inc. – opening titles, the microcosm of the formal strategies of the doc.
– voice of God, variety of voices explaining what’s going on
– making things that are invisible visible
– also animation, we’re seeing statistics through the cows; it’s trying to paint a systematic picture, how to paint something super human
– individual testimony; organic farmer, he kind of provides the thesis of the film and possibly of documentaries in general
“to be able to see would change things”
– the idea of veiling (“evil” – veil)
– rhetorical visualization
Opening of Fast Food Nation – the film is aware of and playing with the conventions of advertisement, like Food Inc.
– close up of the beef, which is the same revelatory moment in Food Inc., it’s a similar story
– your burger is related to a global economy, looking deeper into the meat, the precise meaning is more ambiguous though
– revelation of unseen forces being related more to individual humans
– concluding glimpses, similarity between documentary and fiction because they stage drama, sacrifice, and character story
– treating the humans the same way they treat the animals

neglected, financial not feasible to salvage, out of date material

the challenge to conventional perception
Ballet Mecanique (1923-24) – interplay between humans and machines
Once Upon a Time (the Dali film)
-surrealism (because Dali); how the film resembles continuity devices and then subverts them

poetic series of transitions, suggest ideas/qualities by grouping images

-Popular actors
-can be easily boiled down into a pitch, one-line simple premise
-“unique idea whose originality can be conveyed briefly”
-use of popular logos
-simple and marketable
-multiple levels of appeal vs. complicated premise, diverse themes that defy translation into simple marketing approach
– “two major components: simplification of character and narrative, and strong match between image and music”

-simple premise and simple narrative, but has moments of character introspection and development that are very low concept oriented (ie. Brody’s scene with his son at the table, Quint’s USS Indianapolis speech on the boat)

– computer motif; park premised on complex modern systems, the opening explores two anti-technology characters
– susceptibility of entire systems to hackers and the like
– technology and number crunching is what allowed the dinosaurs life
– the opening digging scene; digital vs. traditional story telling (the main guy telling that traumatizing story to the kid and being generally distrustful of the technology that he is shown)

– hyper-reality, stylized realism (the article on ELMS)
– realistic and fantastic possibilities
WALL-E
– his (her? the robot concept of gender? is WALL-E a gender at all? I’ll just say he for now) relationship to creativity
– surviving vs. living (“I don’t wanna survive! I wanna live!” as an exclamation outlining
the human’s consumption/surviving off of Buy n Large being disrupted by creativity, by “life” and by WALL-E himself), WALL-E is a constant disruptor throughout the movie
– the painting allusion at the end (evolution of the world and art history – started off Medieval style, then goes through Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, etc.)

An element in a film that is repeated in a significant way

The story is the “chronological sequenze of narrated events” with no regard to the logical links between the events. The story is turned into a plot when the causal relations of the events are given. So in a plot, the presentation of the sequenze focuses on why the events follow each other. E.M. Forster gave the famous example :”‘The king died and the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’, is a plot.” The plot shows the causality of a series of events

a cut that takes place after the start of an action like a character standing up, to a different angle of the person then standing, in order to prevent any discontinuities from being noticed between the sitting and standing scene (like in case they took a break from filming after the sitting scene- see Hildy in His Girl Friday after sitting next to the jail cell)

Certain films resemble one another in significant ways: subject, themes, presentation, plot
· Convenient term that developed informally, characterizes film simply
· People share general notions about types of films

filmmakers set out to make these
· Musical, thriller, comedy, drama, sci-fi, westerns à subgenres, mix of genres

come about afterwards with critics and academics (who see a pattern)
· Noir (France 50s, U.S. 60s), Neorealism

genres rise and fall in popularity – tightly bound to cultural factors
Promise of something new based on familiar

In 50s, critics notice cynicism, pessimism, darkness in cinema
· Darker lighting, corrupt characters, fatalistic themes, hopeless tone
· Historically limited definitionIn 70s, renewed interest in film noir – neo-noir – film school, active method

Hollywood films of the 40s and 50s portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime, and corruption. Shows the underside of American character.

Not defined by conventions of setting and conflict, but qualities of tone and mood.
A specific period in film history – Hollywood, 40s-50s

1. War & postwar disillusionment: dark crimes scenes, war delays noir
2. Postwar realism: on-location shots, honest/harsh view of U.S., everyday people
3. German influence: expatriates (20s, 30s) bring different cinema
4. Hard-boiled tradition: literary writers, detective genre, everyday speech

· Scenes lit for night, low key lighting
· Oblique and vertical lines, light enters in odd shapes
· Actors and setting given equal lighting emphasis, shadow characters
· Compositional tension, not physical action
· Attachment to water
· Romantic narration – irretrievable past, predetermined fate, hopelessness
· Complex chronological order, flashbacks – reinforce hopelessness, lost time

· Frontierism that has turned into paranoia and claustrophobia
· Avoid looking into the future, loss, nostalgia, lack of priorities, insecurity
· Femme Fatale: dangerous or deadly woman, inversion of expectations

1. Wartime period (1941-46): private eye & lone wolf, more talk than action
2. Postwar realistic (1945-49): problems of city crime, political corruption
3. Psychotic action, suicidal impulse (49-53): hero goes crazy, self aware

A star is a semiotic construction
-Stars are usually the most prominent ways viewers connect to films
-Films are usually star-driven

how the action/function is done, how lines are said.
Performer has a particular style.

recurrent features of performance create star image

· Seem like normal people, but actually conflict products
· Polysemy: multiple meanings, starts aren’t unambiguous
· Not random – system/logic behind how star persona operates· Duality between actor and character
· Unnatural distinction between public and private life, both public
· Stars form aesthetic intertext audiences use to derive meaning/pleasure from film

contours of star personal, ads for films

disseminated materials on stars that’s not promotional

character/genre associated with star

appreciations/interpretations of star’s performance

Stars are based on ideological contradictions (race, class, gender)

· Photography is realism
· Photography seems real but we know It’s not
· Photography is objective, but achieved via fabrication – rhetorically motivated

· Institutions that present it
· Practitioners – self-selection of documentarians
· Common language: look similar, informing logic, investigation and revelation
· Draws you in explicitly, calls you to action

· Claims to present factual information about the world
· May take a stand, opinion, solution – uses rhetoric to persuade audience
· About our world and not a world, a fictional world
· Does use fabrication to tell story about real world
Seeking and revealing the invisible; generating intellectual and imaginative insight; enrichment of vision

assembling images from archival sources

records testimony about event/movement

records an ongoing event as it happens – Cinema Verite (50s, 60s)

Natural

scenes from the life of a compelling person

organize by category

presents a persuasive argument

pursues all options at once

Expository mode: omniscient narrator, argumentative commentary/structure
Observational: fly on the wall, lack of commentary – 50s, 60s
Poetic: avant-garde, about reality, attention to qualities
Participatory
Reflexive: reflected argument
Performative