Introduction to Studying Film

Week 1: Introduction to Studying Film

• Descriptive analysis involves outlining the events depicted in a film
• Evaluative analysis involves stating subjective claims that do not require evidence
• Interpretive analysis involves making an argumentative claim and backing it up with evidence
• Example of descriptive analysis: Johnny is able to navigate a 3D internet
• Example of evaluative analysis: Keanu Reeves' acting is wooden and yet magnetic
• Example of interpretive analysis: Johnny Mnemonic showcases the increasing combination of humans and media technology
• Content refers to the film's evidence, narrative, story, and happenings
• Form denotes the style of the film
• Context refers to external factors that provoked and led to the film's creation
• Johnny Mnemonic's content involves a pandemic caused by media technology saturation
• Johnny Mnemonic's context delivers a dystopian vision of the embodied web
• Johnny Mnemonic's form includes a computer-generated POV hacking sequence, envisioning a future internet

Week 2: Cinema and Medium Specificity

• Eight quizzes are listed on the syllabus
• Quizzes are available for 24 hours and contains 5 multiple-choice questions based on class readings
• The lowest quiz score is dropped
• There are five quizzes throughout the term
• A practice quiz is available
• The quizzes cover readings, lectures, and films
• A film review assignment of 750-1000 words is required for a film released between 2022-2024
• The film review is worth 10% of the final grade
• Film review due Friday October 4 at 7 PM, submitted as a word or pdf file
• The review needs to be in 12 point font, double-spaced, with 1 inch margins
• Give the review an interesting title
• Cite all sources, including AI, in any citational style
• Personal pronouns can be used, but within reason
• The review should be less formal than a classic essay and include the film's date and director after the title
• APA is good but Chicago style is preferred
• A medium is something or someone that acts as an intermediary
• A medium is communications technology or a form of expression that saves and relays information

Medium Specificity

• Medium specificity relates to the characteristics unique to a form of media
• Cinema preserves both space and time
• Cinema is a prosthetic extension of human sensory capabilities
• Cinema is capable of showing things outside the realm of our perception
• Cinema acts as a form of evidence

Bazin

• All art intends to fulfill a mummy complex, combating the fear of death through art/media that outlives humans
• The mummy complex is the desire to achieve the preservation of life by a representation of life
• Painting has always felt a tension between symbolic and realistic representation
• Camera obscura was a way of creating dimensions
• "Perspective was the original sin of Western painting"
• The invention of photography liberated and fulfilled Western painting
• The creation of cameras would liberate painters from realism
• "Now, for the first time the image of things is like the image duration"

Week 3: Content and Form

• Content is the subject of an artwork, the story, or information conveyed through a medium
• Form is the means by which a subject is expressed, all medium-specific elements shaping the story

Early Photography and the Road to Cinema

• Niépce recorded the first photo on a metal plate, requiring 8 hours of exposure
• Faster exposure times, flexible film stock, and a mechanism for advancing film were needed for cinema to be possible
• George Eastman introduced flexible film stock with a portable Kodak camera in 1888
• The Maltese Cross captures and projects images
• The Railroad is seen as a proto cinematic phenomenon
• The Lumière Brothers' public screening of a train in 1895 marked the birth of cinema, with the brothers also inventing a camera that can film and project
• The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Late Silent Cinema

• Motif is a recurring element that imparts meaning or significance

Week 4: Form

• Content is the subject of an artwork
• Form is the means by which a subject is expressed
• Self-reflexive art reflects upon itself
• Self-referential creative work consciously calls attention to itself or its processes

Sample Sequence Commentary

• F is for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) shows illusion in filmmaking by including usually unseen equipment in the mise-en-scène
• Welles compares filmmaking to art forgery, stating all art is a forgery of life

Screening Questions

• How does this film help distinguish between content and form?
• Is this film self-reflexive and how?
• How does this film demonstrate medium specificity and the difficulties of translating content from one medium to another?

Week 5: Cinematography 1 - Shot Scale and Framing

• Cinematography includes everything captured by the camera through lighting and framing
• Cinematographic properties of the shot include film stock, lighting, and lenses
• Framing includes proximity to the camera, depth, camera angle, height, scale, and camera movement
• Speed and lilt of the shot
• Special effects
• The cinematographer is also known as the Director of Photography (DP)
• Implied proximity is used to make the viewer feel close or far away
• Establishing shots establish the space surrounding a character, usually via an extreme long shot
• Long shots show the character dwarfed by their surroundings
• Medium-long shots film the main character from the knees up
• Medium shots film the main subject from the waist up, showing thoughts and feelings
• Medium-close shots give more character depth
• Close-ups fill the frame with a human face, bringing attention to the character
• Extreme close-ups film an object or a specific part of the character up close to bring attention to detail
• Framing impacts the story through how the work is framed and how the borders of the cinema screen impact the story
• Asking what exists beyond the frame can impact the story
• Open framing makes the world feel like it expands beyond the frame
• Closed framing is claustrophobic, where the characters do not exist beyond the frame

Week 6: Cinematography 2 - Lighting, Colour, and Special Effects

• Eyes are sensitive to wavelengths of different types of lights that produce a color once it enters the photoreceptors that make red, green and blue
• Mantis shrimp have 12 photoreceptors
• Early colour techniques included hand-painting frames, tinting, and toning scenes
• The Great Train Robbery was painted frame by frame
• A Symphony of Horror was tinted green
• The three strip colour process was difficult, and sometimes led to slippage
• Stalker (1979) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, has an expressive use of colour and black and white
• Digital media translates reality into a grid of ones and zeros
• Analog media is an imprint of reality on a storage medium
• Natural light comes from the sun, moon, or natural resources
• Artificial lighting is typically used to expose characters and settings carefully
• Three-point lighting includes a backlight, key light, and fill light

Artificial Lighting

• High-key lighting is well illuminated with few shadows
• Low-key lighting uses some light but the majority is shadows
• High-contrast or Chiaroscuro is a scene with super well lit and dark images
• The main character is well lit while the surroundings are dark

Week 7: Mise-en-Scène and Camera Movement

• Mise-en-scène is the arrangement of what appears in front of the camera, including set design, lighting, costumes, props, character placement, and movement
• Everything on-screen is carefully chosen and placed by filmmakers
• The Four Elements Include: 1. Setting, Decor, and Props 2. Costume, Makeup, Hairstyle 3. Lighting & 4. Composition
• Eye room and lead room in composition will help with composition

Movement

• Types of Movement: Figure Movement and Camera Movement
• Pan: Camera pivots left or right on a stable axis to show a different part of the scene
• Tilt: The camera is stable and pivots up or down
• Tracking Shot: Camera moves parallel to or following the action
• Zoom: Lens closer to the subject
• Hand-Held: Camera is unstable while following a person, adding realism or emotion
• Steadicam: Helps camera people do shaky movements while remaining stable

Week 8: Editing - Continuity and the Classical Hollywood Style

• Signifier: What is materially presented to the viewer
• Signified: The meaning the viewer supplies
• The signifier and signified act as signs that are a real-world referent
• There's a difference between the signifier and the signified
• Photography and cinema have a relationship between a tree, the image of a tree, and the real-world state
• Signifiers can contain multiple meanings within them
• Continuity editing creates a sense of flow so that the story takes priority
• Viewers do not notice most edits; attention goes to the characters, actions, situations, and events
• Point-of-view shots align the audience with the character

Technical Terms

• Match action: Cut on action, creates continuity
• Shot/reverse shot: Reveals dialogue in cinema
• Shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule: Camera will not cross 180 degrees
• Graphic match: Matches through compositional or geometric similarity
• Parallel editing: Jumping between places/actions

Editing: Pacing and Rhythm

• Pacing refers to the speed of the shots
• If the shots are longer there are fewer cuts and it's slow-paced
• Rhythm is varying the pacing

Week 9: Editing - Discontinuity and Art Cinema

• Discontinuity editing developed over time
• It started in the silent era and began in Soviet Russian montages
• Beginning after the Russian revolution in 1917
• Kuleshov Effect: Different meanings from the same shot of an actor when juxtaposed with different things
• Eisensteinian montage makes more radical silent films
• Discontinuity: Extra-diegetic insert

Jump Cuts

• Jump Cut: Two shots of the same subject edited together, makes the action jump forward in time
• There is continuity on soundtrack, discontinuity in the imagery of Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard)
• Jump cuts break the 30-degree rule
• The motivation for this is not always clear

Week 10: Sound

• Vitaphone provided early synchronized sound
• Movies didn't have synched sound until 1926
• In 1926 the first synched film was produced, being a musical
• The soundtrack was pressed onto a disk that was played by a connected apparatus
• Movietone
• The optical soundtrack printed onto the film itself
• Film would run vertically and an amplifier would play it

Technological Impacts

• After issues with the vitaphone, films switched to music on film
• Silent film actors lost their jobs at the development of synchronized sounds because they weren't trained for it
• Microphones were problematic because of their size and the whirring sound of cameras

More Sound Elements

• A Slate is used to synchronize sound and image
• Soundtracks consist of dialogue, music, and sound effects
• Film sound mixing is an important element in post-production where elements of sound are synchronized for the soundtrack design
• Direct Sound is captured in the studio on a boom mic, to be used in films, as reference
• Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) is when actors re-record audio that wasn't clear, or when an actor redubs dialogue for other languages
• Dubbing is a part of Italian culture now

Foley Audio

• Foley are sound effects recorded in real life to mimic sounds for a movie
• Foley artists create "accurate" sounds using random objects
• Artists watch films on a projector and record actions in sync with the movie

Diegetic and Extradiegetic Sound

• Diegetic Sound: Sound characters within the film can hear
• Extra-Diegetic Sound: Sound that characters can't hear, like a soundtrack

Original Sound

• Subjective Sound is sound that only one character can hear and is connected to psychological depth
• Identity Theory emphasizes that the sound in films is like the sound in real life
• Non-identity Theory: Sound production makes sounds unique

Week 11: Realism and Reality - The Long Take In Depth

• Three Types of Signs
• Icon: resemblance to its signified
• Index: an imprint of its signified
• Symbol: an arbitrary but mutually agreed relation to its signified
• Photographic signifiers are like an index
• Reality is real existence or the truth of appearances
• Realism is the construction of a cinematic world that viewers are already familiar with

Stylistic Elements

• Formalism places value on expressive form versus realism
• Bazinian Realism: Filmmakers put their faith in the image
• Long takes make things seem more realistic
• Makes audiences more engulfed in the story
• Deep focus creates spectator relationships with closer relations to reality
• Kuleshov/Eisenstein Montage
• Montage rules out ambiguity of expression
• Depth in focus reintroduces

Week 12: Media and Ideology

• Ideology: beliefs, practices, and discourses that shape thoughts and actions
• Karl Marx used camera obscura to describe ideology as something that flips the world upside down and convinces us that it's real
• Cinematic Identification
• Primary Identification is with the look of the camera
• Secondary Identification is with the main characters
• Christian Metz talks about identification in film by comparing it to turning and looking at the world

Week 13: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

• Questions include how the myth of Orpheus operate in this film, how Portrait is a manifesto about the female gaze, and how it is an example of Johnston's counter cinema

Final Research Paper

• Write an argumentative essay taking into account form in context Proposal due February 7th at 7pm
• Consists of 250 words
• Identify chosen film(s) and the rationale
• Articulate a research question that investigates context and form
• List at least two academic sources
• Stop using the "sandwich" method

Week 14: Race and Representation

• Spectators identify with the camera
• Alternatively, spectators identify with the characters
• Sexism: Patriarchy favours men
• Male Gaze splits pleasure in active/male and passive/female
• Counter-Cinema confronts dominant ideology
• Racism is any prejudice reinforced by system of power
• Intersectionality sheds light on the impacts of race and gender
• Film was designed for capturing white skin tones
• Representation helps marginalized people feel seen
• The Opposition Gaze allows people to manipulate the gaze

Movie - Sorry to Bother You - Boots Riley

• Does the film contain "compelling representations of Black femaleness" as well as Black maleness?
• How does this film link capitalism to racism?
• How does this film’s form challenge dominant ideology along with its content?

Week 15: Postcolonial Cinema

• Colonialism describes the Western economic, military, political and cultural domination in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
• The Third World is The colonized, neo-colonized or de-colonized nations of the world
• Racism generalizes values to differences to justify privilege

Colonialism and the Cinema

• The Rosetta Stone was created in 200 BCE, found by a French colonial in 1799
• The Stone has been displayed in the British museum with its Egyptian hieroglyphics, being symbolic of cultural violence
• When viewing a movie these different people are put in a position as a privileged white male colonizer
• Touki Bouki films through the eyes of the colonized instead

Colonial Cinematic Form

• Colonial POV describes a besieged wagon train or fort that is the focus of attention
• From the centre the family sallies out against the attackers with inexplicable customs
• Post-Colonial POV inverts colonial imagery
• Questioning Battle of Algiers and how it critiques colonialism

Week 16: What Isn't Cinema? : Television

• Different Types of Context: Ideological, Historical, Industrial, Technological & National
• Medium-Specific Characteristics of the Cinema include:
  • Preserves both space and time
  • A prosthetic of the human sensory apparatus
  • It is able to show things outside the realm of perception
  • Functions as evidence
• By 1993, television was in 90 percent of households
• Analyzing Star Trek S1:E25 and Black Mirror S4:E1

Week 17: Genre 1

• Genre movies use repetition/variation to tell stories with familiar characters
• Three Ways to Define a Genre
• Marketing, Iconography, and the Ideological Attitude
• Defining genre simplifies marketing and receives many views
• Iconography includes narrative and visual coding
• The "look" of a film categorizes it into the specific genre
• Ideological attitudes are genres implicit beliefs

Week 18: Genre 2

• Ideological Attitude emphasizes Manifest Destiny
• Self-Reflexive Iconography: Exposure leads the audience to recognize form
• Some critics refer to recognizable form as "icons"
• Revisionist Westerns question ideology

Week 19: Auteur Theory

• The director of the film is like the author of the novel
• Outer Circle: Premises of value
• Middle Circle: Personality serves as a criterion
• Inner Circle: Tension between director's personality + material

Week 20: National Cinema

• National cinema specifies coherence and meaning
• Taiwan had Japanese colonial rule from 1895-1945
• After WWII, China took control until until 1987
• Postmodern Art
• Draws attention to itself through recycling
  • It lacks the anti-commercial with artifice

Week 21: Ecocinema

• Studies portrayals of the natural world
• Ecocinema inspires environmental action and documentaries
• Science Fiction and Environmentalism are concerned with the future
• Both have science and technology
• Both have anxious outlooks

Conservationism

• DDT is ineffective
• Humans use DDT to avoid species
• The technology to kill insects like the ones in WWII used to kill humans
• Spaceship Earth reflects on earth as a spaceship
• Anthropocene: an idea that we have entered a new generation era
• The Great Acceleration, which began in 1950, caused a geological entity when it came to humans

Week 22: Documentary

• In documentary film, address the historical world
• Characteristics of films in the documentary
• Form uses voice of God narration
• Content claims to the real world
• The Impression of Truth states that images from the historical world serve as evidence

Modes of Documentary

• The documentary modes
• Expository documentaries are guided by authority, the most common mode
• Poetic stresses former pattern
• Observational cinema is direct
• Participatory reveals the filmmaker
• Reflexive makes the viewer aware of conventions
• Performative emphasize emotional involvement

Week 23: Avant Garde

• Avant Garde draws attention
• Impact of poetic force is expressive
• The three types of films are: Mimetic, Autobiographical, and Theoretical
• Mimetic shows elements of commercial movies but recognizes the issues