Discussion 6: Acting (LO1) (LO3) (LO4) (LO5)1. In two well-written and fully-developed paragraphs, using your understanding of acting from Chapter 8, details from the film, knowledge gleaned...

Discussion 6: Acting (LO1) (LO3) (LO4) (LO5)

Moving Pictures Moving Pictures MOVING PICTURES An Introduction to Cinema Russell Sharman Moving Pictures by Russell Sharman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. CONCONTENTENTTSS Steal This Book ix About the Author x I.I. An Introduction to Cinema 1. A Brief History of Cinema CINEMA GOES HOLLYWOOD 16 THE GOLDEN AGE 20 THE NEW HOLLYWOOD 25 BIG MEDIA AND GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT 28 A NEW HOPE 31 9 2. How to Watch a Movie CINEMATIC LANGUAGE 38 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT MEANING 42 FORM, CONTENT AND THE POWER OF CINEMA 49 EVERYONE’S A CRITIC 52 36 3. Mise-en-Scène SETTING 57 CHARACTER 63 LIGHTING 66 COMPOSITION 68 CINEMATIC STYLE 70 54 4. Narrative THE SCREENPLAY 77 NARRATIVE STRUCTURE 82 COMPELLING CHARACTERS AND THE PRIMARY NARRATOR 87 THEME AND NARRATIVE INTENT 90 GENRE IN CINEMA 92 76 5. Cinematography FILM VERSUS DIGITAL 100 BLACK & WHITE VERSUS COLOR 104 LIGHT AND LIGHTING 106 THE LENS 111 FRAMING THE SHOT 115 MOVING THE CAMERA 121 THE LONG TAKE 126 96 6. Editing SOVIET MONTAGE AND THE KULESHOV EFFECT 132 EDITING SPACE AND TIME 135 CONTINUITY EDITING 138 DISCONTINUITY EDITING 147 130 7. Sound SOUND RECORDING 154 SOUND EDITING 159 SOUND MIXING 163 MUSIC 166 152 8. Acting THE EVOLUTION OF PERFORMANCE 175 TWO SCHOOLS OF ACTING 178 ACTING FOR CINEMA 183 A COLLABORATIVE MEDIUM 193 173 II.II. Representation in Cinema 9. Women in Cinema WOMEN IN THE GOLDEN AGE 210 SECOND WAVE FEMINISM AND THE MALE GAZE 214 WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA 219 203 10. African Americans in Cinema THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE IN AMERICA 227 EARLY CINEMA AND REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS 229 THE RISE (AND FALL) OF EARLY BLACK CINEMA 235 BLAXPLOITATION AND THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA 239 MODERN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA AND REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS 242 MODERN BLACK CINEMA AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 246 224 – Abbie Hoffman, 1971 This book is an Open Educational Resource using a Creative Commons by attribution license. The text covers the same essential material most other cinema studies textbooks cover, with one glaring exception: it costs zero dollars. It is free to read by anyone in any format. It can be downloaded for reading offline and printed without violating copyright. Students can download or print a copy to keep forever with no expiration date or restricted access. So can anyone else for that matter. However, just between you and me, it is designed to be read online and I encourage you to engage the material in that format as much as possible. There are embedded videos throughout that will enhance the experience, and as a living document, it will change over time, reflecting new insights and additions (and sure, the occasional correction to some embarrassing error). But here’s the best part: it is now and always will be absolutely FREE. And with the Creative Commons by attribution license, other instructors can customize, modify, adapt, or remix the text anyway they see fit for their students. All I ask is the courtesy of giving me credit for the original text. And, if you do decide to adopt this book for a class, let me know! So go ahead, get in touch with your inner rebel. Steal this book. ix . ABOUT THEABOUT THE AAUTHORUTHOR Russell Leigh Sharman is a writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. He has written for Hollywood since 2008, working for dozens of studios and production companies, including Warner Bros., Fox, Disney, MRC, DeLine Pictures, 21 Laps, Participant Media, Montecito Pictures and Real FX. He is the writer/ director of APARTMENT 4E, a feature adaptation of his stage play, as well as a number of award-wining short films and documentaries. His latest stage play, THE INTERROGATOR, was a semi-finalist for the O’Neill Playwriting Conference. He also has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Oxford University and has nearly 25 years of teaching experience at colleges and universities across the country. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whiting Foundation and others; has published and presented numerous essays on urban life, culture, cinema and aesthetics; and is the author of three books, THE TENANTS OF EAST HARLEM, NIGHTSHIFT NYC and MOVING PICTURES: AN INTRODUCTION TO CINEMA. He currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. x And since I’m writing this in the third person, “he” would really like to hear from you if you have any comments or suggestions: [email protected]. MOVING PICTURES XI PART I AN INTRODUCTION TO CINEMA What is Cinema? Is it the same as a movie or film? Does it include digital video, broadcast content, streaming media? Is it a highbrow term reserved only for European and art house feature films? Or is it a catch-all for any time a series of still images run together to produce the illusion of movement, whether in a multi-plex theater or the 5-inch screen of a smart phone? Technically, the word itself derives from the ancient Greek, kinema, meaning movement. Historically, it’s a shortened version of the French cinematographe, an invention of two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, that combined kinema with another Greek root, graphien, meaning to write or record. The “recording of movement” seems as good a place as any to begin an exploration of the moving image. And cinema seems broad (or vague) enough to capture the essence of the form, whether we use it specifically in reference to that art house film, or to refer to the more commonplace production and consumption of movies, TV, streaming series, videos, interactive gaming, VR, AR or whatever new technology mediates our experience of the moving image. Because ultimately that’s what all of the 1 above have in common: the moving image. Cinema, in that sense, stands at the intersection of art and technology like nothing else. As an art form it would not exist without the technology required to capture the moving image. But the mere ability to record a moving image would be meaningless without the art required to capture our imagination. But cinema is much more than the intersection of art and technology. It is also, and maybe more importantly, a powerful medium of communication. Like language itself, cinema is a surrounding and enveloping substance that carries with it what it means to be human in a specific time and place. That is to say, it mediates our experience of the world, helps us make sense of things, and in doing so, often helps shape the world itself. It’s why we often find ourselves confronted by some extraordinary event and find the only way to describe it is: “It was like a movie.” In fact, for more than a century, filmmakers and audiences have collaborated on a massive, ongoing, largely unconscious social experiment: the development of a cinematic language, the fundamental and increasingly complex rules for how cinema communicates meaning. There is a syntax, a grammar, to cinema that has developed over time. And these rules, as with any language, are iterative, that is, they form and evolve through repetition, both within and between each generation. As children we are socialized into ways of seeing through children’s programming, cartoons and YouTube videos. As adults we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the rules, able to innovate, re- combine, become creative with the language. And every generation or so, we are confronted with great leaps 2 RUSSELL SHARMAN forward in technology that re-orient and often advance our understanding of how the language works. And therein lies the critical difference between cinematic language and every other means of communication. The innovations and complexity of modern written languages have taken more than 5,000 years to develop. Multiply that by at least 10 for spoken language. Cinematic language has taken just a little more than 100 years to come into its own. In January 1896 those two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, set up their cinematographe, a combination motion picture camera and projector, at a café in Lyon, France and presented their short film, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) to a paying audience. It was a simple film, aptly titled, of a train pulling into a station. The static camera positioned near the tracks capturing a few would-be passengers milling about as the train arrived, growing larger and larger in the frame until it steamed past and slowed to a stop. There was no editing, just one continuous shot. A mere 50 seconds long… One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://uark.pressbooks.pub/movingpictures/?p=3#oembed-1 And it blew the minds of everyone who saw it. Accounts vary as to the specifics of the audience MOVING PICTURES 3 reaction. Some claim the moving image of a train hurtling toward the screen struck fear among those in attendance, driving them from their seats in a panic. Others underplay the reaction, noting only that no one had seen anything like it. Which, of course, wasn’t entirely true either. It wasn’t the first motion picture. The Lumiere brothers had projected a series of 10 short films in Paris the year before. An American inventor, Woodville Latham, had developed his own projection system that same year. And Thomas Edison had invented a similar apparatus before that. But one thing is certain: that early film, as simple as it was, changed the way we see the world and ourselves. From the early actualite documentary short films of the Lumieres, to the wild, theatrical flights of fancy of Georges Melies, to the epic narrative films of Lois Weber and D. W. Griffith, the new medium slowly but surely developed its own unique cinematic language. Primitive at first, limited in its visual vocabulary, but with unlimited potential. And as filmmakers learned how to use that language to re-create the world around them through moving pictures, we learned right along with them. Soon we were no longer awed (much less terrified) by a two-dimensional image of a train pulling into a station, but we were no less enchanted by the possibilities of the medium with the addition of narrative structure, editing, production design, and (eventually) sound and color cinematography. Since that January day in Lyon, we have all been active participants in this ongoing development of a cinematic language. As the novelty short films of those early pioneers gave way to a global entertainment industry centered on Hollywood and its factory-like production 4 RUSSELL SHARMAN of discrete, 90-minute narrative feature films. As the invention of broadcast technology in the first half of the 20th century gave way to the rise of television programming and serialized story-telling. And as the internet revolution at the end of the 20th century gave way to the streaming content of the 21st, from binge- worthy series lasting years on end to one-minute videos on social media platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. Each evolution of the form borrowed from and built on what came before, both in terms of how filmmakers tell their stories and how we experience them. And in as much as we may be mystified and even amused by the audience reaction to that simple depiction of a train pulling into a station back in 1896, imagine how that same audience would respond to the last Avengers film projected in IMAX 3D. We’ve certainly come a long, long way. This book is an exploration of that evolution of cinema, the art and technology of moving pictures. But it is also an introduction to the fundamentals of the form that have remained relatively constant for more than 100 years. Just as the text you are reading right now defies easy categorization – is it a book, an online resource, an open source text – modern cinema exists across multiple platforms – is it a movie, a video, theatrical, streaming – but the fundamentals of communication, the syntax, grammar and rules of language, written or cinematic, remain relatively constant. The text is divided into two unequal sections: form MOVING PICTURES 5 and content. The first and longer of the two covers the basic principles of the form, the means by which cinema communicates. We’ll start with a brief history of cinema to provide some historical context, then move on to an overview of how moving pictures work, literally and figuratively, from the neurological phenomena behind the illusion of movement, to the invisible techniques and generally agreed-upon conventions that form the basis of cinematic language. Then we’ll take each aspect of how cinema is created in turn: production design, narrative structure, cinematography, editing, sound and performance. Whether it’s released in a theater as a 2-hour spectacle or streaming online in 5-minute increments, every iteration of cinema includes these elements and they are each critical in our understanding of film form, how movies do what they do to us, and why we let them. The second section takes all of this accumulated knowledge of how cinema communicates and applies it to what, exactly, cinema is communicating. That is, we’ll take a long hard look at the content of cinema, how that has changed over time, and how, for better or worse, it often hasn’t. This section will take seriously the idea that cinema both influences and is influenced by the society in which it is produced. And given the porous borders of the information age, that “society” is increasingly a global one. Cinema then, not unlike literature, can