Film studies

Jan 29, 2011

Film movements

 Propaganda- clip-deliberate guidance through editing

 Richard Bartner

Formalising nations
Lumiere brothers: Dec 28, 1895; Indian salon; Paris

 Workers leaving the factory

 Gardner
 Home movie
 Newsreel
 Train leaving the station
 A game of cards
 Demolition of the wall
 Port scene

All genres were covered in the first act of cinema

Cinema referred to as ‘nature caught in the act’

George melies: trip to moon

e. s. porter: great train robbery (1903)

 pioneer in editing
 cutting between scenes
 life of an American fireman (1902)

d. w. Griffith

 to see him is like seeing the invention of the wheel

 humanised acting
 grand scale
 close up/pan/crosscutting/treatment of light (also done by Swedish directors before him)
 metaphors/ cotton
 broke away from theatre
 ‘the birth of a nation’ (1915) adapted from Dixon’s ‘clansman’
 Cost $125,000 and grossed about 100 million through all channels
 Caused nationwide riots and also furthering divide on racial lines

in Indian cinema

no women>man as women>prostitutes>receptionists>lower class muslim women

Chaplin

 Universal hero
 Tramp
 Holding on to his silence: Modern Times- specified society to an industrial one, all shapes of
opinion were disconcerted
 Rebel against the suffocation of the individual by society
 Victorian irony

Hitchcock

 Complete filmmaker in terms of research and technique

 Photography/music/soundtrack and the narrative
 US has given the first musical: the jazz singer, the western and the stars
 Garbo, von Sternberg, Flaherty, Rossellini, Lubitsch, Ingrid bergman, victor sjostorm, erich
von Stroheim, milos forman, Polanski, costa gavras....

Italian Neo-Realism

 2nd formalizing country

 Setting and periods
 Partly borrowed from Russian montage
 Grandiose projects such as ‘cabiria’- based on operatic traditions
 Studios- mussolini’s cause
 Visconti’s ‘ossessione’ (1942) set the stage for neo-realist movement despite fascism

Japenese Cinema

 Idea of smallness in an enduring sense

 Bonsai
 Kabukza- Japanese theatre
 Completely respectable
 Danjuro XI (maple viewing)
 Films arrived in japan with his death and con-incidental screening of his movie at that time
 Films had no stars
 Matsunosuke discovered by makino shozo
 180 films between 1909 and 1911
 Ichikawa kon
 Akira iwasaki
 Burmese harp
 Fires on the plain
 Hiroshi teshigahara: woman in the dunes: based on writings of kobo abe
 Teacher doesn’t represent civilization and widow doesn’t represent primitiveness
  Mizoguchi and kobayashi
 Tokyo story 1960
 Samurai rebellion


How to read a film (B)

Audience response: the way individuals react to or read a film

Spectator studies: academic view

 Theorizes the spectator and nature of viewing experience

 Who/ what is spectator?
 What des watching a movie involve
 Different ways of watching a film
 How to create meaning

Theory of psychoanalysis and ideology

 Unconscious
 Hidden mechanisms
 Typical film viewing experience
 Dream factory

Apparatus theory

 Scopophilia
 Mulvey
 production of meaning
 Oedipus complex
 Law of the father
 Wield the phallus himself
 North by north west (M)

Iconic: basic

Indexical: casual link with what they signify

Symbolic: arbitrary
Structuralism

 christian metz: language of films

 semiology: systematic grammar
 propp: Russian fairy tales


Charu Chopra
 you are to talk sure shall