Film Art an Introduction Chapter 4 Film Art an Introduction Chapter 4 Summary
Film Art: An Introduction
by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
about the volume Motion picture Art: An Introduction is a survey of film as an art form. It's aimed at undergraduate students and general readers who want a comprehensive and systematic introduction to moving picture aesthetics. It considers mutual types of films, principles of narrative and not-narrative form, bones film techniques, and strategies of writing about films. It too puts motion picture art in the context of changes beyond history. Film Art first appeared in 1979 and is currently in its eleventh edition, published by McGraw-Hill. For more on our purposes in writing it, become here on this site.
Film analyses from earlier editions of Motion-picture show Art
Equally Film Art went through various editions, we developed analyses of diverse films that might be used in an introductory grade. Just as space grew tight or certain films dropped out of circulation, we cutting those analyses and replaced them with others. The Internet allows us to revive these old pieces. Many of the films are now available on DVD, and we invite students and professors to use these analyses in examining the movies.
The essays here are taken from the edition featuring their terminal revision.
10th edition
Functions of Film Sound: The Prestige
dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006. From Film Art, 10th edition, McGraw-Colina (2012): 298–306.
In London around 1900, two magicians are locked in desperate competition, each searching for ever more inexplainable illusions. Equally they deceive each other and their audiences, the film about them tries to deceive u.s. as well.
A story of law-breaking, professional rivalry, personal jealousy, and thousand aspirations, The Prestige sets itself a difficult task. The picture tries to be as tantalizing as a magic trick, but i that can eventually exist explained. As a upshot, director Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter (and brother) Jonathan Nolan must both reveal and muffle data. The pic must present us just enough of the story to keep us engaged, while belongings dorsum the answers to the puzzles—and sometimes, similar a magician, distracting us from what is really going on. Throughout The Prestige, audio is crucial to an elaborate choreography of misdirection.
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9th edition
An Example of Associational Course: A Movie
dir. Bruce Conner, 1958. From Pic Fine art, 9th edition, McGraw-Loma (2010): 376–381.
Bruce Conner's film A Movie illustrates how associational form tin confront u.s.a. with evocative and mysterious juxtapositions, yet can at the aforementioned time create a coherent film that has an intense impact on the viewer.
Conner fabricated A�Movie, his outset picture show, in 1958. Similar Léger, he worked in the visual and plastic arts and was noted for his assemblage pieces—collages built upward of miscellaneous constitute objects. Conner took a comparable approach to filmmaking. He typically used footage from old newsreels, Hollywood movies, soft-core pornography, and the similar. By working in the establish-footage genre, Conner juxtaposed 2 shots from widely different sources. When nosotros come across the two shots together, nosotros strive to observe some connectedness between them. From a series of juxtapositions, our activity tin create an overall emotion or concept.
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An Instance of Experimental Blitheness: Fuji
dir. Robert Breer, 1974. From Motion picture Fine art, ninth edition, McGraw-Hill (2010): 388–390.
In contrast to smooth Hollywood narrative animation, Robert Breer'due south 1974 film Fuji looks disjointed and crudely fatigued. It doesn't involve a narrative but instead, like Ballet mécanique, develops according to principles of abstract form.
Fuji begins without a title or credits, every bit a bong rings iii times over blackness. A cut leads non to blithe footage only to a shaky, fuzzy shot through a railroad train window, with someone'south confront and eyeglasses partially visible at the side in the extreme foreground. In the distance, what might be rice paddies slide by. This shot and most of the rest of the movie are accompanied past the clacking, rhythmic sound of a railroad train. More black leader creates a transition to a very unlike prototype. Against a white background, 2 apartment shapes, like keystones with rounded corners, alternate frame by frame, one red, the other greenish. The effect is a rapid flicker equally the two colored shapes drift virtually the frame in a seemingly random blueprint. Another stretch of blackness introduces a brief, fuzzy shot of a homo in a dark suit running across the shot in a strange corridor.
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eighth edition
A Man Escaped
dir. Robert Bresson, 1956. From Film Art, 8th edition, McGraw-Loma (2006): 293–300.
Robert Bresson'southward A Human being Escaped (Un Condamné à mort c'est échappé) illustrates how a variety of sound techniques can function throughout an entire film. The story takes place in France in 1943. Fontaine, a Resistance fighter arrested by the Germans, has been put in prison and condemned to die. Just while pending his execution, he works at an escape plan, loosening the boards of his prison cell door and making ropes. Just as he is ready to put his programme in action, a boy named Jost is put into his jail cell. Deciding to trust that Jost is not a spy, Fontaine reveals his plan to him, and they are both able to escape.
Throughout the film, sound has many important functions. Equally in all of his films, Bresson emphasizes the sound track, rightly believing that sound may be just as cinematic as images. At certain points in A Man Escaped, Bresson fifty-fifty lets his sound technique dominate the image; throughout the film, we are compelled to listen. Indeed, Bresson is 1 of a handful of directors who create a complete interplay between sound and prototype.
5th edition
High Schoolhouse
dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1968. From Motion-picture show Art, 5th edition, McGraw-Hill (1996): 409–415.
Frederick Wiseman'southward High School is a good instance of the cinéma-vérité approach. Wiseman received permission to motion-picture show at Philadelphia's Northeast High School, and he acted as audio recordist while his cameraman shot footage in the hallways, classrooms, cafeteria, and auditorium of the institution. The film that resulted uses no vox-over narration and about no nondiegetic music. Wiseman uses none of the facing-the-reporter interviews that tv set news coverage employs. In these ways, High School might seem to approach the cinéma-vérité ideal of but presenting a slice of life. Withal if we analyze the picture's grade and style, we find that it withal aims to achieve particular furnishings on the spectator, and it still suggests a specific range of pregnant. Far from existence a neutral manual of reality, Loftier School shows how movie course and style, even in cinéma-vérité, shape the event we meet on motion-picture show.
4th edition
Stagecoach
dir. John Ford, 1939. From Film Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 366–370.
Film theorist André Bazin has written of John Ford'southward Stagecoach: "Stagecoach is the platonic example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection…Stagecoach is similar a wheel, so perfectly fabricated that it remains in equilibrium on its centrality in any position." This effect results from the motion-picture show's concentration on the creation of a tight narrative unity, with all of its elements serving that goal.
Hannah and Her Sisters
dir. Woody Allen, 1985. From Moving picture Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 376–381.
It's a typical approach that one person or a couple office as the protagonists of a film. All the same many Hollywood films use multiple protagonists. Woody Allen'south Hannah and Her Sisters examines the psychological traits and interactions among a group of characters. We shall see that creating several protagonists does not necessarily make a film any less "classical" in its form and style.
Desperately Seeking Susan
dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985. From Moving-picture show Fine art, 4th edition, McGraw-Loma (1992): 381–387.
In many classical films, groups of characters interact to create causes and motivations. Their actions, added together, steadily push the activity forward. In Desperately Seeking Susan, yet, the 2 protagonists, the staid New Jersey housewife Roberta and the wild, streetwise Susan, initially seem to have little connection to each other. The early portion of the plot alternates sequences involving the two women, but, although Roberta reads about Susan in the personals column and becomes fascinated with her, they practise not interact direct. Yet the two women'south lives gradually brainstorm to intertwine, until they finally meet at the end. The form of the film depends on devices of parallelism that point upwardly how the women are actually somewhat alike.
Twenty-four hour period of Wrath
dir. Carl Dreyer, 1943. From Film Art, quaternary edition, McGraw-Colina (1992): 387–391.
Many films pose few difficulties for viewers who like their movies straightforward and easy to digest. But not all films are and then clear in their grade and style. In films like Twenty-four hours of Wrath, the questions we ask oftentimes do not get definite answers; endings do not necktie everything up; moving picture technique does not always office invisibily to advance the narrative. When analyzing such films, nosotros should restrain ourselves from trying to reply all of the film'southward questions and to create neatly satisfying endings. Instead of ignoring peculiarities of technique, we should seek to examine how film class and style create uncertainty — seek to understand the cinematic weather condition that produce ambivalence. Day of Wrath, a tale of witchcraft and murder set in seventeenth-century Denmark, offers a skilful exam instance.
Final Year at Marienbad
dir. Alain Resnais, 1961. From Motion picture Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 391–396.
When Concluding Year at Marienbad was showtime shown in 1961, many critics offered widely varying interpretations of information technology. When faced with about films, these critics would accept been looking for implicit meanings backside the plot. But, faced with Marienbad, their interpretations were attempts simply to depict the events that take place in the picture'southward story. These proved difficult to agree on. Did the couple actually meet last twelvemonth? If non, what actually happened? Is the film a character'due south dream or hallucination?
Innocence Unprotected
dir. Dušan Makavejev, 1968. From Moving picture Fine art, 4th edition, McGraw-Loma (1992): 401–406.
Like Final Year at Marienbad, Dušan Makavejev's Innocence Unprotected (more correctly translated every bit Innocent Unprotected) diverges markedly from the norms of classical narrative filmmaking. In analyzing the picture, information technology is useful to think of its form equally a collage, an assemblage of materials taken from widely different sources. By playing up the disparities among the pic'due south materials, the collage principle permits Makavejev to utilize film techniques and film form in fresh and provocative ways. The result is a motion-picture show that examines the nature of cinema — peculiarly, picture palace in a social and historical context.
Clock Cleaners
dir. Walt Disney, 1937. From Film Art, quaternary edition, McGraw-Colina (1992): 418–420.
Clock Cleaners is a narrative, only information technology does non adhere to the typical patterns of narrative evolution that are oft at work in feature-length Hollywood films. Employing a strategy common in slapstick shorts, it sets up a situation and then has the characters perform a series of nearly self-contained skits or gags, edifice upwardly as the film goes along. In this instance, three familiar stars, Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck, all announced, each working in a different function of the huge clock tower. They exercise not interact until near the stop of the film. No overall pattern like a search or a journey helps the plot develop; although the characters could be said to share a general goal of cleaning the clock, they have not accomplished it past the end of the film, and our sense of narrative progression has more to exercise with their mishaps than with any work they may get washed.
Tout va bien
dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1972. From Motion picture Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 436–442.
If Meet Me in St. Louis uncritically affirms the value of family life and Raging Bull offers an ambivalent critique of violence in American social club, Tout va bien strongly attacks certain features of the state of French society in 1972. We shall utilise it as an example of how a film may present an ideological viewpoint explicitly and drastically opposed to that of almost viewers.
2nd edition
The Man Who Knew Likewise Much
dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1934. From Film Art, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill (1988): 292–295.
Like His Girl Friday, The Man Who Knew Too Much presents us with a model of narrative construction. Its plot composition and its motivations for activeness contribute to making the film what a scriptwriter would call "tight." Moreover, the film besides offers an object lesson in the employ of cinematic style for narrative purposes. Finally, the film illustrates how narration can manipulate the audience's cognition, sometimes making drastic shifts from moment to moment.
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