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64 Cards in this Set

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“The Birth of a Sixth art”
Ricciotto Canudo
Calls Cinema the Sixth Art (after Music and Poetry, labelled as Rhythms of Time; and Agriculture (Architecture???), Sculpture and Painting, labeled as Rhythms of Space and as Plastic arts.

Cinema is an art for our modern time, which is characterized by speed, lack of rest, machines, and the annihilation of space. Wedding of technology and art.

Cinema is more sociological whereas theater is about psychology, about the individual.

LIkes the German films and Gance because of the creation of unreality, and the poetry that is created by this unreality.

Writes that cinematographic language should not “illustrate a text” but should “arrest life and pin down its meanings.” Cinema is a universal language. Cinema seeks to return us back to primordial synthetic visual language (as seen in cave paintings or stone carvings of motion), “prior even to the confining literalness of sound.” (296).
“Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema”
Georg Lukács, 1913
Keywords: Presence, revocation of the word, soullessness, externality, fantastic

Lukács is attempting to theorize a relationship between cinema and theater. He discusses the external visuality of film, which is about motion and body without soul.

Begins by noting mistaken conceptions of cinema: as visual instruction (does he mean political), as cheap competition for theater as entertainment, and as way to record the “perfect” theatrical performances with only the best players.

Actual distinction: presence of the living person. This, along with its verbal nature, allows theater to be in the realm of fate, gravity, measure, order, essence, value.

Cinema is characterized by an “absence of presence” - showing “movements and deeds of people, but not people.” It is a life without a soul, pure superficiality.

Cinema’s nature gives it complete freedom because there need not be any physical connection or causality between shots. “Everything is possible. Everything is true and real, everything is equally true and equally real.”

Positive qualities of cinema: animate in nature acquires artistic form for the first time: water, wind, sunset, storm.
The Art of Photoplay Making
Victor O. Freeburg, 1918
Keywords: psychology, crowd vs. public, emotional vs. intellectual, 1) visual sense appeal; 2) emotional appeal 3) intellectual appeal.

Freeburg’s chapter comes from a manual of sorts for the writers and creators of film.
Puts emphasis on social nature of spectatorship, especially how being in close contact with others is both spiritual (he means emotional) and physical.

Cites appeal to spectator on three orders in order: 1) Sense appeal to the eye; 2) emotional appeal; 3) intellectual appeal.

For #1, states pleasing beauty of image as well as illusion of reality, as well as the pleasure of human movement. But the visuality is primary and necessary.

For #2, distinguishes two distinct emotional responses: one with the crowd, but also self-emotion evoked as a general, vague sense of contentment and sadness and longing while watching a beautiful image or nature scene, as well as a thrill or excitement at action.
Visible Man, Or the Culture of Film
Béla Balász, 1924
Balázs begins his preface with an entreaty to multiple groups to take film seriously as an art and to argue for its need for theorization: The academy/intellectuals (Cinema is worth the time), directors (raising consciousness and creativity), and spectators (appeal to non-intellectual realm, Film is created by the spectator - Cultivation of spectator equals cultivation of better films, perhaps part of Belázs’ larger project. )

The language of gesture as the mother tongue of humanity, a nonverbal international lingua franca that is necessary because of commercial demands that films be exported to other countries.
Magnification,” “The Senses 1bis,” “The cinematograph seen from Etna,”
Jean Epstein
“We: variant of a manifesto” (1922) and “Kinoks: a Revolution” (1923)
Dziga Vertov
Camera as more perfect than the human eye, gathering impressions differently, perceiving more and better. We have been limiting the power of cinema and the power of the camera by trying to make it act like the human eye, “the better the copy, the better the shooting was thought to be.”

Vertov opposes theatrical, romantic, Western films, six-reel adaptations, striking a very strong tone “Keep away from them!” Speaks of cleansing it of foreign matter: music, literature, theater, romance, psychological novel, theater of adultery, etc.

“Cinematography” must die so that the art of cinema may live.

Vertov keeps coming back to the beauty of the machine in its regularity and in its pure, repetitive motion (unlike disorderly human motion) - writes of “poetry of machines.”
“Beyond the Shot” and “The Dramaturgy of Film Form”
Sergei Eisenstein
“The Making of a Film” from Film
Rudolph Arnheim
The camera produces totally different impressions than the eye... Desire in man to reproduce nature.

Medium helps determine form - THe interplay of object and depictive medium.

Cinema can be art b/c of divergency between film and nature, molding of reality for artistic purposes.

Choice of what to photograph shows world subjectively as well as objectively

About what cinema can be - most directors tell stories, not make art, but the power of cinema still lies there.
“Style and medium in the Motion Pictures”
Erwin Panofski, 1934
Visual interest of the motion of things was primary interest of cinema.

Cinema is genuine folk art - arises from a primitive social need. For the masses and molds opinion. Must take it seriously.

Unique properties: dynamization of space and spatialization of time. Primarily visual, even in sound film.

Principle of coexpressibility: Acoustic component of film not detachable from the visible, it is inextricably fused together. Movie scripts don't make good reading, plays do.

Metaphor of cathedral building - early discussion of authorship and thinking about collaborative art.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Second Version”
Walter Benjamin
Photography as a mechanical, impersonal product. A machine that abolishes human presence. One that expresses logic of the masses within a new mode of production.

Reproduction lacks here and now, its aura. Aura withers in technological reproducibility. People want to get closer to things and overcome their uniqueness.

Art originally embedded in ritual and cult - cult value (magic) and exhibition value. Reproduction eliminates subservience of art to ritual.

What is reproduced (action/performance) is art, but object (film) is not, art created by montage. Can split actor's performance(s) into single episode assembled.

Reproducibility changes relation of masses to art. Simultaneous collective reception. Discovery of 'optical unconscious' - figures of a collective dream, laughter as therapeutic release.

Ends on a political note - Film's danger is that it can be distraction, that can lead to a co-opting by fascism to reroute the masses (using masses but preserving old property relations)
What is Cinema? v. 1
Andre Bazin
Realism as expression of mythic, not the scientific.

Asks the actor to be rather than pretend to be or act. Prefers natural setting, not expressionistic. Requires the narrative to respect the actual qualities and duration of the event (in preference to the artificial, abstract or dramatic duration favored in classic montage).
Theory of Film
Siegfried Kracauer
Realist approach. Film literally photographs reality. Impossible for film to be a "pure" expression of the artist's intentions.
The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man
Edgar Morin
Morin put aside the artistic aspect of cinema, and liked it more for its popular and scientific usages, we can see that he is first a sociologist. Relationship between human and environment elucidated by film.

Charm of the image - ideas of photogénie of Delluc and Epstein, awakening picturesque in things that are not picturesque.

Emphasized the film's contact with the real. Cosmo/anthropomorphism. It gives inanimate things/landscapes a soul (anthropomorphism) and makes humans and the human face a part of the cosmos, a part of the larger natural order. Plowman in a field. Landscapes are states of the soul and states of the soul landscapes. Identification of spectators is not just with characters, but with everything.
“Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”
Andrew Sarris
Breaks down auteur theory - bad uses of it, before building it back up and saying that it is quite useful. Critiques auteur theory for assuming bad films by good director are actually good. That auteur theory is a shortcut to film scholarship- "you see it or you don't"

But at the same time, he thought the auteur theorists were frequently right, that you could predict quality based on auteur.

Politique des auteurs abbreviated as auteur theory.

Auteur theory is a critical device for American CInema. In the Hollywood system, authorship is obscured/shared. Rescuing from obscurity, but runs risk of going too far - confounding author with whole film. can rescue achievements from unjustifiable anonymity.

Truffaut - given weapon for a given time and place.
“The Auteur Theory”
Peter Wollen
Author theory implies operation of decipherment, revealing authors where none had been seen before. A process of distinguishing the signal from the noise. Presumes European director as an ideal.

Distinguishes stylists and metters-en-scene.

Takes Howard Hawks as an example - homo hawksianus, Hawksian man in a Hawksian world.

Ends with notion that task of author criticism is uncompleted - must compare, move beyond collecting bundles of similarities like Propp and the structuralists.
“On the politique des auteurs”
André Bazin
Opens by noting disagreement with Cahiers group - he finds work can transcend director, they say that is impossible.

Counterexamples - ridiculous applied to literature, where minor works are accepted, anonymous art, ancient art (as work of society),

Makes the point that cinema is both popular and industrial, Hollywood has excellence of a tradition, with a sociological approach to production.

Dismisses that old age leads to senility. Rather, Idea that cinema changes faster than people, geniuses burn out but can be refloated by following wave.

Author + Subject, subject is zero for auteur hardliners.

American cinema admired, where restrictions of production are heaviest. Tradition of genre as base of creative freedom, classical art - genious of the system, fertility in contact with new elements
The Genius of the System, Parts I and II
Thomas Schatz
Liberal theory of the subject, decisions of particular men in shaping film, Irving Thalberg at MGM, David O. Selznick, the strategic exercise of decision-making and avoids impersonality of BST.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
Bordwell, Thompson, Staiger
Theory of Film Practice
Noel Burch
“Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film”
Christian Metz
Semiological approach - cinema is a different system than that of communicative language.

Denotative meaning: Comes by analogy, similarity between signifier and signified. sound of cannon like a cannon sound, image of dog like the dog.

connotative meaning: this is the realm of symbolism, meaning goes beyond the signifier

Later on, from Mitry, connotation is a form of denotation.

Any given visual or auditory theme takes on value greater than itself by its place within the discourse of the film.

The nature of the cinema is to transform the world into discourse.
“Cinema of Poetry”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Semiological approach - cinema is a different system than that of communicative language.

Film and images are pregrammatical,

Cinema should be language of poetry, but practice has made it a language of prose narrative.

Free indirect POV shot is speaking in the first person.
“The Third Meaning” in Image Music Text
Roland Barthes, 1978
Ivan the Terrible as example:

1) Informational level - Communication - the message
2) Symbolic - Intentional Referential, themes to of wealth, historical symbolism,
3) Signifying accidents, what remains in the image after the first two.
“Narrative Space”
Stephen Heath, 1976
Takes moment in Hitchcock's suspicion, in which the detective takes a moment away from the basic plot to fixate on a cubist painting.

The match of the film and world, is representation, which is discourse, and is subject to discrusive operations.

Quattrocentro system - scenographic space, eye and knowledge come together, central perspective systemIt is narrative significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and 'read'.

Space constructed in film is a filmic construction. ,... why does changes in view and cutting not cause discomfort? Spectator positioned always in the subject position, can be concieved as a joyride through space

Work of classical cinema not to hide or ignore offscreen but to contain it - and to contain signs of production (through narrativization). The process binding the spectator as subject in the realisation of the film's space.
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, 1969
All films are manufactured within a given system of economic relations, even independent... Every film is political inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it.

CInema reproduces reality, reality is expression of prevailing ideology. All films are commodities.

Show what films are blind to, how they operate, how signified (political subject) is weakened, rendered harmless, gap produced between film and ideology.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Laura Mulvey, 1975
Psychoanalytic basis -
Two types of visual pleasure in Freud - scopophilia, voyeurism and then identification.

The gaze itself is gendered, and the gaze in cinema is a male gaze.
“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” from Signatures of the Visible
Frederic Jameson, 1979
Reification - making into a thing. Older forms of human activity are reorganized and taylorized.

High art vs. low art - You have no artwork without reification and commodification - made to be sold. Modernist works have been commodified and mass works have some subversive functions
“Identification, Mirror” “The Passion for Perceiving” from Imaginary Signifier
Christian Metz, 1975
The film is like a mirror, in that you can perceive objects on a screen, but it's not, because the reflection of the own body has disappeared. Cinema spectator has already gone through mirror stage and cinema is on the side of the symbolic.

Deals with different kinds of identification - with character, with actor as human being,

Visual scopophili drive and auditory drive, desire or passion to percieve. Voyeurism and exhibitionism.

Metz uses Lacan - who says constitution of subject is accessed through the symbolic.
Imaginary, when ego is concieved as fullness.

L'absence du pere in symbolic -≥Metz creates transcendental ego, allowing subject to identify with Camera.
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”
Jean-Louis Baudry, 1974
Plato's cave as metaphor for the cinematic apparatus. Plato's prisoner is a victim of an illusion of reality, a hallucination, the prey of an impression fo reality. Seated, immobilized, constrained to look at shadows in dim space, while prop, simulacrum of reality is projected.

Freud - cinema is a dreeam, viewer as a dreamer. where mental perceptions are taken for perceptions of reality. Dream Screen. Reproduces an impression of reality, releases a cinema effect comparable to dream. Appatus does this. Subject induced to produce machines to represent this functioning to himself, mechanism mimicking, simulating the apparatus that is not other than himself.
“The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.”
Jean-Louis Baudry, 1976
“The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema”
Daniel Dayan
Filmic enunciation system, that which speaks the fiction is built to mask the ideological origin.

Goes through classical painting as a ediscourse that defines in advance the role fo the subject, which masks ideological codes.

Cinema threatens to expose its own functioning as ideological system ... question - who is watching this, who is ordering this image?

part of the problem is that there is an 'absent one' doing the seeing - this is contained by the shot reverse-shot. A single point of view of the absent one leaves a hole that the spectator cannot percieve, the SRS closes that and 'sutures' the hole shut. Classical cinema gives the impression of speaking for itself - invisibility. Classical cinema establishes itself as the ventriloquist of ideology.
“The Obvious and the Code”
Raymond Bellour
Takes an example of 12 shots from the Big Sleep and shows how they show a very particular design, a design not to be percieved. Strategic placement of the shot, the use of symetry, vectorization of motion. In classical cinema, relationhips between shots resolve themselves within each unit of narration.
”The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach”
Nick Browne
Browne is approaching this question of how to account for the images themselves in classical Hollywood film system, and how they relate to the position of the spectator.
where does imagery arise?
-as spectator with 'best view' of narrative action
-glance of the 'absent one' an offscreen character within the story. Denies authority of the narrator.
-an expression of psychology of the characters
--Browne shows how particular shots and images in stagecoach create a process Involves both the narrator and the spectator - that reveals the narrator's attitude toward the tale, the social relationship of the characters. Spectator is the plural subject, inscribes a moral order into the text.

-bad analogy of position of eye with literal perspective, ignores figurative perspective.
“Metaphors On Vision”
Stan Brakhage
Creatively alters photographic reality by distorting the anticipated and familiar spatio-temporal relationships within the sequential flow of images. New way of looking,
“Major Mythopoeia” from Visionary Cinema
P.A. Sitney
Reading of Dog Star Man -

Mythopoeic- creation of myth and archetype.
An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film
Maya Deren, 1946
Critique of science and reason and a particular form of logic. Reacting against cult of reason and science after the atom bomb being dropped, after the mass tragedies of WWII. Leading toward alternative science, against categorization, emperical.

is man part of nature or to act upon it.
“Towards a Third Cinema”
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1969
Keywords: Camera as gun/rifle, guerilla cinema, culture of subversion, new man, decolonization of culture; guerilla cinema; The film act/action

This manifesto by Solanas and Getino is a Marxist anticolonialist tract that theorizes the conditions for an active, revolutionary mode of filmmaking, what they call a guerilla cinema, or a third cinema. Specifically against reformism of any sort and for violent revolution.

First Cinema, Second, Third

Implementation: “In this long war, with the camera as our rifle, we do in fact move into a guerilla activity”. . . . “The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.” Camera builds weapons, projector shoots them. (subtle difference from earlier idea of the camera as a rifle.)

Apparatus of 35mm ideologically tainted

Discusses activity of revolutionary film unit as a military cell
“For an Imperfect Cinema”
Julio Garcia Espinosa, 1979
Keywords: uncommitted art, Popular Art vs. Mass Art,

Espinosa is writing as a Cuban filmmaker, theorizing a new kind of art and a new kind of cinema. The main idea is the destruction of the “elite” or specialized creation and reception of art.

Discusses the democratization of film production through technology.

Popular Art vs. Mass Art. Popular art is good (develops personal, individual taste of a people), mass art is poor (requires the people to have no taste). “Mass art is produced by minority to satisfy the demand of a public reduced to the sole role of spectator and consumer.” (Hauser)

Art is a life activity, not about personal achievement as an artist but as a human. Art as part of everyday existence.

“committed cinema” = “an imperfect” cinema. Imperfect cinema rejects quality and technique as unimportant, exhibitionism (stars and director as star), criticism, personal self-realization through film.

Ends with idea that “the future lies with folk art.”
“White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory”
Jane Gaines, 1986
“White”
Richard Dyer, 1988
White power secures its dominance as the norm, as something unacknowledged as a quality, as an invisible emptiness.

White people's inability to see whiteness.

Takes Jezebel - Her red dress flouting the conventions of whitness.. (appears black.) Lives through maid Zette.
“Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance”*
Manthia Diawara, 1988*
“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”*
Linda Williams, 1991*
“Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator”*
Mary Ann Doane, 1982*
“The Cinema of Attractions”
Tom Gunning
Lumiere and Melies united as cinema less interested in telling stories than presenting views to audiences.

Links this early cinema wiht the attractions of the fairgrounds, cinema itself as an attraction.

Attraction and narration as two distinct qualitites, development of a synthesis, then a dominance by narrative, but attraction never truly disappears.

1907 to 1913 = narrativization of the cinema
“The Mass production of the senses: Classical Cinema ad Vernacular Modernism,”
Miriam Hansen
Response to BST -

Different way to think about questions of Classicism and Modernism - Why go back to 18th century terms and neoclassicism when cinema is a technology intimately connected with modernity.

therapeutic discourse - helping people come to terms with modernity.

Intervening
The World Viewed
Stanley Cavell
Cinema matters and should be treated as an object of study to philosophers, a social object in which community is involved.

Screen is a framed reality, but scrren is a barrier, it screens me from the world it holds, makes me invisible.

Automatism is one of his major ideas - the absence of the man in the process of the take, interested in what the human agent takes for granted in the workings of the cinema machine.
Cinema 1: the Movement Image, Cinema 2: the Time Image
Gilles Deleuze
Cristal image - the image's infinite potential is built into any image.

Image-mouvement - obeys logic of causality, cause/effect, linear, consequential
Image-temps-= pure optical and sound situations, free (not bound), fragmentary, free flow, purity of element in itself.
What Cinema Is!, ch 2
Dudley Andrew
“Ideology, Genre, Auteur”
Robin Wood, 1976
Notes interest in auteurism, genre, and ideology and tries to link them.

Goes through list of manifestations of capitalist ideologies: capitalism, work ethic, Marriage, Nature, Progress, Success, Rosebud/Money,

Genres are not discrete, ideologically. Same concerns and ideological tensions cross genres.

Best moment - defined particularities of an auteur interact with ideological tensions and film is fed from more than one generic source.
“A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre”
Rick Altman, 1984
Traditional notions of genre have borrowed from industry discourse and have been the establishment of a list of texts, some inclusive and growing, some exclusive but faithful to some notion of the genre.

Takes Saussurian linguistics as structure for understanding genre.

Semantic: Based on presense or absence of easily identifiable elements.
Syntactic: the relationship between elements, the structures into which they are arranged.

When a lasting fit is obtained in Hollywood, a semantic genre becomes a syntactic genre - audience's ritual values coincide with Hollywood's ideological values.
“Document and Documentary: on the Persistence of Historical Concepts” in Change Mummified
Philip Rosen, 2001
Traces a number of concepts involved in indexical media, liveness,

Every normal film image is supposed to be apprehended as a preservation from the past, even if overt fiction.

Expansion of notion of document from its roots as a written text.
“First Principles in Documentary”
John Grierson
Traces early notions of word documentary. Creative document of actuality

Original or native actors
Interview with Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, plus Leacock, "For an Uncontrolled Cinema,"
Film Culture
“Truth Not Guaranteed: An Interview with Errol Morris,”
Cineaste 17:1 (1989), 16-17.
Thin Blue Line, finding new truth as opposed to state truth... supports film truth
“The Domain of Documentary,” in Representing Reality
Bill Nichols, 1991
Documentary is a mode, not a genre; discourse of sobriety;

About world we do inhabit, love of truth, antitheatrical prejudice, kinship with other nonfiction forms.
“Observation Cinema,”
Colin Young, 1975
“Beyond Observational Cinema”
David MacDougall, 1975
Narration in the Fiction Film, part III
David Bordwell, 1985
Auteurs are manipulating various categories of space time, and narration.
“Adaptation”
Dudley Andrew
Adaptations claiming fidelity bear the original as signified, whereas those inspired by or deriving from an earlier text stand in relation to the original.

Distinction between Borrowing: employing earlier successful text, employing earlier presige

INtersecting text, uniqueness is preserved and not assimilated.
“Projections of Sound on Image” in Audio-Vision
Michel Chion
Added value - it is not just sound, not just image, but enrichment . Added value structures vision, what we see depends on what we hear.

Time is vectorized, projection speed,

Cinema is primarily vococentric (intelligible voice over other types of sounds)

Acousmetre - the voice without a body, particular possibility of sound film... seeing all, being everywhere, omnipotent in action.
The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures
Gonda Yasunosuke
Projection by the spectator onto the text, film as a vessel; Realism because spectators bring in their everyday reality with them.
Film Theory and the Crisis in Contemporary Aesthetics
Nakai Masakazu
CInema not medium of expression or communication; unmediated medium, revolutionary communist
A Theory of Avant-Garde Documentary
Matsumoto Toshio
My Theory of Film: A Logic of Self-Negation
Yoshida Kiju
Negation - films already made before being made. Ellipttical thinking. Avant garde film syle,
Hasumi Shigehiko and Film Theory
Ryan Cook