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9 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
- 3rd side (hint)
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Pather Panchali
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Satyajit Ray, 1955
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Pather Panchelli
• Color: high contrast in black and white blurs the line between domestic and natural world • Set also does this, crumbling houses, snake moving in • Cinematography: black and white highlights bleak inner space, and how bright and open the outside space is • "The effect is emotional density, not bleakness. The idea that a whole life, not a single motive, is behind every decision" - page 122 in reader • Contrast with Throne of Blood, where actions are decided on a whim • Ending, but not a culminating climax: resolution of the necklace, Ben leaving, Jurgas' death • Long shots used with little cutting back and forth (more documentary style) so the viewer is placed into experiencing the overall emotion of life in the village, as opposed to individual emotions Robin Wood, Pather Panchali: • Simple and no significant action: long shots that link characters' separate lives and the environment together, age-death motif also emphasized by linking 3 generations (senile and useless auntie, young Apu, Kittens etc...) • Apu: film only partly showed through his eyes (partly identify with him) to highlight the consciousness of his decisions, his development (e.g. not gonna learn in school) • Stolen necklace: shows ability to express character's unconscious psychological impulses through seemingly un-meaningful actions. Shame, humility, anger, and sympathy is expressed through long continuous shots of different characters' participation in the confrontation. Sarbojaya torn between maternal love and public shame, Durgha shows hopelessness of being continually disadvantaged, auntie helps pick up Durga's stuff and be useful for the first time which emphasize the shock from confrontation, Apu repudiating his mother's action and is capable of book learning, following in his father's footsteps • Train: symbolic of progress, wider opportunities unimaginable by Sarbojaya. Apu's captivation with the train, or any other seemingly ordinary event (traveling play), highlights his passion and dream of leaving the boring immediate experience. Apu's foil links his two learning experiences, the play and the quarrel that led to seeing the train. Once the train come, we see it from the other side of the tracks to link our own experience with modernization to the idyllic life. This train scene is cut with Auntie's resignation to her doom, which is implied by her un-prideful plead for water, contrast with the children, comparison with the animal world where death is common. Yet our sympathy for Sarbojaya is maintained without minimizing her brutality. • Durga's death: death-in-separation motif, animal motif again, irony (rain that brings renewable kills her), effect on Apu is unclear which is also powerful (how does death effect a young child's view on life) • Departure: Hari moves family to city, Apu finds Durgha's stolen necklace and makes a conscious moral decision for the first time (whole life behind decision, psychological density), snakes and nature reclaim what was theirs before |
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Throne of Blood
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Akira Kurasawa, 1975
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Throne of Blood
• McBeth redone in medieval Japan, big influence on Kurosawa is "Noh Drama" • Music is based on Japanese theatrical music, violent movement, Japanese forest music as opposed to the three witches Themes: circles and circular movement, ends where it begins, role of women were more psychological (Lady McBeth guided the prophecy) men were more physical, Roger Manwell, Kurosawa's McBeth: • Noh stylization: McBeth's similarities to current Japanese reality (strong preyed weak), quietness and violence coexist, Japanese artistic compositions (white space) • Kurosawa communicated McBeth through film (not speech), what Shakespeare communicated through words, an independent masterpiece with Shakespeare's scenario. Transmutation not adaptation, • Forest maze = Washizu's mind, Asaji and Washizu endowed with only purely physical power (birth and strength), succumbed to the mental brainwash by the witch, characters only speak only when they can't communicate in physical forms |
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Vertigo
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Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
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Vertigo
• Music by Bernard Herman: interesting because it does not only accompany, but prepare ones psychologically for coming images, an expressionistic tool, not so much pointing but making emotions (e.g. Credits scene is abstract, and music was used to lead you in) • False identities (impersonation of the wife, dressing up the girl to look like the dead wife) • Imaginative power it takes to make an unattainable object appeared as lost (the wife becomes more attainable as the film goes on, as the wife, and dead, compared to Marges as a real woman) • A man who falls in love with an empty facade - Marilyn, pg 150 • Autobiographical quality with Hitchcock's OCD over is actresses Kay Kalinak, A Theory of Film and Music: • Bias eye stimulus is superior to ear, classical film theory agrees, • Classical model: meaning is in visual image and music simply reinforces or alters what is there. Parallelism and Counterpoint forms a continuum (emotion and volume) for the music to integrate into the film • Contrapuntal: music that foreshadows, undercuts, provides irony, or comments up on situation or character • Music is criticized for pacifying the audience, lowering barrier to belief, short-cut in cinematography • Psychoanalysis framework: music pleasures by being a link to maternal experiences, music lerks in perpetual background lowers threshold to belief and bypasses the censors of the preconscious • Argues against separation of film theory and film music theory, the two are too integrated and central to the filmic experience, need to develop new framework/terms to analyze Jack Sullivan, Vertigo: The Music of Longing and Loss: • Music hooks viewer in the beginning, and is pervasive throughout, ringing theme of "obsession and longing". • "Recognition scene": music accompanies two ghost apparitions. Mental institution has music for every disorder. Marilyn Fabe, Mourning Vertigo: • Trying to make a fictional image real, Madeleine is an imaginary signifier that is infinitely desirable but never possible • Melancholia: a state in which the "libido stages a simulation where what cannot be lost because it has never been possessed appears as lost" - Agamben • Reenacting Vertigo is a way to cling to an illusory means by which to overcome loss • Fictiveness of location captured on Film: 1) automatically fictionalized by fantasy of narrative 2) transformed by cinematographic techniques 3) Special effects, ex: editing fake tower above church 4) film image itself is ontologically fictional • Scottie's melancholy and insecurity: vertigo symbolizes early insecure attachment, years for the impossible • Madeleine = impossible/insecure object, first was married, then was dead • Dead mothers, Midge • Ending of Resurrection and liberation: Scottie's movement now is straight upward, not circular, signals liberation. Ambiguous whether Scottie ever gets over second loss of Madeleine |
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To Kill a Mockingbird
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Robert Mulligan, 1962
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To Kill a Mockingbird (adaptation)
• Fidelity is implausible when adapting literature to film, a subjective emotional response and not practical • Ex: movie Tom Robinson was the only mockingbird, while in book other characters were too • Much bigger focus on Atticus Finch in the movie than in the book, develops his character (e.g. dog shooting scene) • Film is very much a film and uses the language of film, e.g. horror tropes (shadow, lighting, music, suspense build up) • The loss of innocence of the children - watching courtroom and seeing injustice served (relate this to Panchelli and how the kids growing up and facing the harsh reality) • Ventriloquist relationship Robert Stam, "Beyond Fidelity: Dialogics of Adaptation": • Fidelity: fundamental narrative, thematic, ad aesthetic features of literary source. Should not be only framework to analyze how well a film adapted literature • Medium-specificity approach: adaptation should be faithful more to the essence of the medium of expression, rather than source text. (ex: film is better at action, immediate stimulus, not reflectives) • Use film, as an entirely separate medium, to bring to life the hypotext, not mimic it • Film adaptations of novels often change novelistic events for ideological reasons • Argues for less moralistic critics of adaptations, less focus on "fidelity" but instead critic the whole experience while taking into account differences between the two medium Colin Nicholson, "Hollywood and Race: To Kill a Mockingbird": • Readers have more control over responses to stimuli, film viewers do not (simultaneous signs, real time) • Shift of focus to the father as the heroic American leading anti-racism, narrowing scope & focus • One mockingbird in film (Robinson) but multiple in novel (Jem's damage by racism) • Compression when translating novel to film: uses film techniques as substitute for literary devices (e.g. connecting credit child toys scene with in-film scene, camera remarkably static to express enclosed, Cunningham's lynch mob melodrama replaced with acute embarrassment for increased credibility in the film) • Film focuses on court room scene, segregation, horror tropes (shadows, music, Boo), happy ending |
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Red Desert
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Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964
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Red Dessert
• Color: red associated with fear • Film is not only about Juliana, but also about the particular industrialization movement in the mid 60s, so color was used by director to depict all of this • Juliana lags when she talks Angela Vacche, "Painting as Ventriloquism and Film as Movement": • Ventriloquism: replacement of camera with woman's eye to record historical and produce art • red rules over empty space, symbolizes passion, empty space is unexplored possibilities • Atonioni wants to paint/architect/design reality: use Monica Vitti as a medium through film (e.g. her sickness allows blurry and crisp shots, contrasting colors and shapes) • Juliana's convalescence clears the ground for expression about the individualization, industrialization, and personal artistic expression • Clash between art and technology, old and new, male and female, director and actress, painted machines. Anti is also passionate about painting and architecture, composition similar to De Chirico's paintings • Historical documentation: female condition, ambition, and containment |
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Playtime
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Jacques Tati, 1967
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Playtime
• Not sure what the building is • Voyeuristic: defocused long shots, not many close-ups (e.g. moment in the club with the rare close-up), viewer doesn't know where to look sort of like how the character is also lost, • Deconstruction at the rose garden • Roles of glass, material - invisible barrier, reflective barrier, fragile material, walking into glass, reflecting images of French landmark, use glass as ice, door gag • Slapstick comedy, gag driven film but each joke has a message • In a lot of ways, he was very much a silent film make Dietrich Neumann, "Playtime" and Lucy Fischer, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity...": • Architecture has a role in telling the story, long shot and take, deep-focus, busily filled frames to give viewer freedom of consciousness • Glass confuses and reflect, "International Style" homogeneity • Royal Garden: reflects society, then broken down in the end by Hulot • Long shots/takes directing attention methods: color, sound, dialogue, camera movement, ensemble • Tati directs attention, then sometimes does not, also use repeats of gag that sometimes do not fully complete, to keep audience on their toes |
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Adaptation
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Spike Jonze, 2002
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Adaptation
• Teach us about the frame work (3 acts), and then lead us into the framework that we learned • Self-reflective, seeing it as it was constructed (metaphysical), • 1st act: character figures out what he/shes doing, 2nd act: conflict, complication, reversal, action planned. 3rd act: carry out the goal • Meta reflective aspect (Trope): 3 identities in brother's script, impossible but is being done, once brother dies Kaufman can express his love the girl, etc... Derek Hill, "Spike Jonze": • Mastered art of the con, patience with the frame and trust the actor to adapt the work, inner struggle of the creative genius whose worst fear is selling-out Rizzo Sergio, "Infidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics of Adaptation": • "Sociological turn" in adaptations, wow them in the end and you've got a hit - McKee • "No such thing as a faithful adaptation" - Robin Wood, "take rights of the adaptor to the breaking point", grant the author rights to defend the original even though they sold it, • Motifs: false starts and self-doubt (writing and love life), masculine fascination with the feminine (the book, flowers, women), class/race/gender dualisms, white adaptation of native-resources (psychedelic drugs) |
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Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
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Guy Maddin, 2002
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Dracula
• Homage to silence film using modern digital processing techniques on old grainy stock • Gangbanging: penetrating her with blood, bouncing up and down • In the book: she felt bad for choosing one guy, but in the film it was more lustful • Organ with the green gas William Beard, "Pages from a Virgins Diary" (Godden choreographed): • Synopsis: First half, Lucy Westenra infected by Dracula, killed by her three suitors and decapitated by Van Helsing. Second half, Mina almost seduced by Dracula but due to her greater piety, was saved at the end by the vampire hunters. • Ballerina needs "space" to express love, also limited on time of dance -> covers like sporting event • Filmed ballet is free from fidelity/normal expectations • Dracula is de-fanged, represents ultimate female sexual desire, condemned by males for his mysterious origin and women's demonic desire for him. Lucy's double exposed sleep/dream unsubtly highlight cultural subtext of novel • Music from Mahler, unconventional but surprisingly fitting choice • Filmed choreography (important): broke away from rigid regiments of filmed dance (keeping dancers whole body, pure to the choreography) and replaced with fluidic camera movement that weaves in and out of the dancers, focusing on their face/hands for emotion capture then back out to the body, interventionist style. • Editing: "resulting image-set is simultaneously connected to old cinematic practice (German expressionism and silent films) and avant-garde, stylized, modern techniques. With the background of primitive visual world, the smallest stroke (e.g. camera shakes in moments of excitement) can have a big effect. Use of chiaroscuro (light & dark), double exposures (frame Dracula as a desire). Overall very dynamic editing (fast fades and dissolves, irises, vignettes, soft focus, high grain used profusely to link montages), overall a new editing philosophy • Adaptation of Stoker's (author of Dracula) melodrama: focused on sex (Lucy's killing is very much an orgy, gender, suppressed virginal desires of the men not the women), and using film technique to emphasize what Stoker could not (close up of dancers' fingers) |
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Final Structure:
• Focus more on second half of the course • IDs are from film from second half • Clips are from second half • Middle essay addresses the whole course IDs : 2 parts, 7 IDs, 3 of those are short definitions Essays of Choice (3 options) Clip Analysis at the End: obvious continuity in between the clips which will be the subject of the essay, compare and contrast the clips |
Final Exam Structure
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