Transcript Document

Week 2, January 15th
The Post War Era 1945-1960.
Readings: Thompson & Bordwell Part 4 The Post War Era Chapter
15 American Cinema in the Postwar Era 1945-1960. pp 299-323; and
Alfred Hitchcock Box p. 320
Supplementary reading: Corrigan, Timothy, White, Patricia, with
Meta Mazaj, Critical Visions in Film Theory; Classical and
Contemporary Readings Part I Experiencing Film: From perception
to reception. Judith Mayne “Paradoxes of Spectatorship”pp.88-110
and Part 4 Auteurism: Tania Modelski “Hitchcock, Feminism and the
Patriarchal Unconscious” pp 375-386
Hayward, Key Concepts Hays Code pp 171 and Hollywood Black
List “Orson Welles: Boy Genius and Films of the Period” pp143147; Hayward Key Concepts: Realism pp. 298-300
Screening: Strangers on a Train (1951) Rear Window (1954),
Director: Alfred Hitchcock www.hitchcockwiki.com/ Night and
Fog (1955) Alain Renais
Lecture Plan:
• Over View: Readings etc
• A few key film studies concepts: (Also refer text
glossary and relevant sections of Susan Hayward Key
Concepts in Cinema Studies)
• Diegesis and Diegetic Sound
• Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)
• Surveillance, POV, Spectatorship
• Anamorphosis
• The Gaze/ The look
Mise en Scene
The arrangements of visual
weights and movements within a
given space. In the live theatre,
the space is usually defined by
the proscenium arch; in cinema
it is defined by the frame that
encloses the images. Cinematic
mise en scene encompasses both
the staging of the action and the
way it's filmed. Literally “what
is placed in the scene” All that is
before the camera!
Close-up (CU)
A detailed view of a person
or object. A close-up (CU),
Medium Close-up (MCU)
or extreme close-up (ECU)
of an object or actor,
usually only his or her head
or perhaps an eye. As
opposed to a long shot.
(LS) Hayward Key
Concepts pp317-320
Long Shot
Low Angle
Low Angle- A shot
in which the subject
is photographed
from below. As
opposed to a high
angle shot.
Medium Long Shot 1
Medium Long Shot 2
Dolly Shot or Tracking Shot (Trucking
Shots)
Dolly Shot, Tracking
Shot, Trucking Shot- A
shot taken from a moving
vehicle, bicycle,
automobile, train.
Originally, tracks were
laid on the set to permit a
smoother movement of the
camera. Often produced
cinematic clichés such as
train lines to infinity.
Tracking (dolly) Shot
Aerial or Crane Shot
Aerial or Crane Shot- A
shot taken from a special
device called a crane,
which resembles a huge
mechanical arm. The
crane carries the camera
and the cinematographer
and can move in virtually
any direction.
‘Z’ jib/crane
Deep Focus
Deep Focus
A photographic
technique that
permits all distance
planes to remain
clearly in focus,
from close-up
ranges to infinity.
High Angle
High Angle A shot in
which the subject is
photographed from
above. As opposed to
a low angle shot.
Long Shot
Long Shot- Often an
establishing shot; a shot
that includes an area
within the image that
roughly corresponds to the
spectators view of the area
within the proscenium
arch in the live theatre. As
opposed to a close-up.
Dissolve
Dissolve- The slow
fading out of one shot
and the gradual fading
in of its successor,
with a superimposition
of images, usually at
the mid-point.
Montage
Montage- Transitional
sequences of rapidly
edited images, used to
suggest the lapse of time
or the passing of events.
Often uses dissolve and
multiple exposures. In
Europe, montage means
the art of editing.
Dialectical versus additive
Click
Image for Video Clip
montage
Shot /reverse shot
The camera cuts back
and forth between two
points of view
(P.O.V.) in a scene,
normally between two
characters
180 degree rule.
When planning a sequence
of shots the director is
aware of maintaining
continuity through the
convention of not
"crossing the line", or of
positioning cameras on the
same side of the 180
degree line of action or
axis of action.
Diegesis
Refers to Narration –
the content of
narration or the
fictional world inside
the story. All that is
really going on - on
screen – to
construct/represent a
fictional reality.
Diegesis 22
A narrative's “timespace continuum.” The
diegesis of a narrative is
its entire created world.
Any narrative includes a
diegesis, whether you are
reading or viewing another form of reading science fiction, fantasy,
mimetic realism, or
psychological realism.
Diegetic Sound
Diegetic Sound/ Commentary Sound - sound whose
source is neither visible on the screen nor has been
implied to be present in the action
narrator's commentary (voice over)
such as ‘Voice of God’ in documentary and sound
effects which are added for the dramatic effect such as
mood music.
Non-Diegetic Sound
Non-diegetic sound is represented as coming from a
source outside the story space. The distinction
between diegetic or non-diegetic sound depends on
our understanding of the conventions of film
viewing and listening. Occasionally this is
illusionistic i.e. Sam the piano player in Casablanca
who was singing diegetically (As Time goes By) and
other hit compositions to piano previously recorded.
We know that certain sounds are represented as
coming from the story world, while others are
represented as coming from outside the space of the
story events.
Three-Point Lighting
Three-Point Lighting A common technique of
lighting a scene from three sources. The key light
is the main source of illumination, usually creating
the dominant contrast where we first look in a
shot. Fill lights are less intense and are generally
placed opposite the key, illuminating areas that
would otherwise be obscured by shadow.
Backlights are used to separate foreground
elements from the setting, emphasizing depth in
the image.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC5UhVwcIyg
Rear Window Origins:
Cornell Woolrich’s short story “It Had to
be Murder”
John Michael Hayes (screenplay)
Cast
James Stewart...L. B. Jefferies
Grace Kelly... Lisa Carol Fremont
Wendell Corey... Detective Lt. Thomas J. Doyle
Thelma Ritter...Stella , Insurance company nurse
Raymond Burr... Lars Thorwald
Judith Evelyn..Miss Lonelyheart
Ross Bagdasarian... Songwriter
Georgine Darcy... Miss Torso
Sara Berner... Wife living above Thorwald
Cast continued
Frank Cady... Husband living above Thorwald
Jesslyn Fax...Sculpting neighbor with hearing aid
Rand Harper...Newlywed man
Irene Winston..Mrs. Anna Thorwald
Havis Davenport...Newlywed woman
Marla English.. Girl at songwriter's party
Heat wave
During a heat wave, normally itinerant news
photographer L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart)
finds himself confined by a broken leg to a
wheelchair in his Greenwich Village
apartment. Each day, and often into the
night, he has little to do but gaze out his rear
window at the activities of his neighbours in
the surrounding apartments.
Jeff’s main visitors are his fiancée Lisa
Fremont (Grace Kelly), a high-fashion
model and Stella (Thelma Ritter), an
insurance company nurse who provides him
with therapeutic massages.
Heat Wave Plot device
More than a plot device explaining why everyone
has their windows open, the heat wave intensifies
a crisis for which it also serves as a metaphor for
vulnerability. With windows open, the heat
intensifies a crisis for which it also serves as a
metaphor.
Jeff: I wonder if it's ethical to watch a man with
binoculars and a long focus lens. Do you, do you
suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he didn't
commit a crime?
Lisa: I'm not much on rear window ethics.
Jeff: Of course, they can do the same thing to me,
watch me like a bug under a glass if they want to.
Lisa: Jeff, you know, if someone came in here, they
wouldn't believe what they'd see.
Jeff: What?
Lisa: You and me with long faces, plunged into
despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife.
We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever
known. You'd think we could be a little bit happy that
the poor woman is alive and well.
Character Parallelism
Hitchcock scholars (Mulvey, Modleski,
Woods et. al.), have discussed the way the
relationship between Jeff and Lisa parallels
the lives of the neighbours they are spying
upon. Many of these points are considered
in Tania Modleski’s The Women Who
Knew Too Much.
POV
Almost the entire film is shot from inside
Jeff's bedroom, and most of the point of
view (POV) shots are his. However, at key
points in the movie this rule is broken;
usually as a dual or triple POV shot, but
also with single POV shots of detective
Doyle, Stella, and Lisa.
H’s Cameo
Alfred Hitchcock appears in one of his most
inventive cameo appearances as the man
winding the clock in the songwriter's
apartment as he is playing the composition
that he is working on during the course of
the film.
Art references
Seven + lively arts:
Painting, sculpture, dance, music, theatre,
opera, literature, photography and, of
course, film.
Pets: The dog who knew too much.
Themes
Surveillance, ocular ethics, doubling, uncanny.
Everyone needs to love…someone.
The fine art of murder
Symbolic relationship between spectator and
screen.
The wrong man becomes the right man
Suspicion = suspense
The violability of the fourth wall
literary influences Source: Kenn Mogg,
“E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic tale of the
uncanny ‘The Sandman’ (Hitchcock owned
several editions of Hoffmann), H.G.
Wells’s 1894 short story ‘Through a
Window’ (Hitchcock owned a set of
Wells’s complete works), and Aldous
Huxley’s famous 1922 short story loosely
based on the then-current Armstrong
murder case, ‘The Gioconda Smile.’
Hoffman’s Sandman
“The relevance of Hoffmann’s tale may be
seen from even a partial synopsis. The
student Nathanael becomes fixated on a
house opposite his own occupied by
Professor Spallanzani and his beautiful
‘daughter’ called Olympia. Watching the
house through binoculars, the student quite
loses interest in his regular girlfriend,
Klara. One day, he goes to the house and at
last encounters Olympia - who turns out to
be just a life-size doll.
Freud’s “The Uncanny”
Also the basis of the ballet 'Coppélia'
(1870). The tale is also the main subject of
Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’
unheimlich , in which he alludes to
Spallanzani as a potentially ‘castrating’
father-figure.”
Jeff's rear window world, each story is resolved.
Miss Torso is reunited with her military boyfriend.
Miss Lonelyhearts hooks up with the songwriter,
whose music prevents her from committing
suicide. The Thorwalds apartment is being
repainted. The childless couple gets a new dog.
The sculptress finishes her work, Hunger. The
newly-weds are beginning to have marital strife.
Life goes on…..
Trivia
Principal photography was completed by
January 1954, having taken approximately
eight weeks. The overall budget scarcely
exceeded $1,000,000. Following its world
premiere at New York’s Rivoli Theater on
4 August 1954, the film and its
performances were hailed by critics and
public alike. 'Time' thought it ‘possibly the
second most entertaining picture (after
The 39 Steps) ever made by ...
Hitchcock.’ By May 1956, it had grossed
$10,000,000.
Homage to Rear Window
In 1998, Christopher Reeve (Superman) as
the paraplegic architect Jason Kemp
appeared in a remake of Rear Window that
retained the original title, but had the main
character completely paralyzed instead of
just having a recently broken leg (due to
Reeve's real life condition). The Lars
Thorwald character is replaced by an
English sculptor thus racking up the
art/murder connection.
Other homages to Rear Window
Brian De Palma paid homage to Rear Window
with his movie Body Double (which also added
touches of Hitchcock's Vertigo). The 2001 film
Head Over Heels starring Freddie Prinze Jr., in
which a young woman falls for a man she believes
she saw commit a murder, closely follows the plot
of Rear Window, as well as the 2007 film
Disturbia - although in this film, there is no
accident, and the suspect has no wife. Marcos
Bernstein's The Other Side of The Street (2004
also makes a reference to Rear Window.
Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery, in
which Allen and his wife suspect an elderly
neighbor of murdering his wife and are forced
to investigate for themselves when no one else
takes their concerns seriously, could also be
said to owe a debt to Rear Window.
Many animated series, including Tiny Toon
Adventures, Rocket Power and The Simpsons,
“Bart of Darkness" is heavily influenced by the
movie, with Bart breaking his leg and coming
to the belief that he witnesses Ned Flanders
killing his wife.
Rocko's Modern Life Home Movies, and The
Venture Bros. Pay homage to Rear Window in
different ways. Robert Zemeckis' What Lies
Beneath is another film that pays tribute to this
film and other Hitchcock features.
And most recently
William Rothmans’ / / / / sign
“The view is between the bars of a banister, and
the frame is dominated by the bars in the
foreground. I call this pattern of parallel lines
Hitchcock’s / / / / sign. At one level the / / / /
serves as H’s signature: it is his mark on the frame
akin to his ritual cameo appearances. At another
level it signified the confinement of the camera’s
subject….the barrier of the screen itself.”
(Rothman, W. “ (1982; 33 ).
Feminist approaches & key texts
Laura Mulvey “Visual pleasure and narrative
cinema” 1975 Screen Vol 16:3 pp 6-18
Annette Kuhn Women's Pictures: Feminism and
Cinema (London: Routledge Kegan Paul 1982)
Ann E. Kaplan Women and Film Both Sides of the
Camera (NY Methuen 1983)
Theresa de Lauretis Alice Doesn't: Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington Indiana. Uni
Press 1984).
Psychoanalytic approaches
• Sexual difference and the male spectator
consumer. How different is gendered desire?
• Feminist film theory provides a necessary
corrective to cinema’s naturalized patriarchal
assumptions.
• Spectral forces (Cohen)
Holbein’s Ambassadors
The ‘thing’ that mar(k)s: c.w.the punctum
(Barthes), stain (Bellour), blot (Zizek),
anamorphic figure, demark (Deleuze), the think
that sticks out - un petit objet a (Lacan).
• The signifier that won’t rest!!
• In Holbein's painting the skull is the signifier of
mortality; that no matter what one’s station or
status in life one succumbs to death…the great
leveler. In order to recognize the image of death
the viewer of this painting must prostrate
themselves before the painting and “look awry.”
Anamorphosis
literally the 'image within the image'
Anamorphosis is the idea that multiple
meanings can be materially and
mutually supported within the same
material circumstances.
Feminist Approaches
• Hitch the misogynist?
• Psychoanalysis Freud, Lacan via Christian
Metz, Slavoj Zizek et. al.
• The scopic drive: Cinema as a phantasmatic
(fantasmatic) language of desire”
• Narcissism
• Identification
• Transference
The Gaze
Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” 1975 Screen Vol 16:3 pp 6-18
The cinematic apparatus constructs its spectator
scopic drive, fetishism, narcissism
The woman who connotes “to be looked-at-ness”
The woman’s image existing to be looked at and
desired.
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
The Gaze
The spectatorial gaze: the spectator who is viewing or
reading the image/text. This is often us, the readers or
viewers (popularly audience) of a certain text
intra- diegetic gaze, where one person depicted in the
image who is looking at another person or object in the
frame, such as another character looking at another.
extra-diegetic gaze, where the person depicted in the frame
looks at the spectator, such as an aside, or an
acknowledgement of the fourth wall beyond the frame.
The camera’s gaze, which is often equated with the
director’s gaze.
The look: James Elkins
The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York:
Simon & Schuster (1996)
1 You, looking at the painting,
2 figures in the painting who look out at you.
3 figures in the painting who look at one another,
and
4 figures in the painting who look at objects or
stare off into space or have their eyes closed. In
addition there is often
5 the museum guard, who may be looking at the
back of your head, and…..
6 the other people in the gallery, who may be
looking at you or at the painting. There are
imaginary observers, too:
7 the artist, who was once looking at this painting,
8 the models for the figures in the painting, who may
once have seen themselves there, and
9 all the other people who have seen the painting the buyers, the museum officials, and so forth. And
finally, there are also
10 people who have never seen the painting: they may
know it only from reproductions... or from
descriptions.” (James Elkins 1996, 38-9)
Gaze versus Look
One can make a distinction between the gaze and the
look: suggesting that “the look is a perceptual mode
open to all whilst the gaze is a mode of viewing
reflecting a gendered code of desire.” (Evans, Caroline
& Lorraine Gamman 1995, 'The Gaze Revisited, Or
Reviewing Queer Viewing'. In Burston & Richardson
(eds.) Burston, Paul & Colin Richardson (Eds.) (1995):
A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular
Culture. London: Routledge, 1995
Looking & P.O.V.
• Active male (POV dominant)
• Passive female (POV subordinate)
• Overvaluation of a body part luminous and
spectacular as an “image in direct erotic rapport
with the spectator” (Mulvey p14)
• Cinema’s orchestration of three looks:
• A) the camera, B) the characters, C) the spectator
Mulvey’s Argument in brief
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance
“The unconscious of patriarchal society has
structured film form” in such a way that the
“socially established interpretation of sexually
difference…controls images, erotic ways of
looking and spectacle” (Mulvey 1975:6)
The look
“Woman is posited as image. Man as bearer of the
look” (Mulvey,1975:11)
The masculine voyeuristic gaze which
feminist theory attempts to destabilize.
The counter position
Cinematic apparatus and the masochistic aesthetic
offer identificatory positions for [both] male and
female spectators that reintegrate psychic
bisexuality, offer the sensual pleasure of
polymorphous sexuality, and make the male and
female one in their identification with and desire
for the pre-oedipal mother. (Gaylyn Studlar
1988:192)
Attendance & Participation (10%)
Assignment 1: In class Film Glossary test (20%) Tuesday
January 29th
Assignment 2: In class Film Sequence analysis (20%)
Tuesday February 19th
Assignment 3: Research Essay (25%) Due: Tuesday
March 26th
Take Home Exam (25% ) Due April 16th
n.b. Evaluation will be letter graded according to NSCAD
University policy.
Week 3, January 22nd
Italian Neorealism:
Readings: Thompson & Bordwell Chapter 16 Neorealism and its
Context pp.330-341 and Visconti Rossellini Box, p338
Supplementary Readings: Hayward, S. Key Concepts: Italian NeoRealism pp.191-2.
Supplementary reading: Corrigan, Timothy, White, Patricia, with
Meta Mazaj, Critical Visions in Film Theory; Classical and
Contemporary Readings Part 3 Modernism and Realism: Debates in
Classical Film Theory. Andre Bazin “The Evolution of the Language
of Cinema” pp 309-325 & Cesare Zavattini “Some ideas on the
Cinema pp 915 -924
Screening: Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini dir. 1945) and clips
from Miraculo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) (1950) and Ladri di
Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) dir. Vittorio De Sica.
www.robertorossellini.it/ official site