Transcript Filming Space and Time HUM 3280: Narrative Film Fall 2014 Dr. Perdigao September 22-24, 2014

Filming Space and Time
HUM 3280: Narrative Film
Fall 2014
Dr. Perdigao
September 22-24, 2014
Editing
• D. W. Griffith and crosscutting or parallel editing—two or more strands of
simultaneous action (Corrigan and White 136)
• Sergei Eisenstein—montage (French word for editing), breaks and contrasts
between images joined by a cut (137)
• Hollywood montage: thematically linked sequences, sequences showing
passage of time by quick sets or cuts, dissolves, wipes, superimpositions to
bridge spatial and temporal discontinuities
• Continuity editing and new realisms (1929-1950) to modern disjunctive
editing (1959-1989) (139)
• Fracturing illusion of realism, extension of Soviet montage editing, resulting
in temporal disjunctions, or disconnections, creating ruptures in the story,
condensing or expanding time, confusing relationship between past, present,
and future (139)
• Jump cuts as technique—gaps in the action
• 1990s-present, nonlinear digital editing
Breaking Shots
• Cut as break between two shots, border between two pieces of film (Corrigan
and White 141)
• Fade-ins, fade-outs, dissolves—show breaks between sequences or larger
segments of a film, more definite spatial or temporal break (142)
• Verisimilitude—“having appearance of truth,” accepting world of fiction; in
cinema, consistent spatial and temporal patterns (144)
• Continuity editing—uses cuts and transitions to tell stories efficiently,
establish verisimilitude (144)
• Invisible editing—continuity
• Establishing shot
long shot establishes setting; reestablishing shot (144)
• Insert
brief shot, often close-up, other characters don’t see (146)
Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots (everybody!)
• Intertitles
printed words inserted between the images, used in silent films (219)
• Diegesis
world story describes: characters, places, events (Corrigan and White
186)
• Nondiegetic insert
introduces an “object or view from outside the film’s world or makes a
comparison that transcends the characters’ perspectives” (ringing phone,
text) (146)
• Shot/reverse shot or shot/countershot (148)
reverses angle of shot, showing conversation
• Eyeline match
continuous offscreen space (148), can be used in shot/reverse-shot
sequences
Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots, Shots (everybody!)
• Point-of-view shots (150)
• Reaction shot
character’s response to something viewers have been shown (151)
• Flashback, flashforward (151)
• Duration of shots determine pace of editing (153)
• Long takes
Sequencing
• Sequence shot–entire scene in one take (Corrigan and White 153)
• Narrative segmentation—dividing film into large narrative units (159)
Typing
• 1950s and 1960s—experiments in film, Soviet films
• Move away from linear progression to disjunction
• Reflexivity
self-consciousness in story
• Character coherence—psychological, historical, other expectations that see
people as fundamentally consistent and unique (Corrigan and White 226)
• Values, actions, behaviors
• Inconsistent, contradictory, divided characters subvert one or more patterns of
coherence (226)
• Character depth—dimensions (227)
• Character grouping—social arrangements of characters in relation to each
other (227)
• Collective character—group’s action and personality (227)
Typing
• Character types—single trait or multiple traits (228)
“damsel in distress,” “psychotic killer” (228)
• Figurative types—exaggerated or reduced, unrealistic, emblematic (228)
Characterization and Plotting
• Archetype—reflection of spiritual or abstract state or process (Corrigan and
White 228)
• Stereotype
• Character development—“pattern through which characters move from one
mental, physical, or social state to another” (230)
• Patterns of external and internal changes, progressive and regressive
developments (230)
• Linear chronology—“selected events and actions proceed one after another
through a forward movement in time” (234)
• Deadline structure—plot leading to specific moment (236)
• Parallel plots—simultaneity or connection between plots, intersection (236)
• Retrospective plot: The Godfather, Part II (237)
• Narrative duration—“length of time an event or action is presented in plot”
(237)
• Narrative frequency— “how often those plot elements are repeatedly shown”
(ex: focus on bomb mechanism in Die Hard: With a Vengeance) (237)
Location, Location, Location
• Historical location; ideological location; psychological location; symbolic
space (Corrigan and White 254)
• Psychological location—character’s state of mind and place inhabited (Lost in
Translation); symbolic space—space transformed through spiritual or abstract
means (Cast Away) (254-5)
• Narrative frame—context or person positioned outside the story to bracket
the film’s narrative and help define terms and meaning; might be voiceover
(257)
• Omniscient narration
third-person narration (257)
• Restricted narration
limited third-person, focusing on one or two characters (258)
• Reflexive narration
calls attention to narrative point of view (258)
• Unreliable narration (Fight Club) (258)
• Multiple narrations
different perspectives for single story (258)
The Classics
• Classical film narrative: centers on one or more central characters that propel
plot with cause-and-effect logic; develops with linear chronologies directed at
certain goals; employs omniscient or restricted narration that suggests realism
(Corrigan and White 263)
• Classical Hollywood narrative visible and dominant form since 1910s
• Classical European narrative—made in Europe since 1910 and flourishing
in 1930s and 1940s
• Postclassical narrative—in decades after WWII that strain and maintain
classical formula for coherent characters and plots (263)
• Alternative film narrative: deviates from or challenges linearity of narrative;
undermines centrality of character; questions objective realism of classical
narration (264)
I’ve got a theory
• Formalism: film’s form or structure as focus; cinematography, close readings
(Corrigan and White 462-463)
• Authorship and Genre theories
• Auteur theory: individual imprint, director’s influence (464-469); Orson
Welles and Citizen Kane; Hitchcock’s cameos; Griffith’s intertitles with
initials
• Idea of film as collective and collaborative production versus work of single
individual
• Identity politics—identity of director
• Genre
• Intertextuality: dependence upon other texts for meaning (471)
• Film noir—dark lighting style, dark sensibility, 1940s and 1950s (471)
• Melodrama (472)
• Westerns and gangster films (472)
• Woman’s picture (472)
I’ve got a theory
• Soviet film theory—montage: 1920s (Corrigan and White 477)
• Spectators’ experience through organization of fragments, making meaning
through juxtaposition or chain of shots (477)
• Classical Film Theories: Formalism and Realism (478-480)
• WWII—two periods for filmmaking and film theory
• Film journals, influence from 1910-present
I’ve got a theory
• Semiotics—1970s, Ferdinand de Saussure
• Sign, signifier, signified; signifier as spoken or written word, picture, gesture;
signified as mental concept (Corrigan and White 486)
• Comparison between film and language (487)
• Structuralism
• Narratology as study of narrative; plot and story
• Marxism (488-489)
• History and society in terms of class relations (488)
• Ideology—systematic set of beliefs (489)
• Poststructuralism: Psychoanalysis, Apparatus Theory, Spectatorship
I’ve got a theory
• Soviet Montage Theory—after the 1917 Russian Revolution, defining artistic
practice that could “participate in revolutionary change” (405)
• Classical Film Theories: formalism and realism (406)
• Formalism, foundations of film theory in early twentieth century
• Film as new “formal language” breaking from language of theatre (407)
• Realism: imitation of reality
• Experiences in everyday life
• Realism in post-World War II period
• Postwar period and development of film theory
• Film journals in 1950s
• Auteur theory—imprint of individual on the film; focus on filmmaker (410)
I’ve got a theory
• Genre theory, focus on genres like westerns, crime films, film noir
• Contemporary film theory—1970s and beyond
• Specialized discipline
• Semiotics and structuralism—ideas about language, film language (413)
• A visual language, conjuring meaning
• Influence of linguistic theory
• Syuzhet (plot) and fabula (story)
• Syuzhet as the way events “are arranged in the actual tale or film” and fabula
as the “chronologically ordered sequence of events as we rationally
reconstruct it” (417)
• Model of detective story—syuzhet follows detective’s progress; fabula as
circumstances leading to the crime (417)
I’ve got a theory
• Modernism—fractured human subjectivity, foregrounding of style, openended narrative
• Structuralism + subjectivity=poststructuralism; questions truths and
hierarchies, tying up of loose ends; questions closure (Corrigan and White
419)
• Psychoanalysis—Jacques Lacan and the imaginary (419)
• “Mirror stage”
• Apparatus Theory—cinema as ideological mechanism, Plato’s allegory of
the cave; values built into technology in historical moment (420)
• Spectatorship—how subjects interact with films (420)
• Screen theory and gaze theory—Christian Metz
• Feminist Film Theory—Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” (1975); ideas of the “Other” subjected to the gaze (421)
I’ve got a theory
• Lesbian and Gay Film Studies—questioning heteronormative ways of
viewing film, filmmaking (Corrigan and White 422)
• Cultural Studies—text analyzed in relation to processes of production and
consumption (423)
• Reception Theory—viewers’ responses to film; work’s meaning derived
from reception (423) (The Rocky Horror Picture Show!)
• Ethnographic Reception Studies—ethnography; dominant, negotiated, and
oppositional reading (424)
• Historical Reception Studies—historical context; New Historicism;
extratextual details (424)
• Star Studies—auteur theory, focus on individual, “types” (424-425)
• Race and Representation (426-428)
• Phenomenology—perception involving mutuality of viewer and viewed;
Lacan and Metz (428)
Layers: It’s like Inception!
• Postmodernism
• Pastiche; questions about critiquing the world through art, division of high and
low culture, genius and independent identity of the artist (Corrigan and White
429)
• Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum (432)
• Breakdown of singular identity, recognition of “otherness” (432)