media EXAM 3
Film Noir
"Dark film," a term applied by French critics to a type of American film, usually in the detective or thriller genres, with low-key lighting and a somber mood.
9. What are some of the greatest silent films?
"Great" is a relative term, "greatest" even more so. In the view of many critics, academics and plain-vanilla movie buffs, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of titles that are worthy of inclusion on a list of silent masterpieces. Among the best and/or most historically important: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1919), RobertWiene's expressionistic drama about an evil magician and the hypnotized flunky who does his bidding; Nosferatu(1922), F.W. Murnau's expressionistic horror story, an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula re-set in 19th-century Germany;Metropolis (1926), Fritz Lang's highly influential and boldly visionary science-fiction epic about social unrest in a futuristic society; Potemkin(1925), Sergei Eisenstein's sweeping drama about a 1905 revolt by Russian sailors, justly famous for the distinctive editing of its "Odessa Steps" sequence; Sparrows (1926), William Beaudine moodily gothic melodrama about a backwoods baby farm, featuring the great Mary Pickford in one of her finest performances as a feisty orphan girl; The Phantom of the Opera(1925), Rupert Julian'slavish adaptation of Gaston Leroux's novel about a horribly disfigured madman (Lon Chaney, famed as "The Man of a Thousand Faces") who haunts the Paris Opera House; The Mark of Zorro(1920), Frank Niblo's action-packed adventure, the movie that transformed romantic-comic actor Douglas Fairbanks into a crowd-pleasing, swashbuckling hero; Orphans of the Storm (1921), D.W. Griffith's last great commercial success, a tale of two sisters caught in the whirlwind of the French Revolution, starring real-life sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, two of the greatest actresses of the silent-movie era; The Last Laugh(1924), F.W. Murnau's bleak fable of an aging hotel doorman (memorably played by Emil Jannings), presented in images so expressive that only a single title card was required to advance the plot; and City Lights (1931), Charles Chaplin's richly comical and profoundly moving tragicomedy about the Little Tramp's relationship with a beautiful blind girl (Virginia Cherrill), filmed as a silent movie four years after the advent of talking pictures and gloriously eloquent even without a word of dialogue spoken.
Cahiers du Cinema
"cinema notebooks". A vastly influential journal which gathered about it a group of young critics-Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer- who were to become the major directors of the New Wave. Influential French film magazine, most notable for being the platform used by Franqois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other critics in the 1950s to propagate the auteur theory. The journal's writers gave serious attention to directors who had previously been designated as merely "popular," and brought critical acclaim to Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford and other notable filmmakers
5. What is a tracking shot?
Also known as a dolly shot or a trucking shot, a tracking shot is a shot taken from a camera mounted on a platform (sometimes referred to as a truck) that can move as the camera is running. Sometimes these platforms are mounted on a track (much like a train track) so the dolly can be smoothly moved back and forth.Hence the term dolly is used to refer to the action of moving the camera towards (dolly in) or away from (dolly back) the object that is being filmed. The first eight minutes of Robert Altman's The Player (1992) is filmed as one continuous a dolly shot.
Who was Eadweard Muybridge, and what did he have to do with the development of motion pictures?
While helping former California governor Leland Stanford win a bet by proving all four of a galloping horse's hoofs might leave the ground at the same time, British-born Eadweard Muybridge became one of the first photographers to successfully record motion in a sequence of photographs. Muybridge placed 12 threads — each connected to a camera — along a racetrack in 1877. Every broken thread triggered the shutter of a camera that opened and closed fast enough to freeze the horse's hoofs on film. Muybridge's experiment was copied by countless other photographers and inventors, and led to the development of motion pictures.
Who were the first movie stars?
Florence Lawrence became the first film actress to be known to the public by name in 1910. (Prior to her receiving star billing, most movie-production companies opposed giving screen credit for actors, figuring — rightly, as it turns out — that "name" stars would cost more than anonymous faces on a screen.) But Mary Pickford was the first movie superstar with a truly international fan base. Indeed, Pickford was so phenomenally popular that, even before U.S. women gained the right to vote in 1920, she was making more than $1 million a year, and overseeing her own production company. In 1919, she co-founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and her husband to be, swashbuckling star Douglas Fairbanks
process shot
Live shooting against a background that is front- or rear-projected on a translucent screen.
Motion Picture Rating System
a means of evaluating a film's suitability for various audiences
Kuleshov Effect
a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation
Cinema Verite
a style of filmmaking characterized by realistic, typically documentary motion pictures that avoid artificiality and artistic effect and are generally made with simple equipment. - The term means "camera truth" in French and applies to documentary films that strive for immediacy, spontaneity and authenticity through the use of portable and unobtrusive equipment and the avoidance of any preconceived narrative line or concepts concerning the material
Expressionism
a style of painting, music, or drama in which the artist or writer seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world.
Neorealism
a version of realist theory that emphasizes the influence on state behavior of the system's structure, especially the international distribution of power
Post Production
all phases of production following recording of video, i.e. capturing, editing, titling, exporting, etc
Kinetograph
an early movie camera developed by Thomas Edison's assistant in the 1890s
Montage
any combination of disparate elements that form a unified, single image
self-reflexive
the ability to use language to communicate about language
Iris Shot
the expansion or contraction of a small circle within the darkened frame to open or close a shot or scene
Pre-Production
the process of preparing all the elements of a video production, including planning, storyboarding, script writing, scheduling, props, camera angles and locations
Motion Picture Production Code
the strict set of censorship guidelines adopted by the hollywood studios in the 1930s and enforced through the 1960s
4. What is a blimp?
A blimp is a soundproof camera housing designed to prevent microphones from picking up the sound of the camera's motor when it is operating. As early as 1929, director Victor Fleming(who would later direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind) used a blimp to shoot dialogue sequences outdoors, including tracking shots in which men on horseback spoke to passengers aboard a moving train. And by 1930, director Ernst Lubitsch could shoot a long tracking shot for his film Monte Carlo on a gravel path. Camera movement, dialogue and editing worked together with complete fluidity
3.What is a boom?
A boom is an extension device, usually a steel arm, used to support a camera or a microphone. A camera boom is a crane-like devise used to move a camera over a set in order to soot continuous action or a series of related shots at more than one level or angle; a microphone boom is microphone attached to a telescoping pole that allows the recording of the actors without restricting their movements
pan
A camera movement on a horizontal plane from one part of a scene to another. A contraction of "panorama" or "panoramic," the term is sometimes used to describe any pivotal movement of the camera.
6. What is an iris shot?
A cinematographic technique in which a part of the screen is blacked out so that only a portion of the image can be seen by the viewer.Usually the iris is circular or oval shape, and is often expanded or contracted as the film rolls
Screwball Comedy
A film genre, introduced in the 1930s in the United States and popular up to the 1950s, characterized by zany lovers, often from different social classes. The plots are often absurdly improbable and have a tendency to veer out of control. These movies usually feature slapstick comedy scenes, aggressive and charming heroines, and an assortment of outlandish secondary characters.
Kinetoscope
A moving-picture device, invented by Thomas Edison and his associates in 1892, that allowed one person at a time to watch a motion picture by looking through the viewer.
New Wave (Nouvelle vague)
A recent movement in French filmmaking based mainly on the notion of the Auteur. The movement was begun in the late 1950s by a group of young filmmakers (including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais) interested in exploring new potentials for film art.
4. What is a panning shot?
A shot (also known simply as a pan or a pan shot) that requires the camera to rotate on its vertical axis, from left to right or right to left. The horizontal movement of the camera in one direction could continue for 360 degrees or more
blue screen or green screen
A special effects process that combines separate images in a single frame. This allows filmmakers to insert actors into scenes that would be otherwise unattainable or more costly to shoot. The actors perform their scenes in front of a giant blue (or green) screen, allowing directors to place the backgrounds into the frame, often at a latter date.
Smell-O-Vision
Also known as Aromarama; gimmick used to lure people into movies; released smells into the theater that coincided with the images on screen
5. What is cross-cutting?
The technique of interweaving pieces of two or more scenes, usually in order to show simultaneous actions, illuminate themes or indicate connections. Cross-cutting also is known as parallel editing or inter-cutting
Auteur Theory
The theory, first proposed in Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, that certain directors so dominate their films that they are virtually the authors of the film. As a critic before his film making career, Frangois Truffaut made the first significant and developed argument for this theory in his 1954 essay "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema." Truffaut argued for "la politique des auteurs" ("the policy of auteurs," later dubbed the "auteur theory" by U.S. critic Andrew Sarris); he stood strongly against those films where a literary script was mechanically put on screen by the director and other technicians. For Truffaut and others Cahiers critics, a film had to be the product of the personal vision and control of the director, who should be the auteur of the work and not a metteur en scene (i.e., someone who merely carries out another person's concepts).
What did Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson have to do with the development of motion pictures?
Thomas Edison originally envisioned motion pictures as entertainment roughly akin to what we now recognize as music videos. Specifically, Edison wanted moving images to be recorded on the same wax discs used to play recorded music on his latest invention, the phenomenally popular phonograph. He asked William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, one of his top laboratory assistants, to work on the project. After many failed experiments, Dickson hit upon the idea of ditching the wax discs and instead using the celluloid film recently developed by George Eastman for the Kodak still camera. Dickson developed a camera capable of recording moving images on celluloid film in the West Orange, N.J., laboratories of the Edison Company in 1888
Freeze Frame
When the movement of the film image appears to stop so that it appears like a photographic still.
Motion Picture Patents Company
Company founded by Thomas Edison to control the movie equipment business; known as the Trust
6. What is looping?
Also known as dubbing or automatic dialogue replacement(ADR), looping is the re-recording of dialogue in a sound studio during the post-production period. The actor(s) usually perform to a playback of the edited picture, in order to pace the dialogue with the movements on screen. Looping frequently is used to replace poor-quality sound in the original track; sometimes looping also is used to change the delivery or inflection of a line. (After Andie MacDowell completed her co-starring roles in 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, producers decided her Southern accent was a major distraction -so all of her dialogue was looped or dubbed by Glenn Close.) In some cases, looping also can be used to insert new lines of dialogue that are conceived during the editing process. Trouble is, such lines can be placed only in scenes where the face of the actor speaking is not visible
Surrealism
An artistic movement that displayed vivid dream worlds and fantastic unreal images
What was the Motion Picture Patents Company?
An organization founded by the Edison Company and several other powerful motion picture production firms in 1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company — also known as "The Trust" sought to control every segment of the film industry by having its members pool the 16 most significant U.S. patents for motion-picture technology, and entering into an exclusive contract with the Eastman Kodak Company for the supply of raw film stock. Independent companies not aligned with The Trust often endured costly lawsuits — or, worse, brutal attacks by thugs employed the MPPC — if they persisted in making movies. After years of heated courtroom battles, the MPPC was declared an illegal monopoly in 1915, and disbanded in 1917.
9. What specific effect did sound have on movie comedy?
Because it relied on purely physical humor, pure slapstick of the sort made famous by Buster Keaton,Charles Chaplin and The Keystone Kops and other great comics of the silent era could not and did not survive. It was replaced by equally vital --but ultimately less surreal and abstract --sound comedies: The anarchic dialogue comedies of the Marx Brothers(The Cocoanuts, 1929; Animal Crackers, 1930; Monkey Business, 1931; Horse Feathers, 1932; Duck Soup, 1933) and W.C. Fields(The Golf Specialist, 1930; The Dentist, 1932; Million Dollar Legs, 1932) and the fast-paced wisecracking screwball comedies of directors like Frank Capra(It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr.Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), Howard Hawks(Twentieth Century, 1934; Bringing Up Baby, 1938), Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, 1936) andLeo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937)
Why is The Great Train Robbery (1903) a significant early movie?
Directed by Edwin S. Porter, a former projectionist for the Edison Company, The Great Train Robbery is widely acknowledged to be the first narrative film to achieve continuity of action. Comprised of 14 separate shots of non-continuous, non-overlapping action, the film contains an early example of parallel editing, two credible back, or rear, projections (the projection from the rear of previously filmed action or scenery onto a translucent screen to provide the background for new action filmed in front of the screen), two camera pans, and several shots composed diagonally and staged in depth a major departure from the frontally composed, theatrical staging of Georges Melies. The industry's first spectacular box-office success, The Great Train Robbery is credited with establishing the realistic narrative, as opposed to Melies-style fantasy, as the commercial cinema's dominant form.
7. How silent film stars, directors and writers adapt to the introduction of sound?
Directors could no longer give directions to their performers while the cameras were rolling and sound was being recorded. Actors and actresses were suddenly required to have pleasant voices and to act without the assistance of mood music or the director's shouted instructions during long dialogue takes.The introduction of sound ended the careers of many popular silent film stars. Some found that they could not learn lines; others tried and were defeated by heavy foreign accents (such as German-born Emil Jannings, star of The Last Laugh, and Polish-born leading lady Pola Negri), or voices that did not match their screen image (Colleen Moore, Norma Talmadge, John Gilbertand many others). Numerous silent stars were supplanted during the transitional period by stage actors or film actors with stage experience. "Canned theatre," or literal transcriptions of stage hits (such as 1929's The Cocoanuts) became a dominant Hollywood form between 1929 and 1931, which brought many Broadway players and directors into the film industry on a more or less permanent basis. In addition, to fulfill the unprecedented need for dialogue scripts, the studios imported hundreds of editors, critics, playwrights, novelists and newspaper reporters, many of whom would make lasting contributions to the verbal sophistication of the American sound film
What would be presented on a typical program of early silent motion pictures?
During the earliest days of motion picture exhibition — the so-called "novelty period" of roughly 1896 to 1904 a typical film program would include theatrical-style variety shorts, excerpts from popular or classic plays, historical re-creations, "actualities" (the earliest form of documentaries) and brief comedies. Some of these movies lasted only between 30 and 90 seconds, though a "one-reeler" such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) might be as long as 14 minutes. Some exhibitors traveled with their programs from one temporary location (vaudeville theaters, fairgrounds, circus tents) to another as the novelty of their films wore off at a given site. The putting together of these programs which often involved narration, sound effects, and music was in effect a primitive form of editing, so it is possible to regard the traveling projectionists as the earliest directors of motion pictures. Several of them, notably Edwin S. Porter, were indeed hired as directors by production companies after the industry had stabilized in the first decade of the 20th century.
10. Why do many critics, historians and movie buffs consider 1939 to be the greatest year in motion picture history?
For many, 1939 represents the pinnacle of movie making as both art and entertainment during Hollywood's golden age, because no other year produced so many classic films in so short a period. As war clouds gathered over Europe, Hollywood released an extraordinary number of memorable movies, ranging from high comedy to tragic romance to Western epic. Among the most famous 1939 releases: Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz,John Ford's Stagecoach (the Western that turned John Wayne into a superstar) and Young Mr. Lincoln (with Henry Fonda in the title role), William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (starring Laurence Olivier in his U.S. movie debut), Sam Wood's Goodbye, Mr. Chips (for which British actor Robert Donat earned an Oscar as Best Actor for his performance as a dedicated schoolteacher), Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (staring James Stewart and Jean Arthur), Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory(with Bette Davis, an Irish-accented Humphrey Bogart and future U.S. president Ronald Reagan), Howard Hawks'Only Angels Have Wings (starring Cary Grant) and George Marshall's Destry Rides Again (a semi-spoofy musical Western with James Stewart and the immortal Marlene Dietrich).
8. Why is The Birth of a Nation(1915) so controversial?
If Birth of a Nationwere not the first great American movie, it would be inexcusable. Indeed, even for those who fully appreciate it as a groundbreaking and trend-setting masterwork, D.W. Griffith's notorious 1915 release is almost impossible to watch without being electrified by alternating currents of shame and embarrassment. The film was based Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, an epic novel set against the backdrop of the Civil War and the post-war era. Griffith, the son of a Confederate colonel, was particularly impressed by Dixon's romanticized account of ordeal and triumph in the Deep South during the Reconstruction period. Trouble is, even though Griffith made at least a token effort to delete or moderate the more virulently racist portions of Dixon's novel, Birth ofa Nationoften comes across as an impassioned justification, if not recruitment propaganda, for the Ku Klux Klan. Worse, Griffith renders most of his African-American characters (the majority of whom were played by white actors in blackface) as lazy buffoons, prideful dullards, sexual predators, bloodthirsty savages --or all of the above. And yet, for all that, Birth of a Nationwas, and remains, a landmark achievement. After the viewing its 1915 world premiere, an uncredited critic for The New York Times began a review by disapproving of the film's "melodramatic and inflammatory" content. "But of the film as a film," the critic added, "it may be reported simply that itis an impressive new illustration of the scope of the motion picture camera." For better or worse, the Times writer made the right call
7. What is expressionism?
In cinema, expressionismrefers to a distinctive storytelling style that calls for lighting, editing and costumes that are designed to reflect a subjective reality --the inner feelings of the characters and/or the filmmaker -rather than an objective reality. Strongly influenced by expressioniststagecraft, the earliest German Expressionistfilmsset out to convey through decor the subjective mental state of the protagonist. The most famous of these films is Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1919), in which a madman relates his understanding of how he came to be in an asylum. The misshapen streets and buildings of the set are projections of his own crazy universe, and the other characters have been abstracted through makeup and dress into visual symbols. The film's morbid evocation of horror, menace, and anxiety and the dramatic, shadowy lighting and bizarre sets became a stylistic model for Expressionist films by several major German directors. Paul Wegener's second version of The Golem(1920), F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu(1922), and Fritz Lang's Metropolis(1927), among other films, present pessimistic visions of social collapse or explore the ominous duality of human nature and its capacity for monstrous personal evil. Many of the German Expressionist filmmakers fled Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, and relocated to the United States. Their distinctive visual style would later influence manyHollywood horror films of the '30s and '40, and so-called film noir crime dramas of the '40sand '50s
10. How were legendary silent-movie greats Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton dissimilar in their approaches to comedy?
In such silent masterworks as The Kid, The Gold Rush and City Lights, Charles Chaplininterweaves hilarity and sentimentality, usually playing his trademark Little Tramp character as shabby rascal who nonetheless is a wistfully romantic figure. In The General, Sherlock Jr. and other silent classics, Buster Keatonusually appears as an appreciably more respectable character --or at least a character who's more eager to be accepted as a respectable member of polite society. More important, he is far less overtly sentimental, almost to the pointof seeming downright brusque. As critic Andrew Sarris astutely noted in his book The American Cinema, "The difference between Keatonand Chaplinis the difference between poise and poetry, between the aristocrat and the tramp, between adaptability and dislocation, between the function of things and the meaning of things..." To put it another way: While Chaplinoften risks everything, even his life, while soaring on flights of dream-stoked fancy, Keatoncustomarily remains more earthbound, doggedly ignoringthe chaos around him while obsessively focused on purely practical matters. Chaplinromanticizes women as luminous mysteries to be worshipped; Keatonexpects a woman to pull her weight even after he falls in love with her. (At one point in The General, his character is so exasperated by the clueless klutziness of his lady love that he very nearly strangles her before opting to kiss her instead.) Chaplinmight be driven batty by his dehumanizing drudgery on a high-speed assembly line (as he was in Modern Times), but Keaton-whose unflappability earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face" --is more determined to impose control over troublesome technology through sheer force of will
1. Why did Hollywood become the center of U.S. film production?
In the early days of American cinema, the center of film production was New York City -Westerns were shot in the wilderness of New Jersey -with limited activity also taking place in Chicago and a handful of other cities. As early as 1907, however, some independent producers began to migrate toward the West Coast. It is generally thought that Hollywood's distance from the Motion Picture Patents Company's New York headquarters made it attractive to the independents. (If MPPC thugs threatened to disrupt your filming, you simply packed your equipment into a truck and headed across the nearby border to Mexico.) But MPPC members such as Selig, Kalem, Biograph and Essanay also established facilities there by 1911 in response to a number of the region's attractions. These included the temperate climate required for year-round production (the U.S. Weather Bureau estimated that an average of 320 days per year were sunny and/or clear); a wide range of topography within a 50-mile radius of Hollywood, including mountains, valleys, forests, lakes, islands, seacoast, and desert; the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical center; the existence of a low tax base; and the presence of cheap and plentiful labor and land. This latter factor enabled the newly arrived production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing sets, and back lots. Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man (1914) is regarded as the first major feature to be produced in Hollywood, as well as the first full-length Western
Who were Auguste and Louis Lumiere, and what role did they play in the development of motion pictures?
Inspired by a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the first commercially viable projector. Their Cinématographe — from which we have derived the term "cinema" functioned as a camera and printer as well as a projector, and ran at the economical speed of 16 frames per second. It was given its first commercial demonstration for an audience of 35 people at the Grand Café in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895, which now is commonly accepted as the birthday of motion pictures.
2. How did the advent of sound actually limit films and hinder filmmakers during the early days of the talkies?
Many artistic shortcomings of the first sound films can be attributed to the practical and theoretical problems of mastering the new technology. The static nature of the early sound films resulted partly from the need for silencing the whirring camera, and partly from the difficulty of recording with a single, fixed microphone. To muffle the camera's clatter, the machineand its operator were imprisoned inside a soundproof, windowed booth. The camera could neither tilt nor travel --the most it could manage is a slight pan. Directors began to shoot scenes from several booths at once; footage from the secondary camera setups could be cut into footage from the primary camera, but only if the other footage was exactly as long as the footage it replaced. In the era before sound mixing and the boom microphone, a single mike had to be hidden in a stationary spot (a flower vase, for example) on the set. Obviously, the easiest scenes to shoot were those in which a character spoke into a telephone. By necessity, the fixed microphone forced actors to remain within a confining circle around the mike while they exchanged dialogue.
8. What film genres were created or renovated during the early years of talking pictures?
Not surprisingly, musicals and animated cartoons were among the most popular of the early talkies. The Singing Fool(1928), an Al Jolson musical produced as a follow-up to The Jazz Singer,was the top-grossing U.S. movie of the 1920s, and remained the top-grossing sound film until Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first feature-length animated cartoon. The greater realism permitted by sound inspired the emergence of tough, socially pertinent films with urban settings. Crime epics such as Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar(1930), William Wellman's Public Enemy(1931) and Howard Hawks' Scarface(1932) used sound to exploit urban slang and the rat-tat-tat of the recently invented Thompson submachine gun. Subgenres of the gangster film appeared in the prison film (The Big House, 1930; Hawks' The Criminal Code, 1931; LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932) and the newspaper picture (Lewis Milestone's The Front Page; LeRoy's Five Star Final, 1931; John Cromwell's Scandal Sheet, 1931; Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde, 1931), both of which relied on authentic-sounding vernacular speech.
4. What was the first movie production studio?
The Edison Company established its own Kinetograph studio a single-room building called the "Black Maria" that rotated on tracks to follow the sun in 1894, in West Orange, N.J.
2. Why is The Birth of a Nation(1915) regarded so highly as a classic silent film?
One of the most expensive and ambitious epics made during the first two decades of film, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is widely considered to be a groundbreaking achievement that revolutionized movie making. Aptly described by a biographer as "fundamentally a 19th century man who helped to invent the 20th century art," Griffith has been widely but wrongly credited with "inventing" such devices as panning shots, expressionistic lighting and crosscutting between simultaneous actions. In truth, each of these innovations appeared in other films long before Griffith embraced them. Griffith's indisputable genius was his ability to synthesize these and other tools in the creation of a uniquely cinematic storytelling syntax. To paraphrase a contemporary television commercial: Griffith didn't invent the close-up or the iris shot; he simply found better uses for them than anyone else had before.
Why is A Trip to the Moon (1902) a significant early movie?
Produced by illusionist-turned-filmmaker Georges Melies, A Trip to the Moon (1902) is considered one of the first narrative films — that is, one of the first movies to actually tell a complete story — and one of the earliest science-fiction films to employ special effects.
persistence of vision
Refers to the way our eyes retain images for a split second longer than they actually appear, making a series of quick flashes appear as one continuous picture.
Q & A 3: Talking pictures 1. What was the first talking picture?
The Jazz Singer, a Warner Bros. release that premiered in New York on October 6, 1927,is widely regarded as the very first talking picture. Various other Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers had experimented with the coupling of sound and image for more than three decades before its release. Indeed, American inventor Lee De Forest began producing programs of short sound movies (using an optical-film process he dubbed Phonofilm) in 1921. And Warners released a feature with a synchronized musical score, Don Juan, a full year before The Jazz Singer. Even so, Jazz Singer --while neither the first sound film, northe first film to synchronize picture with speech and sound -was the firstfull-length feature to use synchronized sound as a means of telling a story. Popular stage and nightclub performer Al Jolson stars in the title role as an entertainer who rebels against his conservative Jewish father, a cantor at the local synagogue, by singing "jazzy" songs.
Cinemascope or CinemaScope
The anamorphic-lens system introduced by 20th Century Fox in 1953 with its production of "The Robe." Such a system at first projected a wide-screen aspect ratio of 2.55:1, which later became 2.35:1 to allow for an optical soundtrack. Until the advent of wide-screen movies, standard motion picture aspect ratio was 1.33:1.
3. What is a shot?
The basic unit of film photography and editing, a shot consists of the celluloid used from the moment a camera begins to record a scene to the moment it stops. A scene(or sequence) is a series of individual shots editing together
How were the first motion pictures photographed and exhibited?
The camera Dickson developed for Edison was patented as the Kinetograph in 1893, and it initially imprinted up to 50 feet of celluloid film at the rate of about 40 frames per second. But Edison — who saw little future for motion pictures, which he considered a passing fad did not commission the invention of a projector to accompany the Kinetograph. Rather, he had Dickson design a type of peep-show viewing device called the Kinetoscope in which a continuous 47-foot film loop ran on spools between an incandescent lamp and a shutter for individual viewing. Kinetoscopes were marketed commercially starting in 1894. Within a year, hundreds of Kinetoscope parlors — not unlike today's video-game arcades were operating profitably throughout the United States.
Nickelodeon
The first movie houses; admission was one nickel; jukebox
Dubbing
The process of replacing part or all of the voices on the sound track in order to correct mistakes or rerecord dialogue. (1.) Sound mixing; the combining of several sound tracks (dialogue, music, sound effects, etc.) into one master recording that eventually becomes the sound track of a motion picture film. (2.) A process of sound recording in which a voice, which may or may not be that of the actor appearing on the screen, is synchronized with the lip movement of the film actor. Dubbing is most often used in the making of foreign language versions of a film, but sometimes dialogue in the original language is dubbed. The Italian film industry is notorious for dubbing most dialogue lines in the sound studio after the film production is completed.
serial
consisting of, forming part of, or taking place in a series.
