Midterm Film 20
magnification/close up
"the close up is the soul of the cinema", it is a brief expression of the maximum photogenie which is immersive, dramatic, overwhelming and should have movement (Jean Epstein)
composition
"the composition of the image is our rhetoric; the contrasts and the sequences that it sets up are our means of silently affecting spectators"
The sound hermeneutic (Altman)
(triggered by labeling and italicizing) Sound without image produces a curiosity that we turn to television to satisfy. This is an ideological construction: we think we have to control, but all is curated and cued for us. The soundtrack provides an internal audience guiding the viewing choices of the external audience.
The Mass Ornament (Kracauer)
A spectacle of a large group of people (usually female dancers that move alike) that looses their individuality fully for the purpose of capitalist production. It is considered the aesthetic of a capitalist system that goes against reason and accepts myth/fairytales (Siegfred Kracauer)
Crisis
A condensation of temporality that has a limited duration, with clear resolution and is attributable to human agency or a system
Catastrophe
A condensation of temporality to a moment or instant an "all at once" that has no subject or agent. It is simply there and just happens. At some level it is always about the body and the encounter with death.
Ideological problematic (feur)
A programs ideological content, world-view, or attitude: the un-interrogated values and beliefs that it presents as common sense.
Montage
A quick succession of images or impressions used to express an idea.
The long take
A shot that continues for an unusually lengthy time before the transition to the next shot.
The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
Andre Bazin
The Ontology of the Photographic Image
Andre Bazin
Is Paris Burning?
Bell Hooks
The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators
Bell Hooks
Kracauer Vulgar Boredom
Boredom that we experience as a consequence of our everyday lives and routines, our openness with mass control texts, we don't allow ourselves to sit with our thoughts
Punctum
Breaks the studium, it is not intentional, it is a contingency that occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful, it pierces and bites the viewer but sometimes is only revealed after the fact (pornographic images do not have a punctum because they already reveal everything about the subject)
Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser)
Dominance of an educational that functions through ideology and repression, repression is concealed and symbolic and carried out through punishment, is comprised of religion, family, education, legal
Kinoks: A Revolution
Dziga Vertov
W.E. Variant of a Manifesto
Dziga Vertov
The sound advance (Altman)
Ensures that the internal audience is cued before the event and the show holds a pose so that the intermittent viewer can turn to witness the desired event just in time. Sound and image are presented backwards turning the casual auditor into a spectator.
Mise-en-scene
Everything in front of the camera, everything we see in the film frame of the finished film. This includes set design/location, lighting, costuming, blocking, and how the characters move and speak
The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
Walter Benjamin
Ideology thessis 2 (Althusser)
Ideology has a material existence
Repressive State Apparatus (Althusser)
Ideology needed for cohesion and reproduction, functions through violence, is comprised of the government, army, police, courts, and prisons
Ideology thesis 1 (Althusser)
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence
sound
Includes everything hear when we watch the film: dialogue, music, sound effects, and even silence
The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology
Jane Feur
Magnification
Jean Epstein
On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie
Jean Epstein
Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus
Jean-Louis Baudry
Cinema/Ideology/Criticism
Jean-Louis Commoli and Jean Narboni
Imitation and Gender Insubordination
Judith Butler
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Laura Mulvey
For Marx and Lenin and Philosophy
Louis Althusser
Information, Crisis, Catastrophe
Mary Ann Doane
Scopophilic identification
Narcissistically we look at the screen as a mirror and identify with characters as our proxy in the story. "Curiosity and wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition".
overtonal montage
Organized by the conflict between the principal tone of the piece and the overtone, the conflict must be solved within one or another category of montage
rhythmic montage
Piecing together shots with more concern of the content within the shot than the length, it is not mathematical, movement within the frame drives the movement from frame to frame
Television as Flow
Raymond Williams
Television/Sound
Rick Altman
Camera Lucida Part 2
Roland Barthes
Myth Today
Roland Barthes
Mythologies; Preface to the 1957 Edition
Roland Barthes
Plastic
Roland Barthes
Preface to the 1970 Edition
Roland Barthes
Striptease
Roland Barthes
The Great Family Man
Roland Barthes
Toys
Roland Barthes
A Dialectic Approach to Film Form
Sergei Eisenstein
Boredom
Siegfried Kracauer
Photography
Siegfried Kracauer
The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies
Siegfried Kracauer
The Mass Ornament
Siegfried Kracauer
Developed oppositional gaze (bell hooks)
When interrogating a work is looking past race and gender for aspects of film such as form, content, and language. Being numb to lack of representation or bad representation, it is a form of mental decolonization
Deep Focus Cinematography
The process of rendering the figures on all planes (background, middle-ground, and foreground) of a deep-space composition in focus.
editing
The process of watching all the footage captured during principal photography, choosing which takes to use, and trimming and joining them to create a sense of temporal and spatial continuity.
Flow
The replacement of a program series of timed sequential units by a flow series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organization is something other than declared organization.
mode of address (feur)
The way in which a program addresses us and positions us as spectators. In film and television this includes mise-en-scene and cinematography.
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Little History of Photography
Walter Benjamin
Studium
a field of information which I perceive quite familiarly as a consequence of my knowledge and culture (general but culturally specific knowledge); the field of unconcerned desire and various interest, of liking but not loving
Light as a carnal medium (barthes)
a medium of flesh through which we can experience connection with people
Myth (Barthes)
a mode of cultural communication in which signification purposefully disguises the structural underpinnings of its own operation. It presents meaning as a naturally occurring phenomenon when in fact it is contrived as a matter of culture, history, or politics. Works to naturalize ideas that are culturally constructed.
A subject
a person subjected to ideology that attains personhood by being such a subject; conforming gives them a place in the world by which they define their identity, and take their place, take up space, in society.
Artificial perspective
a representational convention that through common usage, came to be naturalized. The ideological function of artificial perspective is to posit a single ideal eye as the origin of all vision and the unifier of objects in the field of vision = optical privilege
Information
a steady stream of daily newsworthy events characterized by their regularity/predictability (noteworthy but not shocking or gripping, politics, science or human interest)
Cinematic apparatus
all the equipment or machinery involved in the making of a film or the structure formed by these machines in the organization or system of the process of filmmaking.
Connotation
an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.
Ideology (Barthes)
is a pervasive set of values or assumptions that structure everything we do, from the way we speak, dress, or act to the way we think about and move around in the world. It is internalized, to the point that we are not conscious of it. It is naturalized: entirely culturally constructed but appearing natural, normal, and legitimate.
Socially catastrophe
brings us face to face with the failure of Progress; the failure to master nature through science and technology
Photogenie (Epstein)
cinemas unique revelatory and cinematic powers, what is beautiful, or poetic (transforming something ordinary into something extraordinary) - a being, thing, or soul whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction, must be mobile and have personality (Jean Epstein)
Medium Specificity arguments
comparing film with other mediums such as theater, literature, music, as a narrative device (film scholars consider it to be the best medium)
intellectual montage
complex association of overtones from themes/motifs, a montage not of generally physiological over tonal sounds, but of sounds and overtones of an intellectual sort
Noeme (Barthes)
content that has been or that is untouchable
Technologically catastrophe
coverage interrupts our regularly scheduled programming and resists containment by flow.
Interpellation
ideology constructs individuals as subjects
ideology critique
is the practice of uncovering the hidden operations of ideology in cultural objects: bringing these objects' un-seen structuring values and assumptions into the light and de-naturalizing them so that we can see their real political consequences. A process of defamiliarization, de-normalization, and estrangement that invites us to challenge the present and dream of a different future.
catastrophe socially and technologically
it brings us face to face with what is obscured by the cultural dominance of narratives of progress and techniques of insuring flow: the threat of an end, the termination of our personal time lines: death.
Labeling (Altman)
musical and vocal sound cues that tell us when we are moving from one character, segment, or text to another
metric montage
pieces are joined together according to their lengths, in a formula-scheme corresponding to a measure of music
Apparatus theory
the cinematic apparatus is complicit with the transmission of ideology; its mode of operation in itself is ideological.
tonal montage
scenes organized around a dominant thematic or emotional motif or sound
aura
secularization of the image, the divine can be in the image, can be apart of exhibition value
italicizing
tells us when something important is about to happen so that we don't miss it
mummy complex (Bazin)
the desire to defend against the passage of time by preserving a body or a representation of thereof
persistence of image (Baudry)
the fact that images remain on our retina for a split second before fading entirely - we perceive the film strips multiplicity of images as a single image in which changes unfold over time. Looks like a single, continuous image
The optical unconscious
the film is making you conscious of a specific place or nature that we cannot see with our eyes (plant growing, stars moving, Oppenheimers Berkeley). The unexpected things stand out, things in the background
superimposition
the illusion of motion is achieved by overlaying two separate images, it is thinking, the inner life and it is achieved by combining two photographs
Kracauer Radical Boredom
the kind of boredom that makes people actually question our social and economic positions, we are not invaded by outside texts
Denotation
the literal meaning of a word
emanation of the referent (barthes)
the person or thing photographed emanates toward us, touching us through the medium of light
Exhibition value
the value of something that is determined by how circulatable it is and how it can be produced for mass consumption
Cult value
the value that an object that has meaning to a specific culture, something that has value in a religious practice and is considered devout
versimilitude (Bazin)
visual similarity or realism
Scopophilic objectification
voyeuristically, in a darkened movie theater, we watch film as though looking through a window, a window through which we can see but not be seen. The film is our object subject to our curious and controlling gaze.
cinematography
what the director, cinematographer, and other members of the crew do with the camera