American Film Studies Mid-Term Test Study Questions
Identify a theme that is commonly depicted in melodramas.
Family struggles, exaggeration, sensualisation
One of the staples of the musical and one of its major subgenres is the ... in which various characters are brought together to put on a show.
backstage musical
Charlie Chaplin's most common character is ...
the Tramp/Hobo
Which of the following is NOT a type of lighting in the three-point lighting system? Rack Lighting Back Lighting Key Lighting Fill Lighting
Rack Lighting
The process of actors becoming "typed" involves..
Stereotypes
Why is the term "factory" of Fordism often used to describe the classic Hollywood Studios?
Each person had one job or bit to do after it's completed it's handed on to the next person
..... is a structural analysis of a film's plot.
Narrative Structure
The object Charles Foster Kane drops as he utters his dying words is ...
Snowglobe
What does panning mean?
Across the shot
Define drama as "life with the dull bits cut out"?
Alfred Hitchcock
The genre of screwball comedy was produced, in part, by the ....
Battle of the sexes/sensorship
The tactic of forcing exhibitors to bid on many movies without seeing them was called ....
Block Booking
An .... shot includes only a face
Close up
What is true about the contracts by actors with the studio system?
Control diets,lovers,behavior,7 year contract
Which of the following statements was truer during the studio era than at the current time?
Controlled the stars
Which of the following is the most common technique to simply replace one shot with the next?
Cut
When shot B slowly appears over shot A and gradually replaces it, we call it a ...
Dissolve
He used 12 electrically operated cameras with corresponding wires stretched across a race track to prove that horses lift all four hooves off the ground at once. This experiment led to the creation of series photography.
Eadweard Muybridge
Who created The Great Train Robbery and Life of an American Fireman?
Edwin S. Porter
A melodrama is?
Emotional movie
An actor and a star are always the same?
False
An establishing shot is a close view that reveals a significant detail in the scene.
False
Race films were mostly produced within the Hollywood Studio System
False
Scenes are usually shot in the sequence in which they will appear in the film.
False
The very first films were narratives.
False
In citizen Kane the pattern of plot development is to move from flashbacks of Kane as an old man progressively back to flashbacks of him as a child.
False, not in order
Unlike Charlie Chaplin, this silent-era comic usually played middle class characters.
Harold Lloyd
Which of the following includes the setting, the lighting, and the distance between the subject and the camera?
Mise-en-scene
Crosscutting is an editing technique that
Jumping from 1 shot to another
Thomas Edison produced the first motion picture camera called the ..... that was largely developed by his assistant WKL Dickson.
Kinetoscope
Which of the following is true about American movie palaces of the 1910's and 1920's?
Let normal Americans become Royalty
Who had filmed actualities, everyday life, factory workers video, who made them?
Lumiere Brothers
In 1908, the major film producers banded together to form the ..., which sought to control all aspects of motion picture production, distribution, and exhibition.
MPPC
A ........ .... is a shot of a person from the waist up
Medium shot
A modal genre with a visual style drawn to interior scenes and close ups best describe
Melodrama
A sweeping musical score that the characters cannot hear is referred to as ...
Non- diegetic
Which of the following cannot be present in "classic realist narration"?
Not retelling the story, believable, emotional?
A common theme in Alfred Hitchcock's films, such as Vertigo, is ....
Obsession/suspense
Which famous black filmmaker directed within our gates, a race film that was seen as a direct response to the racist content and editing of birth of a nation?
Oscar Micheaux
Which of the following is NOT part of mise-en-scene?
Pre-post production
The prop most closely associated with Susan in Citizen Kane and which goes on to become a metaphor for Kane's life is ....
Puzzles
Birth of Nation is often hailed as a landmark film for its early mastery of technique. Why is it also frequently criticized?
Racism
What is a Foley Artist?
Recreate Sounds
Why did Studios depend on Genres?
Reduced Financial Risk and people like genre films
The movie that confronts sexual stereotypes and where sexual differences no longer determine social structure (boat trip at the end)
Some like it hot
A sound bridge is ....
Sound carried over visual transition
Which of these apply to an Astaire-Rogers musical?
Screwball technique, battle of class/sex
The term ........ refers to the tool clowns used to strike one another in the more physical forms of theatrical pantomime.
Slapstick
What form of comedy do Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton share?
Slapstick Comedy
Classic Hollywood Style
Smooth editing/ invisible editing
Which of the following is most typical of the chain of command in a major studios of the 1930's?
Studio, Producer, Director
The dialogue in the Jazz Singer
Synchronized Dialogue
the practice of block booking?
The studios controlling other studios producing,sharing and gathering wealth from movies
Beginning in about 1915 race films were made by and for black audiences consisting of almost entirely black actors.
True
Classic Hollywood style is character centered
True
Hundreds of people work on the production of a single film.
True
In melodrama, emotion is more important than logic.
True
Most Films are presented in "real" time?
True
Which of the following was a "minor" studio in the Studio Era?
Universal, Colombia, United Artists
The studios' control of film production, distribution, and exhibition is called .......
Vertical Integration
The movie .... is an example of a classical mystery narrative
Vertigo
What was the function of Hayes' office?
Was a self censoring system to show that Hollywood had cleaned up their act
Which of these genres fit into Thomas Shatz's genre of order?
Western, Gangster, Sci-Fi
According to the 180 degree rule...
When characters are shown it should be in a parallel line and to never cross invisible line
In order to produce the sense of ecstasy associated with musical numbers, the narrative and the musical number depend on ....
lift
deep focus cinematography
all planes are in focus (fore, mid, background)
Melodramas often use props to tell us emotional information about characters when they cannot speak for themselves. In Imitation of Life, ......
couch, coffin, corpse
Screwball Comedy grew out of the
depression era
Which of the following statements are true of the studios perspectives on stars.
easy to sell
The majority of the screwball comedy films tended to side with the ... protagonist.
female
A violation of the 30 degree rule is called a ...
jump cut?
When musicals shift from narrative reality to musical reality, this is known as a(n) ...
lift
In a musical, the shift from one level of reality to another ....
musical reality/lift
Which of the following techniques were commonly used to transition from narrative to musical number?
non diegetic music, space, music, black to white, etc.
Stanislavski's technique became the foundation for "the method", or method acting, training exercises that requires actors to ....
putting themselves in the place of the character.
Which other genre does the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals most resemble.
screwball
The film industry became concerned with "respectability"
silent era,30's
Why are women so influential in film editing they chose to be ...
technical/menial jobs
Who is comedy usually targeted to?
working class
