film appreciation midterm - usd, mollman

How the theme and narrative intent inform everything form the mise-en-scene to the cinematography, music, sound, design and editing, and how all of this morphs into different narrative forms is part of

Cinematic storytelling

The property of white light is

Color temperature

This is when light passes through a physical material, gel, particles of air, silks or fabrics like muslim.

Diffusion

This is the person solely responsible for organizing the digital files coming off the camera.

Digital Imaging Technician (DIT)

The job of this movie maker is to create a final product that has a unified aesthetic, and a coherent, underlying theme that ties it all together. This position makes sure everyone is moving in the same direction, making the same work of art.

Director

Three of the movies that made shocking genre shifts halfway through:

1. From Dusk Til Dawn, 2. Life is Beautiful, 3. The Prestige

Cinematic language has taken just a little more than _________ years to come into its own.

100

This job is responsible for the camera components, swapping out lenses, and keeping the camera in focus.

1st assistant camera

Most digital cinema today is recorded in resolution of at least 4096 pixels by 2160 pixels, or

4K

In 1983, 90% of all American media was controlled by more than______ distinct companies. By 2012, that same percentage was controlled by just 5. By 2019, it was down to____

50, 4

Which of the following statements is most true?

A finished film will often contain some differences from the screenplay, because like a blueprint is a plan for a building, a screenplay is a plan for a movie.

Wrote, directed, and edited what many consider the first fully fictional film in cinema history, The Cabbage Fairy (1896).

Alice Guy-Blanche

Which of the following are part of the mise-en-scene?

All of the above

A clear and well-planned narrative theme unifies the movie using

All of the above.

In January 1896, Auguste and Louis Lumiere presented their short, simple film to a paying audience in Lyon, France. There was no editing, just one continuous shot. The film was entitled

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station

Created the 46-second film Worker's Leaving a Factory.

Auguste and Louis Lumiere

The school of thought that claims the director is the "author" of a work of cinema, and that they alone are ultimately responsible for what we see on screen

Auteur Theory

Thomas Edison built the first "movie studio", which his employees nicknamed

Black Maria

What does it mean that the stakes get higher each time the protagonist confronts and overcomes another obstacle.

With every obstacle, the protagonist must risk more and more, making their journey more and more difficult.

This chemist and Confederate veteran of the Civil War perfected the technique of motion picture projection in 1895.

Woodville Latham

Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was

a macabre nightmare of a film about a murderous hypnotist and is considered the world's first horror movie.

One of the first decisions a cinematographer must make is whether to use

a physical film stock or a digital sensor.

Pretty much every story ever told can be boiled down to these three elements:

a protagonist, a goal, and a whole bunch of obstacles.

Sets may be built here, in a large, windowless, sound-proof building called

a soundstage.

The part of the screenplay that is a description of the events of the scene.

action

According to the video "POP CULTURE: What is Cinema For?", what is a key problem film can help us with?

all of the above

The companies that control 90% of ALL American media are

all of the above, comcast, disnet, at&t, national amusements

The three-act structure is not an explicit industry standard or rule to which screenwriters must conform. It is less a writing technique than it is

an analytic tool, a way of breaking down cinematic stories for analysis.

In The Dark Knight (2008), Batman is the protagonist, the hero, and the Joker is the

antagonist

In Joker (2019), the Joker is the protagonist, in this case an anti-hero, and the police, ostensibly the "good guys", are the

antagonists

This is an unsympathetic hero pursuing an immoral goal, and somehow we end up rooting for them anyway.

anti-hero

This is light generated from any number of different technologies, LED, incandescent, fluorescent, etc.

artificial light

Filmmaker Claire Denis is known for her

attention to small, concrete details of every day life that most other directors would see as trifling.

This is light from the sun or whatever permanent fixtures are at a given location.

available light

Light from the pre-existing fixtures on location is called

available light or practical light.

This is usually a hard light that shines on the back of a subject's head.

back light

This light helps separate the subject from the background.

back light

The neurological phenomenon that interprets two stimuli shown in quick succession as the movement of a single object.

beta movement

Movie studios would force theaters to buy a block of several films to screen.

block booking

Character is determined

by the screenwriter, the actor, and the costume, make-up and hairstyles.

The primary narrator in cinema is always the

camera

This is the person that actually handles the camera.

camera operator

Cinema is an ongoing, collaborative social experiment, one in which we are all participants, and it carries with it a

certain magic.

The part of the screenplay that is always indented to the center and ALL CAPS before their dialogue.

character

CGI stands for

cinema generated imagery.

There is always a give and take between the director and the screenwriter, cinematographer, production designer, sound designer, editor, actors, etc because

cinema is a collaborative medium.

How did the movie change the way movies are made?

cinematic influence

The collaboration of the unconscious social experiment that created the fundamental and increasingly complex rules of how cinema communicates meaning is the development of a

cinematic language.

It is this person's job to translate the director's vision into usable footage, using all the skills of a photographer.

cinematographer

This shot make the audience feel more intimately connected to a character's experience.

close-up

The arrangement of people, objects, and setting within the frame of an image.

composition

The arrangement of people, objects, and setting within the frame of an image is called

composition.

Cinema can be viewed and analyzed as a kind of

cultural document, a neutral reflection of society in a moment of time, or as a powerful tool for social change.

How did the movie change the actual world it was made in, not just the world of cinema?

cultural impact

This is the most common and least noticed transition that bridges some physical action on screen.

cutting on action

This transition enables filmmakers to join shots, often from radically different angles and positions, while remaining largely invisible to the viewer.

cutting on action

This part of the screenplay is always indented to the center.

dialogue

Alice Guy-Blache was working as a secretary at a photography company when she saw the Lumiere's invention in 1895. The following year she

directed and edited what many consider the first fully fictional film in cinema history, The Cabbage Fairy (1896)

Cinematographers shape light, making it work for a scene and the story as a whole. They do this by emphasizing different aspects of lighting

direction and intensity.

Another name for cinematographer is

director of photography.

This transition is similar to the way we remember events from our own experience, one moment bleeding into and overlapping with another in our memory.

dissolve

One of the best aspects of black and white film is that it

doesn't look real.

This is a character that lacks complexity, does not change at all over the course of the story, and is usually there only to help the other characters on their journey.

flat character

The overall distance between the sensor and the point at which the light passes through those glass elements is called

focal length

The visible border of the captured image is the

frame

The two important components of composition are

framing and movement.

This head of the lighting department and skilled electrician is known as the

gaffer

Classifications of cinematic narratives, such as westerns, romantic comedies, horror, super hero, are examples of different

genres.

The most common form of CGI is implemented through

green screen technology

The folks that move everything that isn't a light (lighting stands, flags, bounces, cranes, dollies, the camera itself) are called

grips

This lighting is intense and focused, creating harsh, dramatic shadows.

hard

The quality of light refers to whether the light is

hard or soft.

A defining quality of Blockbuster Cinema is

high concept effects focused spectacle that dazzle the audience but not necessarily the critics.

With this shot, the audience feels like gods, looking down on everyone and everything.

high-angle shot

Fritz Lange's Metropolis (1927) opening scenes included

images of industrialization, mechanized, dystopian future.

Much of Life of Pi was filmed

in front of a blue screen, with a blue teddy bear standing in for the tiger.

How bright the light sources is and how it is going to affect the explore is the

intensity.

Rule of Thirds

is dividing the frame into thirds horizontally and vertically and lineup areas of visual interest at the intersection of those points.

The rules of the cinematic language are

iterative, in that they form and evolve through repetition, both within and between each generation.

In The Poetry of Details we learn that Lynn Ramsay's framing often

keeps important information slightly cut off from the viewer.

The position in charge of the grips, and whose most important jobs is on-set safety.

key grip

The main light that illuminates a subject is a

key light

The three lights used in 3-point lighting are

key light, fill light, back light.

This is the main source of illumination, or the

key light.

This determines the clarity, framing, depth of field and exposure of the film image.

lens

Placing the camera below the eyeline of a character pointing up is known as a

low-angle shot

This shot makes the character we are watching feel dominant, powerful, worthy of respect.

low-angle shot

This term refers to a lighting design where the key light remains subtle and even subordinate to other lighting sources.

low-key lighting

The overall look of the production including set design, costume, make-up, carefully planned to evoke a sense of place and visual continuity.

mise-en-scene

Recurring patters that can emerge in the sound design, narrative structure, mise-en-scene, dialog, and music.

motifs

In ancient Greek, Kinema means

movement

The similarities within a particular genre that extend to types of characters, settings, themes, and even musical scores are called

narrative conventions.

In Pixar's Toy Story (1995), stating that the movie is really about friendship and the importance of self-sacrifice is discussing the movie's

narrative intent.

This is light that comes from the sun or moon.

natural light

Music that only the audience can hear, and not the characters as it exists outside of the world of the characters, is called

non-diegetic.

Rotating a camera from side to side or from a fixed point is called a

pan.

In a screenplay, the action or attitude direction for the character is

parenthetical

The way the movie changes YOU.

personal impact

We don't go to the movies to root for

plots, we root for people.

This is light from lamps and other fixtures that are part of the set design in the world of the movie.

practical light

A Wes Anderson film is made a Wes Anderson film by often

providing an exact centered point to the composition, balancing the composition.

The term Mise-en-Scene is a French term that literally means

putting on stage.

According to some anthropologists, the generic conventions of genres satisfy society's desire for

ritual

In this movie genre, we will most likely see two people meet early on in the story that will most likely have some terrible misunderstanding or other calamity that dooms their relationship, until there is cause to profess their true feelings and they'll finally be together.

romantic comedy

This is a complex, often conflicted character with a deep internal life who usually undergoes some kind of change over the course of a story.

round character

This textbook is dedicated to revealing the tricks without

ruining the illusion.

Part of the process of designing a show involves arranging people, objects, and setting in the frame to achieve a sense of balance and proportion by dividing the frame into thirds horizontally and vertically to ensure proper distribution is called the

rule of thirds.

The part of a screenplay that is a one line description of the location and tie of day of the scene.

scene heading

This part of the screenplay will let everyone involved with the production know at a quick glance if that particular scene is set inside or outside, INT or EXT, what time of day, and where the scene will take place.

scene heading

This is the technical document, a kind of blueprint for the finished film.

screenplay

These are light fixtures that are off camera and specifically designed to light a film set.

set lights

This element of mise-en-scene is the literal context, the space actors and objects inhabit ever scene.

setting

The four elements of design discussed in your textbook are

setting, character, lighting, and composition

One continuous capture of a span of action by a motion picture camera is a

shot

One continuous capture of a span of action by a motion picture camera that could last minutes or even hours, or could last less than a second.

shot

The most basic building block of cinematography is the

shot

The basic building blocks of cinema are

shots

On the plastic of film stock is a gelatin coating containing thousands of microscopic grains of light-sensitive crystals called

silver halide.

This transition words as an echo of our experience of falling asleep, drifting out of consciousness.

slow fade-out

This lighting is more diffused and even, filling the space with smooth, gradual transitions from light to dark.

soft

Music, dialog, sound effects, silence, and ambient sound that creates a rich sonic context for what we see on the screen is called

sound design.

D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) set design was

staggering, ginormous, and took four years just to dismantle.

This is actually a brand name for a camera stabilizer that has become a somewhat generic term, where a camera is strapped to the camera operator using a system of counterweights, gimbals, and gyroscopes.

steadicam

In discussing that the "DP is the best job on the set," Rachel Morrison likened the job to being able to

take photos while walking in someone else's shoes. (wrong)

Every time a shot is repeated, it's called a

take.

Composition is

the arrangement of people, objects and setting within the frame of an image.

In The Poetry of Details, Martin Scorcese states that "the films that I constantly revisited or saw repeatedly held up longer for me over the years not because of plot but because of character" with everything conveyed through

the camera and the person's face.

A discrete shot in isolation is full of potential and may be quite interesting to look at on its own, but cinema is built of

the juxtaposition of shots arranged in a particular order that create stories that provide a collective meaning.

The difference between digital cinematography and analog film cinematography is that

the light passing through the lens hits a digital image sensor instead of a strip of plastic film.

Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa liked these three types of movement:

the movement of nature, movement of groups, movement of individuals.

For this textbook, the term cinema refers to

the moving image, which includes all of the above

The underlying idea that activates the plot, defines the characters, and leads us to a satisfying resolution is

the narrative intent.

Star Wars (1977) is about a farm boy saving a princess and defeating a planet-destroying weapon wielded by the evil empire. This description is considered

the plot

In Pixar's Toy Story (1995), a child's favorite toy si threatened by the arrival of a shiny new toy. His jealousy leads to them both being lost and working together to return home. This description is considered

the plot.

The standard frame rate for cinema has been 24 frames per second, but the higher the fps

the sharper the image.

An essential part of analyzing cinema is the ability to identify this, and to follow it throughout the film.

thematic intent

The idea that unifies every element of the work, gives it coherence and communicates what the work is really about is called the

theme.

Without ever needing to spell it out or make it explicit, every camera angle and camera move, every line of dialogue and sound effect, every music cue and editing transition will underscore, emphasize and point to the movie's

theme.

This is the most basic starting point for lighting a scene.

three-point lighting

Audiences truly hook into the narrative of a Blockbuster film

through the characters: the stakes become more personal with characters that the audience can easily identify with and root for from the start.

A goal of the costume designer is

to create authentic and realistic people on the screen.

Graphien is the Greek Root meaning

to write or record

The part of the screenplay that is used to call out how one scene might transition to the next.

transition

Fade-ins, fade-outs, long dissolves, are examples of

transitions

This movement from shot to shot works like conjunctions in grammar, words meant to connect ideas seamlessly.

transitions

Taste in cinema is subjective (whether you like a movie or not). But analysis of cinema doesn't have to be. You can analyze anything. Even things you don't like.

true

The use of black and white film, the removal of color is

typically used only in old timey movies. (wrong)

The shared set of meaningful units in any language. The list of all available words and parts of words in a language we carry around in our heads.

visual lexicon

The shared set of meaningful units in our collective cinematic language: images, angles, transitions, and camera moves that we all understand mean something when employed in a motion picture.

visual lexicon

Cinematography is like photography, but that

you must recreate all of the elements of photography 24 times every second.

Helped form one of the earliest examples of a unique and unified cinematic style, consisting of highly stylized, surreal production designs and modernist, even futuristic narrative conventions that became known as German Expressionism.

Fritz Lange and Robert Weine

The French term that literally means "a kind" or type.

Genre

Became the most well-known filmmaker-as-entertainer in the early years of film, producing hundreds of films that combined fanciful stage craft, optical illusions, and wild storylines.

George Melies

This filmmaker's most famous film is A Trip to the Moon (1902) transported audiences to the surface of the moon on a rocket ship and sometimes even included hand-tinted images to approximate color cinematography.

George Melies

These films were notable for their consistent use of surreal, exaggerated set design and very low key lighting schemes. They were full of dark shadows and macabre settings.

German Expressionism

This style of cinema showed life in a stark, almost documentary-like style, often using non-professional actors, rarely built any sets, and avoided showy camera techniques.

Italian Neorealism

This film is considered the first Blockbuster.

Jaws

Experimented with how the creative juxtaposition of images could influence how an audience thinks and feels about what you see on screen.

Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein

Explored a series of experiments that juxtaposed images to generate meaning, leading to the concept of montage.

Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein

An early innovator and the first American director to make a narrative feature film, The Merchant of Venuce (1914).

Lois Weber

In the film Suspense (1913), this filmmaker pioneered the use of intercutting and basically invented split screen editing.

Lois Weber

This refers to every element in the frame that contributes to the overall look of the film.

Mise-en-scene

Star Wars (1977) is really about believing in oneself and the difference one brave person can make in the face of overwhelming evil. That is its

Narrative Intent

This can follow any character, even minor ones, if it helps tell the story.

Omniscient Narration

This is the art of fixing an image in durable form through either a chemical or digital process. It requires detailed, scientific knowledge of how light reflects off the lived environment and how that light reacts to various light-sensitive media, and a sophisticated grasp of color temperature and the interplay of light and shadow.

Photography

This is what happens in a film.

Plot

This is the point person for the overall aesthetic design of a film or series. They work closely with the director, helping translate the aesthetic vision for the project - its mise-en-scene- to the various design departments, including set design, art department, costume, hair and makeup. They make sure the setting matches the aesthetic vision through set design and set decoration.

Production Designer

Genres primarily influence three facets of industrialized film:

Production, Distribution, Consumption

This refers to stories that never leave the protagonist, limiting our access to any other character unless they are in the same space as our hero.

Restricted Narration

Who is known for infesting his company's profits into technology required to not only record synchronized sound, but to reproduce it in movie theaters around the country?

Sam Warner of Warner Bros.

In the movie The Cabbage Fairy (1896)

The Cabbage Fairy is a fairy who plucks live babies out of cabbage patches.

The 20 year stretch, from 1927 to 1948 that was the most prolific and critically acclaimed period in the history of Hollywood.

The Golden Age

The first film to include synchronized dialog.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

What caused hundreds of production companies to close their doors for good in October of 1929.

The great depression

The hardness or softness of a light is determined by the size and distance relative to its subject.

The smaller light is compared to your subject the harder the light. The bigger your light source compared to the subject, the softer the light will be.

This is the unifying principle of a movie, informing every other element of the cinematic experience.

Theme

This is what the film is really about.

Theme

The closed-ended, narrative feature film, has been around for more than a century and served as a kind of foundational form in cinema storytelling, and over time, particularly in Hollywood, has been refined and perfected into what we can describe as

Three Act Structure

Make up in movies is at its best when the audience doesn't notice it at all.

True

One can assess the difference between a "good" movie and a "bad" movie in terms of its effectiveness, but that has little to do with whether one likes it or not.

True

You can really, really like a movie that isn't necessarily all that good. Maybe there's no unifying theme, maybe the cinematography is all style and no substance (or no style and no substance), maybe the narrative structure is made out of toothpicks and the acting is equally thin and wooden.

True

You don't have to necessarily like a movie to analyze it using a unifying thee or the way the filmmaker employs cinematic tools to effectively communicate that theme.

True

Owning and controlling every aspect of the business, production, distribution and exhibition of movie making, maximizing profit by monopolizing the screens in local theaters.

Vertical Integration

The movies of this genre typically take place in the 19th century American west with a loan gunslinger, a homesteading widow, and a disillusioned sheriff, with the theme of rugged individualism and frontier justice.

Western

Andrea Arnold poses this question in her films, over and over and over again.

What does loneliness look like?

Helped pioneer the full-length feature film and invented many of the narrative conventions, camera moves, and editing techniques still used today.

D. W. Griffith

This filmmaker's film Intolerance (1916) was a box office disappointment but notable for its larger than life sets, extravagant costumes, and complex story-line.

D. W. Griffith

This shot lets the camera hover above a character or situation.

High-angle shot

A lighting design where they key light remains the dominant source, resulting in a low-contrast or even flat or washed-out look to the image.

High-key lighting

The deeper, essential meaning, suggested but not necessarily directly expressed by any one element is called

Implicit meaning

These important events conspired to end the reign of the major studios and the Golden Age of Hollywood. (Check all that apply)

In 1948, the U.S. government filed an anti-trust case against major studios. With The Paramount Decision, the court recognized that vertical integration constituted an unfair monopoly over the entertainment industry, the court ordered all major studios sell off their theater chains, and outlawed the practices of block booking and blind bidding. In 1943, actress Olivia de Havilland sued Warner Bros for adding six months to her contract, becoming the first actor to win a lawsuit against a studio. Actors became freelance performers, and talent began to be paid for the work that brought the studios their great successes. The rise of television entertainment.

In terms of explicit and implicit meaning, theme, and narrative structure points, cinema and literature share many elements, but cinema also shares deep ties with music, theater, and painting or photography as well. Cinema

draws on all of them at once in a complex, multi-layered system.

Arranging shots into patterns that make up scenes, sequences and acts to tell a story.

editing

The whole crew responsible for putting the lights wherever the gaffer tells them to.

electrics

One page of a screenplay is

equal to about one minute of screen time.

The obvious, directly expressed meaning of a work of art, be it a novel, painting, or film.

explicit meaning

This shot makes the character feel like our equal.

eye-level shot

This transition is most often used in cinema to indicate the close of an act or segment of story, much like the end of a long day.

fade-out

This light fills out the shadows that a strong key light might create.

fill light

The size of the film stock which is determined by measuring from corner to corner the individual frames that will be exposed to light is called

film gauge

This style of filmmaking includes a gritty, urban setting, tough, no-nonsense characters, low key lighting, and off-balance compositions.

film noir