FILM 100 - Exam Study w/Quiz Questions

A taller version of himself

"Zero for Conduct" features several special effects sequences, including one in which the school's headmaster looks at himself in the mirror as sees himself as:

Shot Length

A measure of the increased use of editing throughout the history of film is shown in the decline in the typical average _________ __________.

Mechanical means to record and project intermittently

According to Thompson & Bordwell, there were 5 preconditions needed before motion pictures could be invented. They were (1) the scientific realization that the human brain could process a certain number of still images as motion, (2) the technological capacity to project rapid series of images onto a surface, (3), the technological ability to photograph a rapid series of images, (4) a base flexible and sturdy enough to capture such photographs, and (5):

Government subsidies of the emerging film studios

All of the following are factors in the centering of the film industry in the Los Angeles area, EXCEPT:

The zoetrope

An animation toy that showed the mechanics of apparent movement and become popular in the mid-1800s is:

The magic lantern

An early glass-slide projector that showed the potential for motion pictures in the 1800s was known as:

The increased competition from radio programming

An economic reason for Hollywood to find renewed interest in implementing synchronized sound film in the mid 1920s was:

Fordism

Analyzing a film as a product of the studio system that created it rather than as a work of art made by individual artists is known as what kind of film criticism?

Poverty Row

Apart from the 5 major studios, 2 mini-majors and special high-prestige companies like United Artists, Samuel Goldwyn, and David O. Selznick, several small, low-prestige production companies turned out film content during the studio system era, usually grouped together as:

Unhappy endings

As Julie pointed out in our Thursday meeting, during the 1930s and 40s it was increasingly considered "Un-American" for a movie to include what?

Violence on the Water vs. Peace on the Water

As Kynan argued in our Thursday meeting, the relationship between the opening and and closing images of BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN can be summarized as:

Air conditioning

As Thompson & Bordwell point out, what now-ubiquitous technology were movie theaters often the first public building to introduce to a given town?

Rural and Christian

As Victoria pointed out in our Tuesday meeting, most of Hollywood's output during the Great Depression spoke to the audience's shared values which were:

"Soldier"

At the end of THE GENERAL, when Johnnie Gray is asked for his occupation, how does he respond?

Babylon

Based on the influence of D. W. Griffith, Hollywood architecture is traditionally linked with what culture?

New Jersey

Before the American film industry settled in what become known as Hollywood, most filmmaker activity occurred in:

Be composed of a single, unedited shot

Before the work of D. W. Griffith (and to a lesser extent his previous mentor Edwin S. Porter), most short films held to the rule that each scene should:

Mack Sennett

Both Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton came to prominence in America working for which major producer?

The Continuity Style

By the late 1910s, American mainstream film had developed a style emphasizing clear and unnoticeable filmmaking that Thompson and Bordwell refer to as:

The novel

D. W. Griffith expanded the artistic and narrative possibilities of film by trying to emulate facets of which art form?

Charles Dickens

D. W. Griffith's favorite author (whose influence has often been cited on INTOLERANCE and BROKEN BLOSSOMS) was:

"The Biograph Girl"

Despite early movie studios denying film actors credit and actively trying to discourage their stardom, film audiences still grew deep attachment with movie stars, even writing fan letters to an actor who they knew only as:

The producer

During the classical studio system era, which filmmaking position held the most power and made most of the key decisions on a given film?

Galloping horses

Eadweard Muybridge's series photography that kickstarted the race to invent the motion picture in the late 1800s is most famous in its depiction of:

A magician

Georges Melies used his films in his profession as what?

Movie palaces

Highly elaborate movie theaters (such as those with balconies, velvet curtains, and ushers) are known as:

Win the top 5 Academy Awards

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT was the first film to accomplish what feat?

Separate his motel sleeping area from Ellie's

In IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Peter builds "The Walls of Jericho" to:

Reimbursing him for lost or sold clothes and effects

In IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Peter meets with Mr. Andrews to collect money for what purpose?

A bag of shoes

In THE GENERAL, Johnnie Gray sneaks Annabelle Lee back to his train by disguising her as:

In THE GOLD RUSH, the Lone Prospector embarrasses himself in his initial meeting with Georgia by inadvertently:

In THE GOLD RUSH, the Lone Prospector embarrasses himself in his initial meeting with Georgia by inadvertently:

1 Reel

In a measure of screen time equating to physical length of film footage, approximately 11 minutes of film is equal to what unit of measurement?

Eat

In a potentially offensive gesture to its Great Depression-era audience, the opening of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT finds Ellie Andrews on her yacht, refusing to:

A raised flag

In an otherwise black-and-white film, color is used as punctuation in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN in a single instance, that of:

Transformation

In our Thursday meeting, Kynan argued that most of the major jokes in THE GOLD RUSH pertain to Chaplin's power of positive:

On the same film strip as the movie image

In the Phonofilm system, audio information is stored:

Distributing their films to their own owned movie theater chains

In the classical era, the business practice that separated the major studios from smaller, less powerful film producers was:

7 years

In the traditional studio system, actors, directors, and other creative talents were typically signed to contracts of what length?

Frank Capra

It is generally agreed that the most popular film director of the 1930s Great Depression Era was:

B-pictures

Lower-cost, lower-expectation films that studios would make to provide filler in theater schedules and training grounds for upcoming talent were called:

Tugging on piglets as they nurse on their mother's teats

Modern audiences, accustomed to a squeaky clean Disney aesthetic, are often surprised by the comedy gags in "Steamboat Willie," which includes Mickey Mouse creating music by doing which of the following?

Movie stars

On Tuesday, Kynan talked about the change in the audience's viewing vantage point (from looking up at a movie screen in a theatre to looking down at a phone while engaged in other activities) as part of the reason for the decline in the power of which filmmaking position?

A film school

One of the innovations of Soviet Cinema was being the first country to found which of the following?

Dialectical

Sergei Eisenstein espoused a film of film criticism based on conflict with shots and series of shots, which he termed the "____________ Approach to Film Form."

1927

Silent film would virtually perfect itself as an art form before being destroyed by the coming of sound in what year?

parallel

THE BIRTH OF A NATION, along with other previous Griffith films, are strong examples of ___________ action, a system of film editing and cinematic structure in which two spheres of action are edited between to appear to be occurring at the same time, usually with characters finding themselves interacting in the same sphere at the sequence's climax.

Producing entire alternate versions of films in multiple languages

THE BLUE ANGEL (1930) and DRACULA (1931) are examples of what post-sound revolution practice by studios?

Northern New Jersey

The American film industry which emerged in the 1890s was centered around:

Imprinted on unreliable wax cylindrical discs

The audio recordings for early Warner Bros. sound films were:

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

The character who was "stolen" away from Walt Disney by Charles Mintz, apparently contributing to Walt Disney and the Disney Company being fiercely protective of their intellectual property rights was:

Wax

The earliest sound tracks for films were recorded onto cylinders made of:

The Black Maria

The first film studio of note, built at Edison labs, was called:

The Soviet government

The first government to take any real interest in cinema (financing films and funding film education) was:

Lev Kuleshov

The major Soviet film theorist (with a famous film "effect" named after him) who championed editing as creating meaning beyond the effect of a film's individual shots was:

Margaret Winkler

The major animation producer who brought Walt Disney and other major animators to Hollywood prominence was:

Soviet Montage

The major avant-garde film movement to emerge out of the Soviet Union in the 1920s was called:

Poetic Realism

The most artistically significant film movement in France in the 1930s, as represented by the films of Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir, is a loosely connected group of films known as:

German film

The national cinema that developed under the influence of D. W. Griffith's BROKEN BLOSSOMS (especially its use of expressive lighting and production design) was:

Soviet film

The national cinema that developed under the influence of D. W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (especially its use of editing to create thematic parallels) was:

American film

The national cinema that developed under the influence of D. W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (especially its use of cross-cutting between different spheres of action) was:

Vertical Integration

The ownership strategy by which a movie studio would own production, distribution, and exhibition is called:

Thomas Ince

The producer given the single-most individual claim to the founding of the common practices within the Hollywood Studio System (such as the hierarchy and bureaucracy that became standard at every studio) is:

Movie theaters

The reason why box office success from the classic era is often measured in "rentals" is because film distributors would rent film reels to:

Genre

The tension within audiences in wanting both familiarity and surprise within entertainment-based films has been referred to as some film theorists as the __________ paradox.

Actuality

The term the Lumiere Brothers gave for the type of brief, non-contextualized nonfiction footage they favored is a(n):

The phonograph General Feedback: Edison wished for Dickson to invent a device that "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear."

Thomas Edison assigned William Dickson the task of inventing the motion picture as an extension of his his favorite invention, the:

The first time a movie was projected onto a screen for an audience General Feedback: 1895 was the year the Lumiere Brothers projected their films for an audience onto a screen.

Though precise dates are debated by historians, Kynan likes 1895 as the year of the motion picture's invention because this marks:

Escapism

Though the Great Depression saw many films made about realistic social problems, the general interpretation of audience tastes is of a preference for genre pictures far removed from daily struggles, a tendency called:

The state

Though the term "propaganda" is now commonly used to describe persuasive art, media, and advertising designed to further the agendas of multiple kinds of organizations (often through unfair manipulation), Kynan argues that labeling films as "propaganda" should be limited to those designed to further the aims of:

The automotive industry

To maximize efficiency, the Hollywood Studio System modeled its production methods after those of which industry?

True

True or False: Although Walt Disney had previously made a few cartoon shorts starring Mickey Mouse, "Steamboat Willie" was chosen to be Mickey Mouse's debut because of its use of synchronized sound.

False

True or False: As Thompson and Bordwell point out, the Soviet government, due to its explicitly communist nature, was unconcerned with whether their films were or were not profitable as long as they were effective.

True

True or False: By most accounts, Warner Bros. only recorded dialogue for THE JAZZ SINGER incidentally; their original plan was to only record synchronized songs.

False

True or False: Due to his achievements with BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and other masterpieces of Soviet cinema, Sergei Eisenstein was revered and protected by the Soviet state, even across major governmental regime changes.

True

True or False: In the classical Hollywood period, audience members would buy a ticket for a single movie and be treated to several hours of entertainment, including several additional movies.

True

True or False: Into the 1940s, white performers in musical theater and musical films were expected to have blackface or minstrel-show inspired routines as part of their repertoire.

True. General Feedback: Skepticism of film's potential was expressed by Thomas Edison and Louis Lumiere.

True or False: Some of the early inventors of film went on record claiming that film was nothing more than a passing fad.

False

True or False: The Hollywood studio system's economic struggles during the Great Depression also caused it to be largely culturally insignificant during the 1930s.

False General Feedback: Motion picture technology and artistic conventions were developed in the United States and Europe simultaneously, with innovations usually building on top of previous breakthroughs from across the Atlantic.

True or False: The art and technology that we know as the motion picture/cinema/the movies is a wholly American invention.

False General Feedback: Film prints would have to be hand-tinted to achieve these color effects, which made them labor intensive and somewhat expensive, but this was not impossible and was a relatively common filmmaking choice.

True or False: The colorization seen in our Thursday screenings (in the Dickson/Edison serpentine dances or Georges Melies's "A Trip to the Moon") are modern additions added to DVD/streaming versions of our films and was not technologically feasible in the 1890s and early 1900s.

True

True or False: The musical scoring seen in our Thursday screenings (in the works by Dickson/Edison, the Lumiere Brothers, and Georges Melies) are modern additions added to DVD/streaming versions of our films and was not technologically feasible in the 1890s and early 1900s.

True

True or False: The short film "The Rice-Irwin Kiss" was received with outrage and scandal on a scale not seen when the same kiss was performed by the same actors on stage.

False

True or False: Though Warner Bros.'s earlier film DON JUAN featured sporadic synchronized dialogue sequences similar to those in THE JAZZ SINGER, the film went largely unnoticed, apparently because of its lack of musical numbers.

True

True or False: In the star system, certain actors were groomed for success, with studios even directly supplying positive publicity for actors to fan magazines.

Eats sheet music

Walt Disney used the brand name "Silly Symphonies" for many of his shorts that highlighted musical-based comedy, as exemplified in "Steamboat Willie" when a goat does what?

The screenplay

What filmmaking component that is now often associated with artistry was implemented to give movie producers control and oversight over directors like D. W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim, who typically were unconcerned with costs and schedules?

The Ku Klux Klan

What group is the hero of D. W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION?

He spanks her on the bottom

What surprising thing does Peter do to Ellie in this "piggyback" scene from IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT?

Vitaphone

What trademarked system did Warner Bros. use to record their early sound films like THE JAZZ SINGER?

Oneiric

What word is often used to describe the dreamlike nature of film?

Lions

What zoo animal did we see amongst the Lumiere Brothers shorts in our lecture/screening package?

Eugen Sandow, the strongman

Which 1890s celebrity did we see amongst the Dickson/Edison shorts in our lecture/screening package?

Constructivism

Which art form do Thompson and Bordwell link closest to the 1920s rise of Soviet film and its usefulness to the Soviet government?

Correct answer: William K. Dickson

Which filmmaker made a sound film as early as the 1890s?

It is performed by the same character at two key story points

Which is NOT true about "The Dance of the Rolls" from THE GOLD RUSH?

Lee DeForest

Which scientist was responsible for many important innovations in audio technology across mediums such as radio, in-person amplification, and film (though his film concepts were ignored by major film producers and only taken up in the form of competitors' imitations once sound became economically feasible)?

Soviet cinema

While mainstream American films tend to focus on the journey of a single character, group protagonists are common in which national cinema?

Greta Garbo

While many silent careers were destroyed by the coming of the sound era, which actor successfully took a hiatus to retrain themselves in their previous stage acting background and work successfully as a sound-era star?

George Eastman

Who invented roll film and was the first major manufacturer of film stock?

"Fatty" Arbuckle

Who was Buster Keaton's former on-screen partner, at the center of a scandal that helped galvanize anti-Hollywood crusaders in the 1920s?