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