Agenda for 4/9

1. Agenda for 4/9 • Quiz #1 • Man with a Movie Camera discussion • Montage Editing lecture • Break • “Odessa Steps” and analysis • “Film and Ideology” discussion • What is Genre?

2. Man with a Movie Camera • What did you draw in your picture? • Is there a story in this film? • What does the film tell you about life in the Soviet Union in the 1920s? • Why doesVertov show us his filmmaking process at various points in the film? • Why watch experimental film? What are the strategies for drawing meaning from it?

3. Formal Approaches to Movie Meaning-Making • How do you use film to: • Tell a story (in a way that a novel or a play can’t)? • Convey the complex inner thoughts and intentions of the people on screen? • Make viewers in the audience feel strong emotions, or think new ideas, or see the world in a different way?

4. Classical Hollywood Narrative: Continuity and Clarity

5. Cinematographic Distortion: French Impressionism

6. Distortion of Mise-en-scene: German Expressionism

7. Sharp Juxtapositions in Editing:Soviet Montage

8. Continuity Editing • Associated with D.W. Griffith • The convention of classical Hollywood filmmaking. • Meant to be essentially invisible to the viewer. • Cause and Effect Editing: • A→B→C • Parallel Editing or Cross-Cutting: • A + B = C

9. Aspects of Continuity Editing • Shot-to-Shot Matches • Eyeline match • Match-on-action • Graphic match • Spatial Consistency • “Master scenes” • Establishing shot • 180-degree rule • Temporal Consistency • Linear progression of time and event

11. Montage (or disjunctive) Editing • Associated with Sergei Eisenstein and Soviet Cinema of the 20s. • Meant to call attention to the editing itself: • Andre Bazin: “The creation of a sense of meaning not proper to the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition” (LaM 349) • A + B = Z (where “Z” is something offscreen that we, the viewer, have to imagine or think or feel)

12. Editing: KuleshovEffect

13. Some Aspects of Montage Editing • Tempo: Use of different shot lengths (very fast cuts, for example) to create a feeling (like tension) • Vectors: Using contrasting angles and movements to convey a feeling (like confusion) • Repetition: Using the same or very similar shots multiple times in a sequence • Fragmentation: Breaking a simple action into several different shots • Dramatic Juxtaposition: Mixing related by not directly connected images (as in a “reaction shot”) • Visual Metaphor: Adding unrelated images to a sequence to create a metaphoric association

14. Montage Editing In Man with a Movie Camera • Graphic Matches to Draw Unusual Connections • i.e., woman washing face / someone washing the city street • Man mining coal / industrial stack producing smoke • Fast Tempo: • Average shot length of movies made in 1929: 11.2 seconds. • Average shot length of Man with a Movie Camera:2.3 seconds • Use of Still Images • Crowd Movements • http://www.theasc.com/blog/2014/01/13/the-spinning-top-and-the-parvo-man-with-a-movie-camera/

15. “Odessa Steps” Sequence • From Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) • Watch for: • Sharp juxtapositions between shots • Mix of “crowd” and “individual” shots • Tempo of shots • Directionality and angles of movement

16. Film and Ideology • What’s ideology? • How do films transmit ideology? How do you determine a film’s ideology? • “The same commercial instinct that inspires filmmakers to use seamless continuity also compels them to favor stories that reinforce viewers’ shared belief systems . . . Because so much of this occurs on an unconscious, emotional level, the casual viewer may be blind to [a film’s] implied political, cultural, and ideological messages” (LaM 10) • What is Sherlock Jr.’s ideology?What is Man with a Movie Camera’s?

17. Next Week: Singin’ in the Rain (1952) • Read chapter 4 (on narratives) and pages 450-455 • First blog post due at the end of next week (Friday 4/18). • I’ll talk about the shot list/essay assignment due at the end of Week 4 (Friday, 4/25)