September 4 | September 9 | September
16 | September 23
September 4:
- Optical toys of the nineteenth cenutry: moving images, pre-cinema,
and the persistence of vision: http://web.inter.nl.net/users/anima/optical/phena/index.htm
- Please have a close look at the following scene of Ang Lee's, Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Watch it carefully and count:
- the total number of cuts
- the number of shots that you believe used special effects.
September 9:
Please preview the following clips for class and think about the questions
below:
- Series
Photography by Eadweard
Muybridge: This film presents an array of serial photographs
taken by Muybridge in the 1880s. Muybridge bgan working on serial photography
in 1872, at the request of San Francisco railway magnate Leland Stanford.
He first publicly showed the results of these efforts in a number of
1878 illustrated lectures and continued to work on this project over
the following decade. These photographs were taken in quick susccession
by a battery of cameras, but they were not shown in this rapid fire
manner.
- Auguste and Louis Lumiere: Promenade
of Ostriches, Paris Botanical Gardens (1896)
- Auguste and Louis Lumiere: Photograph
(1895)
- Auguste and Louis Lumiere: New
York, Brooklyn Bridge (1896)
- Georges Melies: A
Trip to the Moon (1902). Selection, including a voice over recalling
how early film narrators might have commented the screening.
It is more useful, writes Roberta Pearson, "to discuss early genres
in terms of similarities of subject-matters rather than in terms of an
imposed distinction between fiction and documentary" (Oxford History
of World Cinema, p.18). How can we apply this insight to these clips by
Lumiere and Melies? What are their subject matters? In what way do they
blur the line between fiction and documentary?
September 16:
- Film critic Lotte Eisner wrote in 1952: "In Friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau, the greatest film-director the Germans have ever known, cinematic
composition was never a mere attempt at decorative stylization. He created
the most overwhelming and poignant images in the whole German cinema."
(The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence
of Max Reinhardt). Please view the following scene of Nosferatu
and think about how cinematic composition here interacts with editing
in order to create certain effects in the viewer: Nosferatu
(dir. F. W. Murnau, Germany 1922). How does Murnau compose his shots?
How do certain characters inhabit the space in front of the camera?
And how do we get from one shot to the next?
- Please view the following scene of Robert Wiene's famous 1919, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Wiene's film was programmatically designed
in the expressionist style, an attempt to adapt a movement in art to
cinema in order to build a self-contained aesthetic and symbolic world
of the imagination. Expressionist stylization in this film functioned
to convey the distorted viewpoint of a madman; it allowed Wiene to make
us see the world as his film's hero does, to render the film a projection
of his hero's highly subjective vision. Later expressionist films picked
up on Dr. Caligari's peculiar style to create stirring situations
for horror and outrageous fantasy, for melodrama and epic historicism,
The Golem (1920), Destiny (1921), Dr. Mabuse (1923),
Variety (1923), Waxworks (1924), and Nibelungen (1924)
being perhaps the most famous examples.
September 23:
Film Clip 1: Battleship
Potemkin (USSR 1925, dir. Sergei Eisenstein): Opening sequence
- In 1926, the influential Hollywood producer David O. Selznick wrote
about Battleship Potemkin: "The picture has no characters
in an individual sense; it has not one studio set; yet it is gripping
beyond words-its vivid and realistic reproduction of a bit of history
being far more interesting than could any film of fiction; and this
simply because of the genius of its production and direction. (The firm
might well consider securing the man responsible for it, a young Russian
director named Sergei Eisenstein.) Notable, incidentally, are its types
and their lack of make-up, and the exquisite pieces of photography that
alternate with the starkly realistic dramatic scenes." How does
the opening sequence set the tone for the rest of the film? How does
it introduce the film's characters and spaces? How does this differ
from conventional Hollywood films? How does this opening sequence negotiate
the boundary between "fiction" and "history"? How
does this opening try to grip the viewer?
Film Clip 2: Battleship
Potemkin (USSR 1925, dir. Sergei Eisenstein): The Odessa Steps.
- Eisenstein on the principles of montage:
- "If montage is to be compared with something, then a phalanx
of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of
explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its
automobile or tractor: for, similarly, the dynamics of montage serve
as impulses driving forward the total film."
- "By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently,
its cell-the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in
opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision."
- "What we do in the cinema [is] combining shots that are depictive,
single in meaning, neutral in content-into intellectual contexts
and series. This is a means and method inevitable in any cinematographic
exposition. And in a condensed and purified form, the starting point
for the 'intellectual cinema'."
- To what extent articulates the above clip Eisenstein's vision of an
intellectual cinema? Please find examples in which conflicts and collisions
take place between different individual shots (conflicts of-in Eisenstein's
words-visual composition, of visual planes and spatial depth, of volume,
of lighting, of tempo, of movement and direction, of matter and viewpoint)?
How do shots collide with each other, not only in what they show but
also in how they show it? And when does Eisenstein convert depictive
images most effectively into intellectual constructs?
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