Understanding Cinema – 01, 02, 03

 What do you consider while watching a movie?

i) Theme
ii) Emotion
iii) Cinematic language
 Elements to consider while watching / making a film
i) Macro structure – Story, Plot, Theme / premise, Characterization, Screenplay
ii) Micro Elements – The cinematic tools needed to implement a story on screen.
iii) The relation between the Micro and Macro Elements.
 The View held by a film
i) Social Worldview
ii) Cinematic world view.
iii) The compatibility of these two views.
iv) Thus, form and content is the same.
 Social World view
i) Comes across in the macro structure
ii) Maybe reflected in theme, premise, plot, narration etc
 Cinematic Worldview
i) Would be evident in the micro structure
ii) In the cinematic tools used.
iii) In the pattern worked out of these cinematic tools by the director.
iv) These patterns genrally reflect the theme and the social worldview held by the film.
 Watch ‘Love Thy Neighbours‘
i) What does it say – Obsession dos not pay; different from the ‚moral‘ that one should love
your neighbour
ii) Plot – Two friendly neighbours kill each other over the ownership of a rose.
iii) Structure – A dramatic Narrative structure. Exposition, inciting incident, rising conflict,
Climax, Resolution
iv) Micro Elements – Pixiliation, stop block, stylised acting, stylised settings, stylised make up
etc
 Essence of some art forms without which creation is not possible.
i) Music – vocal cord, instrument.
ii) Painting – paint, canvas, brush
iii) Sculpture – chistel, stone, wood etc...
 iv) Stage / Theatre – Actor, Acting Space and audience.
 What is the essence of Cinema without which there is no creation Or What is the nature of the
cinematic medium?
i) Visuals
ii) Audio
iii) Juxtaposition of visual and visual
iv) Juxtaposition of audio and audio
v) Juxtaposition of visual and audio.
 Stages of Film making
i) Pre-Production – Idea to script, Shot break Down story board, logistics.
ii) Production – Filming
iii) Post Production – Editing, Sound post production.
 VISUALS – Is basic Unit of a film a ‘SHOT‘?
 What is a “Shot‘
i) A piece of film recording of visual, measured from the moment that the camera is turned on
until the moment it is turned off.
ii) Or a piece where the edited shot starts and ends.
 Aspects of a Shot
i) It has a factor of time
ii) It has a factor of movement.
iii) It has a factor of sound.
 Relation between Time and Movement
i) Movements happen in the ambit of time.
ii) Time necessarily involves movements, however miniscule they might be.
iii) A person sitting still is still ‘breathing’ a static shot of a sky has the clouds moving.
iv) If nothing moves in the frame, time surely does.
 Short film ‘Incident by the Bank‘
i) Entire film of 11 odd minutes is in a single shot.
 Railway station Steps Sequence of “The Untouchable‘.
i) Shots are very short in nature.
ii) Disjointed shots put tpogether and an effective narration is stiched.
 Is shot a basic unit of the movie?
i) What about the elements within the shot for example the frame?
ii) And the elements within the frame?
 iii) What about sound within a shot?
 Micro Elements within the shot – Visuals.
i) Image sizes – ECU, CU, MS, MLS, LS, ELS
ii) Angles of a shot – Low Angle, Eye Level, High Angle.
iii) Character movements in a shot – Various possibilities from various sides of the frame.
iv) Camera Movements from a fixed position – Pan, tilt, Zoom
v) Camera Movements when the camera is moving – Track in, track out, diagonal track, circular
track, Crane up, Crane down, Diagonal Crane etc…; handheld.
vi) Colours in a shot – Warm colours, Cool colours,
vii) Heights within the frame – characters, properties and elements of the settings place in
relation to the height of the camera frame; and the play there in.
viii) Planes within the frame – FG, MG, BG
ix) Texture of the setting, costumes etc within the shot – Harsh, smooth.
x) Contrast within the shot – High contrast, medium contrast and Low contrast.
xi) Keying – High key (more brighter tones), normal key (good mixture) and low (more of
darker tones) key
xii) Lighting – Direction and intensity.
xiii) Focus in a frame – it may be in FG or MG or BG; Deep focus – more things in focus. Shallow
focus – less things in focus.; shift focus
xiv) Lensing – Wide, Normal, telephoto
xv) Composition of a frame – Balance, off balance, rule of one third.
xvi) Graphics suggested within the frame through setting, movements etc.
 The ‘Mise En Scene’
i) The pattern of the micro elements (the elements within the frame) that reflect the macro
elements (theme, premise etc)
ii) My Uncle first 10 mins – who this alignment is reflected.
 Matters of Continuity :
i) Continuity of action
ii) Continuity of looks
iii) 180 degree convention
iv) Exception to the 180 convention and the breaking of it
 Unity of time and action
i) Unity of action – the singular action of a film.
ii) Different from Unity of Time and Space.
 ‘Happy Anniversary’ short film
i) Theme – chaos of city life infringes on personal space
ii) Plot – a couple can celebrate their wedding anniversary.
iii) Subsidiary plot – The man who wants to shave, the man who wants to catch a train, the
delivery boys who can’t deliver etc.
iv) Pattern of Magnification, pattern of keying, pattern of graphics, sound pattern etc..
 The micro elements of AUDIO –
i) Is there a concept of an audio shot?
 Can an audio shot be thus ?
i) A piece of recording of audio, measured from the moment that the recording unit is turned
on until the moment it is turned off.
ii) What about individual sounds and different frequencies.
iii) Defining thus could be problamatic.
 Types of Sound.
i) Music
ii) Dialogues
iii) Voice Over Narration
iv) Sound Effects
v) Ambeince Sound
 How Sound Occurs.
i) “Synchronous" Sound – source within the frame
ii) “Asynchronous" Sound – source outside the frame.
 Sound in relation to Image.
i) Parallel Sound - sounds complements the image track. Sound & image seem to reflect each
other.
ii) Contrapuntal - Contrapuntal - sounds that does not complement or fit with the image track.
 Sound in relation to Image.
i) Actual Sound – these are diegetic sounds that emerge from the narrative and within the
frame
ii) Commentative Sounds – these are descriptive non-diegetic sounds as they do not emerge
from within the story but are added to achieve an impact or a to give a comment.
 Nature of Sound.
i) Different pitches – high, mid and low
ii) Perspective of Sound – louder if nearer and fainter when far.
 iii) Rhythm – sounds have them. Beat of sound
 Beginning of ‘Conversation’ or Beginning of ‘Mon Uncle’
i) How elements of sound would play.
 Micro Elements – EDITING or Putting together of shots.
i) In the U.S., putting together the shots of a film is termed as "cutting" or "editing"
ii) It is a trimming process, in which unwanted material is eliminated.
iii) The raw material is cut down to shape like in sculpting.
 Putting together of shots - Montage.
i) Montage word is more prevalent in Europe
ii) The word suggests a building action - working up from the raw material.
iii) It is a process of synthesis where a film is seen as being constructed rather than edited.
 The two meaning that have developed of Montage.
i) a dialectical process that creates a third meaning out of the original two meanings of the
adjacent shots.
ii) a process in which a number of short shots are woven together to communicate a great deal
of information in a short time.
 Putting together of shots - Montage. Eisenstinian types of Montage
i) Metric montage – shots put together by their relative length in spite of its action
ii) Rhythmic montage – length of the shots depend on the rhythm on the shot of the action or
its direction.
iii) Tonal montage. – shots joined as per the tonal or emotional quality of the scene.
iv) Overtonal montage. – mixes pace, action rhythm and emotional
v) Intellectual montage – introduces ideas to the scene
 Putting together of shots - Montage.
i) Either a film segment is autonomous, or it is not.
ii) Either it is chronological, or it is not.
iii) Either it is descriptive, or it is narrative.
iv) Either it is continuous, or it is not.
v) Either it is organized, or it is not
 Clipping of “The Untouchable” where Sean Connery gets killed –
i) The long take and the subsequent cutting.

Understanding Cinema – 04, 05, 06 Evolution of Cinema and language.

 Pre-History
 i) Classical Era
ii) Scientific Revolution
iii) Industrial Revolution
 Modern Era (1500- 1945)
i) Renaissance,
ii) Reformation
iii) Enlightenment
 Photograph – Animal Locomotion 1878
i) Eadweard Muybridge, an American photographer, made a series of photographs of a
running horse by using a series of cameras with glass plate film and fast exposure.
ii) He was interested in freezing phases of an action, not re-creating the movement by
projecting the images in succession.
 Movie – Camera Cum Projector
i) Inventors working independently in many countries had developed different film cameras
and projection devices.
ii) Edison Manufacturing Company in America, owned by inventor Thomas A. Edison
iii) Lumiere Brothers in France, the family firm of Louis and Auguste Lumiere
 Movie – Camera Cum Projector 1893 - Edison
i) Thomas A. Edison's assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, had developed a camera that made short
35mm films.
ii) He had Dickson develop a peep-show machine, the Kinetosc'ope,
iii) It displayed these films to individual viewers.
 Movie – Ist Public Screening 1895 - Lumier
i) Lumimre brothers invented their own camera independently.
ii) The camera exposed a short roll of 35mm film. It was also as a projector (12.2).
iii) Lumimre brothers held one of the first public showings of motion pictures projected on a
screen
iv) Venue - Grand Cafe in Paris on 28th Dec, 1895
 Six movies of Lumier Brothers
i) Capturing reality as it is
ii) Intervention for the camera
iii) Early enactment
iv) Use of the medium itself as an expieriment
 Sequence Shot
i) Limitation of thecamera
ii) Scene as shot
 The Melies Films
i) Georges Melies purchased il projector from a British inventor Robert William Paul in 1896
ii) He built a camera based on the same mechanism.
iii) As Melies was a magician, he discovered some simple special effects.
iv) In 1897, M6lies built his own studio which had glass walls and roof
 “A trip to the Moon“ – George Melies
 i) Elements of fiction
ii) Lenier time
iii) No attempt at capturing reality
iv) Theatrical influence
 Language of Narration of the silent era
i) Shot–sequences,
ii) static cameras
iii) staged mise en scene
 Language of Narration -Thomas Edison
i) Edison’s foray into patent issues.
ii) Control of the business
iii) His Own production Unit
iv) Shift to California / Los Angeles
v) Birth of Studios
vi) The language of CU
 ‘The Gay Shoe Clerk‘ Edison (1903)
i) Use of CU to carry forward the narration.
 Evolution of Narrative Language – Pathe Studios
i) ‘No More Bald Men’ Pathe (1905) Pathe, - Mise en scene
ii) ‘The Bride Retires’ (1907) Pathe, - Mise En Scene
iii) Discuss narrative language
 Evolution of Narrative Language - General
i) How camera can be shifted
ii) How expressions can be enhanced in CU
iii) How things can be made interesting
 The treatment of time in Cinema - How time is delt with
i) Same time, different location
ii) Same location different time.
iii) Different time, different location
 Edwin Porter – and Parallel Action
i) Life of an American Fireman (1903)
ii) The Great Train Robbery (1903)
iii) Crude initial attempts at parallel cutting
 The sophistication of DW Griffith
i) The Lonely Villa (1909) – the parallel world meets at the end
ii) The point of getting into parallel action, and when will it merge back again.
 DW GRIFFITH
i) Wanted to be an actor, became a director
ii) Was a theater actor. Joined Biograph, one of the first studios/.
iii) Popularized the subtitles, dramatic camera angles, match cuts, night photography, the still-
shot, camera pans, fade-outs, and close-ups.
 iv) Later Joined hands with Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Doulos Fairbanks and started United
Artists.
v) Was accused of being racist in ‘Birth of a Nation’ glorifying the Ku Klux clan
 DW GRIFFITH -Karel Reisz in The Technique of Film Editing :
i) Griffith’s fundamental discovery...lies in his realisation that a film sequence must be made
up of incomplete shots whose order and selection are governed by dramatic necessity.
Where Porter’s camera had impartially recorded the action from a distance (i.e., in long
shot), Griffith demonstrated that the camera could play a positive part in telling the story. By
splitting an event into short fragments and recording each from the most suitable camera
position, he could vary the emphasis from shot to shot and thereby control the dramatic
intensity of the events as the story progressed.
 ‘Birth of a Nation’ 1915 - sister being chased and falling off the cliff sequence
i) Intra Sequence cutting
ii) Inter sequence Cutting
iii) The language he helped develop is now the universal cinematic language.
iv) This should been seen and distinguished with the experiments in Russia on the language of
cinema with its relieance of montage.
 Experiment of Pudovkin
i) The same blank face of a popular actor juxtaposed with a bowl of soup, a glamorous lady
and a dead body
ii) When shown to the audience, they infered that the man is hungry, lusty and sad respectivly.
 Sergi Eisenstein worked on the theory of Montage.
i) All his five montage forms can be seen in the Odessa Step sequence in “BattleShip Potemkin‘
 The langauge of Cinema as popularised by Hollywood in its early days and coopted all over the
world mimics the way we looks at things in real life.
i) Our attention is drawn to where themain action is.
ii) When a person is hitting another person, we first see both of them. We then probably see
the man hitting in anger and then the other person getting beaten up. We probably see both
of them together when the beating stops and the two me wak away.
iii) Cinema apes process – that is the langage of Hollywood.
iv) When we cut into shots in the above manner we are recreating space out of disjointed shots
and thus, are building up time.
v) You could thus build up a space from disjointed shots taken in different spaces and see it in
continuity even thogh they might not be so in real life.
vi) Or you could maintain the continuity of the real space.
vii) You could also build up time from disjointed shots taken in different time and make it look
like there is continuity of time.
viii) Or you could keep the continuity of time as it is in real life.
ix) Time in cinema can thus be depected as real time, it can be condenced or expanded.
1) French Impressionists
i) Can be connected to impressionist painters
 ii) Started around 1963 by rebel painters Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and
Frederic Bazille
iii) Earlier painting subjects were mainly from history and Greek mythology.
iv) Their paintings are marked by swift visible brush strokes.
v) They wanted to catch the impression of the moment and of what is out there.
vi) Reality is not important as much as the experience of it, shown in the physicality of the
painting.
2) French Impressionists filmmakers of the late 1920s
a) The World War 1 (1914-1918) caused destruction and bleakness.
b) Griffith had popularized the conventional language of filmmaking.
c) Hollywood was getting popular in Europe.
d) French filmmakers wanted to make films ‘the French way’.
e) Filmmakers looked at Film as an art form – as a means of expression.
f) The films would not be the reality by an impression of them.
g) For the audience it would be experiential
h) The films rendered states through cinematography and editing, irises, masks, and
superimpositions, filtered, personalised camera movements, multiple frame images, etc
i) A formal approach to filmmaking
j) The audience took to it for a while, but then the Hollywood language was too powerful to b
sidelined.
k) Within 3-4 years such films ceased to be made, except occationally.
3) French Impressionists filmmakers of the late 1920s
a) Jean Epstein,
b) Abel Gance,
c) Louis Delluc,
d) Germaine Dulac
4) Germaine Dulac ‘s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923)
a) Watched the lone housewife sequence.
b) Observed the expressionist qualities of the scene.
c) POV shots, odd angles, letting the audience experience the state of mind of the lady,
superimposition, odd editing, etc…
5) German Expressionism
a) World war 1 (1914-1918) caused destruction and bleakness.
b) Defeat of Germany was devastating, country in financial destitute.
c) The people of Germany began to feel resentment towards its leaders for bringing untold misery
upon them.
d) The expressionist art movement reflected this bleakness, where the figures were distorted, the
act of painting visible, dark themes, emphasis on emotional experiences of the subject.
e) Expressionism also found its way into cinema
6) Some features of Expressionist films
a) Stylized setting
b) High Key Lighting
 c) Dramatic Camera Angles
d) Stylized acting
e) Overtly expressive.
f) Dark themes
7) Some filmmakers who expressed in such language
a) Fritz Lang
b) Robert Wiene
c) Stellan Rye
d) F. W. Murnau
8) Some films
i) Metropolis (1927): Fritz Lang
ii) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): In Robert Wiene
iii) The Student of Prague (1913): Stellan Rye
iv) Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922): F. W. Murnau
9) The Cabinet of Dr Cagliari
a) Watched the act where the friend is murdered.
b) Discussed lighting, dark shadows, pointed sets, geometric patterns, stylized acting,
10) Film Noir
a) French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 coined the term Film Noir meaning Dark Films
b) He pointed out how dark and black the visual looks were.
c) How bleak the themes and characters were.
d) Mainly in American crime & detective films after World War II
e) As against optimism in Hollywood's musicals and comedies
11) Historical context
a) World War II projected post war anxiety, pessimism, and suspicion.
b) Costs of these films were low.
c) They were the B-list American films
d) Utilized to its advantage development of film technology of the 20s and 30s.
e) Synchronized sound, panchromatic (black and white) film stock with better light sensitivity,
more compact lighting equipment, and cheaper on-location shoots.
f) Heroes were actually anti-heroes.
g) Corrupt characters who were cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding,
menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners who struggled to
survive.
h) They are driven by their past
i) They may repeat past mistakes
j) They lost, ultimately.
12) The micro elements
a) Expressionistic low key lighting and shadows
b) deep-focus or depth of field camera work,
c) disorienting visual schemes
d) Low Key lighting, Dark shadows and skewed angles
 e) jarring editing or juxtaposition of elements,
f) Unbalanced or moody compositions.
13) Femme Fatal:
a) Defined as ‘an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into difficult,
dangerous, or disastrous situations:
b) She is beyond societal norms; is independent and smart
c) mysterious, duplicitous, double-crossing, gorgeous, unloving, predatory, tough-sweet,
unreliable, irresponsible, manipulative and desperate
d) The male invariably had to choose what path to take invariably following the dangerous but
desirable wishes of these women.
e) It caused destruction for both.
14) Examples:
a) The Maltese Falcon (1941)
b) Murder, My Sweet (1944)
c) Double Indemnity (1944)
d) The Woman in the Window (1944
e) Laura (1944)
15) Some Directors
a) Orson Welles
b) John Huston
c) Billy Wilder
d) Douglas Sirk
e) Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger
f) Howard Hawks
16) Sent Maltese Falcon (1941)
a) Asked them to see the beginning