Film  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Current revision

A simple example of a cliché in an art form is that of a western film where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one dons a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the "western" genre, it is clear to the informed audience that they are watching a gunfight showdown between a good guy and a bad guy.

This page Film is part of the film series.
Illustration: screen shot from L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat

A Trip to the Moon (1902) Georges Méliès

In 1963, Roger Corman directed The Raven, a horror-comedy written by Richard Matheson very loosely based on the poem, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. It stars Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff as a trio of rival sorcerers.

Extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

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Film is a visual art used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.

The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects.

Traditionally, films were recorded onto celluloid film stock through a photochemical process and then shown through a movie projector onto a large screen. Contemporary films are often fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution, and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack (a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other sounds that accompany the images which runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it, and is not projected).

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures. They reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, and a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens. The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles to translate the dialog into other languages.

The individual images that make up a film are called frames. In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame, in turn, is moved into position to be projected, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears. The perception of motion is partly due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon.

The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photoplay, and flick. The most common term in the United States is movie, while in Europe film is preferred. Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, and cinema; the last of these is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and critical essays. In early years, the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen.

In the history of fiction

history of fiction

In the history of fiction, film became the dominant medium after the arrival of sound film in the late 1920s and early 1930s, displacing the novel and theatre. Until the arrival of home video, film was a community based entertainment medium. In recent years, video games have displaced films as the top grossing entertainment medium.

History

The New Spirit in the Cinema

Motion pictures developed gradually from a carnival novelty to one of the most important tools of communication, entertainment, artistic expression and mass media in the 20th century.

Although as a medium its importance has been eroded by television, video games and internet, motion picture films have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology, and politics, and it can be argued that it is still the people's favorite way of consuming fiction.

A major event in the recent history of film history was the arrival of home video.

Cinema

Cinema is synonym for film. The word borrows from French cinéma, shortening of cinématographe (term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s), from Ancient Greek κίνημα (kínēma, “movement”)

Film director

This page Film is part of the film series.
Illustration: screen shot from L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat

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A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design and all the creative aspects of filmmaking. Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film.

The film director gives direction to the cast and crew and creates an overall vision through which a film eventually becomes realized or noticed. Directors need to be able to mediate differences in creative visions and stay within the budget.

There are many pathways to becoming a film director. Some film directors started as screenwriters, cinematographers, producers, film editors or actors. Other film directors have attended a film school. Directors use different approaches. Some outline a general plotline and let the actors improvise dialogue, while others control every aspect and demand that the actors and crew follow instructions precisely. Some directors also write their own screenplays or collaborate on screenplays with long-standing writing partners. Some directors edit or appear in their films or compose the music score for their films.

See also

• Alan Smithee (pseudonym for anonymous directors)
• Auteur theory
• Hurry up and wait
• Director's cut

Film theory

Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is generally distinguished from film criticism, which concentrates on evaluating individual films.

History

In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory anticipated the development of film theory at a time that the cinema was just being born as a new medium—the early 1900s. He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer.

These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form.

In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema, arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality.

In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguistics.

During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an indexical image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion of the Real, Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of the gaze extensively used in contemporary film analysis. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers such as Tom Gunning.

Specific theories of film

• Apparatus theory
• Auteur theory
• Feminist film theory
• Formalist film theory
• Marxist film theory
• Philosophy of language film analysis
• Psychoanalytical film theory
• Screen theory
• Structuralist film theory

List of film theorists

• Rudolf Arnheim
• Béla Balázs
• André Bazin
• Walter Benjamin
• David Bordwell
• Ricciotto Canudo
• Gilles Deleuze
• Louis Delluc
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Alexander Kluge
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Teresa de Lauretis
• Christian Metz
• Laura Mulvey
• Hugo Münsterberg
• Vivian Sobchack
• Slavoj Žižek
• Georg Lukacs
• Vsevolod Pudovkin

Specific theories of film

• Apparatus theory
• Auteur theory
• Feminist film theory
• Formalist film theory
• Marxist film theory
• Oneiric (film theory)
• Psychoanalytical film theory
• Socialist realism
• Screen theory
• Structuralist film theory

See also

• Auteur theory
• David Bordwell vs Slavoj Žižek
• Fictional film
• Philosophy of film
• Surrealism and film

Bibliography

• The New Spirit in the Cinema (1930) by Huntly Carter
• The Hollywood Hallucination (1944) by Parker Tyler
• The Haunted Screen (1952) by Lotte Eisner
• Le Surréalisme au cinéma by (1953) Ado Kyrou
• Hollywood Babylon (1959) by Kenneth Anger
• Film as a Subversive Art (1974) by Amos Vogel
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is a feminist film essay by British academic Laura Mulvey, written in 1973 and first published in 1975
• Midnight Movies (1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Incredibly Strange Films (1986) by by V. Vale and Andrea Juno
• Cult Movie Stars (1991) by Danny Peary
• Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 (1994) by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs
• 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (2004)
• The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) is a two-hour documentary by Sophie Fiennes, scripted and presented by Slavoj Žižek.

See also

• Cinematic techniques
• Cinephilia
• Cinematography, the art of recording visual images
• Cinematic effects in literature
• Experiments with cinematic time
• History of fiction
• Jahsonic's film canon
• List of film topics
• Lists of films
• Lost film
• Paracinema
• Sequential art
• Visual culture