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Introduction

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17 views3 pages

Introduction

Uploaded by

Minu George Vettamala
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Introduction
• Film studies deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches
to films. Exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political
implications of the cinema.
• What is Film? - A story or event recorded by a camera as a set of moving images
and shown in a cinema or on television.
• Movies, also known as films, are a type of visual communication which
uses moving pictures and sound to tell stories or inform.
• Like all other media texts films are constructs. A movie is a written document using
visuals (aural too).
• Films are a sequence (arrange in a particular order) of signs that when combined
together create meaning.
• How these signs are created?
• Shots are the building blocks of a film. Shots are the basic unit of a movie. Shot is a
series of frames that runs for an uninterrupted period of time.
• Scene - It is a combination of shots. It is the action in a single location and continuous
time, a sequence of continuous action.
• Narration in Film
• Narrative is generally accepted as possessing two components.
1. The story presented 2. The process of its telling
• Story is a series of represented events, characters and actions out of which the
audience constructs a fictional time and place.
• Narration is the process of giving an account of a sequence of events, real or
imagined.
• Editing --- How the shots are organized into a sequence is what makes the narrative.
• In film, those story elements, plot, character, theme, etc. plus production elements,
camera angles, camera movements, lighting, sound, acting, etc. make the narrative.

Different types of shots


• Long Shot - A shot taken from a sufficient distance to show a landscape, a building
or a large crowd.
• Establishing shot - An establishing shot is usually the first shot of a new scene,
designed to show the audience where the action is taking place. It is usually a very
wide shot or extreme wide shot.
• Medium Shot - A shot between a long shot and a close up that might show two
people in full figure or several people from the waist up.
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• Close - Up - A shot of one face or object that fills the screen completely
• Extreme close - Up - A shot of a small object or part of a face that fills the screen.

Camera Angle
• The camera angle marks the specific location at which a movie camera or video
camera is placed to take a shot.
• High Angle -The camera looks down at what is being photographed.
• Eye level Angle - A shot that approximates human vision; a camera presents an object
so that the line between camera and object is parallel to the ground.
• Low Angle - The camera looks up at what is being photographed
• Over the Shoulder Shot is a shot of someone or something taken from the
perspective or camera angle from the shoulder of another person. This shot is framed
from behind a person who is looking at the subject. The person facing the subject
should usually occupy about 1/3 of the frame. This shot helps to establish the position
of each person, and get the feel of looking at one person from the other's point of
view. It's common to cut between these shots during a conversation, alternating the
view between the different speakers.
• Point of View Shot (also known as POV shot or a subjective camera) is a shot that
shows what a character (the subject) is looking at. This shot shows a view from the
subject's perspective.
• Canted shots (Dutch Angle) - Canted shots are composed with a camera tilted
laterally, so that the horizon is not level and vertical lines run diagonally across the
frame. The resulting compositions can create spatial imbalance or disorientation
which can convey a sense of dramatic tension, psychological instability, confusion,
madness, or drug-induced psychosis.

Camera Movements
• Pan: Camera moves horizontally on a fixed base.
• Tilt: The camera points up or down from a fixed base.
• Boom: The Camera moves up or down through space.
• Tracking (dolly shot): The camera moves on a wheeled truck.
• Zoom: not a camera movement but a shift in the focal length of the camera lens to
give the impression that the camera is getting closer (Zoom in) to or farther (Zoom
out) from an object.
• Authorship

Auteur Theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal
creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). The
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theory of director-as-author was principally advanced in Bazin’s periodical Cahiers du


[kaje dy sinema] cinéma (founded in 1951).
• In 1954, François Truffaut wrote an essay entitled A Certain Tendency in French
Cinema. In this work he claimed that film is a great medium for expressing the
personal ideas of the director. He suggested that this meant that the director should
therefore be regarded as an auteur. In fact, Truffaut once provocatively said that:
"There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors"
• The auteur theory, which was derived largely from Alexandre Astruc’s elucidation of
the concept of caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”), holds that the director, who oversees all
audio and visual elements of the motion picture, is more to be considered the “author”
of the movie than is the writer of the screenplay. In other words, such fundamental
visual elements as camera placement, blocking, lighting, and scene length, rather than
plot line, convey the message of the film.
• Auteur Theory suggests that a director can use the commercial apparatus of film-
making in the same way that a writer uses a pen or a painter uses paint and a
paintbrush. It is a medium for the personal artistic expression of the director.
• Auteur Theory suggests that the best films will bear their maker’s ‘signature’. This
may manifest itself as the stamp of his or her individual personality or perhaps even
focus on recurring themes within the body of work.
• Alfred Hitchcock is one of the first names who comes to mind when talking
about auteur theory. His most famous films are Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and Rear
Window.
• Hitchcock’s story telling techniques were renowned for their intelligent plots, witty
dialogue, and the smattering of mystery and murder.
• He has been attributed with revolutionizing the thriller genre.
• The reason for his success, however, was not the genre that he was working in, but
rather the skill which he exhibited in the film-making.
• One of Hitchcock’s best-known screen moments is the terrifying shower scene
in Psycho. This shot features 70 distinct shots in less than 1 minute. They are fused
together in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish between the Montage and
the Mise-en-Scène.
• Other auteurs
• Jean Renoir made extraodinary advances in French cinema during the 1930s. His
films were socially sensitive and comic in style.
• Ingmar Bergman gained world known with films such as Smiles of a Summer
Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1958) and The Virgin
Spring (1959). Like Hitchcock, Bergman was interested with some of the anxieties
that dominated life during the 1950s and 1960s.

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