10th Edition of Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
Picture Art: An Introduction
past David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
about the volume Moving picture Art: An Introduction is a survey of motion picture every bit an art course. It's aimed at undergraduate students and general readers who want a comprehensive and systematic introduction to pic aesthetics. It considers common types of films, principles of narrative and non-narrative form, basic film techniques, and strategies of writing about films. It also puts film fine art in the context of changes across history. Film Art first appeared in 1979 and is currently in its eleventh edition, published by McGraw-Hill. For more on our purposes in writing information technology, go here on this site.
Film analyses from before editions of Film Art
Every bit Motion picture Art went through various editions, we developed analyses of various films that might be used in an introductory course. But as space grew tight or certain films dropped out of circulation, we cut those analyses and replaced them with others. The Cyberspace allows u.s.a. to revive these old pieces. Many of the films are at present bachelor on DVD, and we invite students and professors to use these analyses in examining the movies.
The essays here are taken from the edition featuring their last revision.
10th edition
Functions of Film Sound: The Prestige
dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006. From Film Fine art, 10th edition, McGraw-Hill (2012): 298–306.
In London around 1900, ii magicians are locked in drastic competition, each searching for ever more baffling illusions. As they deceive each other and their audiences, the film nearly them tries to deceive us too.
A story of crime, professional rivalry, personal jealousy, and g aspirations, The Prestige sets itself a difficult job. The movie tries to be as tantalizing as a magic fob, merely one that can eventually be explained. As a result, director Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter (and blood brother) Jonathan Nolan must both reveal and muffle information. The motion-picture show must present usa just enough of the story to continue usa engaged, while holding back the answers to the puzzles—and sometimes, like a magician, distracting united states of america from what is actually going on. Throughout The Prestige, sound is crucial to an elaborate choreography of misdirection.
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ninth edition
An Example of Associational Form: A Movie
dir. Bruce Conner, 1958. From Pic Art, 9th edition, McGraw-Hill (2010): 376–381.
Bruce Conner's film A Picture show illustrates how associational form tin can confront usa with evocative and mysterious juxtapositions, nevertheless can at the same time create a coherent flick that has an intense touch on on the viewer.
Conner made A�Movie, his kickoff picture show, in 1958. Similar Léger, he worked in the visual and plastic arts and was noted for his assemblage pieces—collages built up of miscellaneous found objects. Conner took a comparable approach to filmmaking. He typically used footage from old newsreels, Hollywood movies, soft-core pornography, and the like. By working in the institute-footage genre, Conner juxtaposed two shots from widely unlike sources. When we run into the two shots together, we strive to discover some connection between them. From a series of juxtapositions, our activeness can create an overall emotion or concept.
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An Example of Experimental Animation: Fuji
dir. Robert Breer, 1974. From Pic Art, 9th edition, McGraw-Colina (2010): 388–390.
In contrast to smooth Hollywood narrative animation, Robert Breer's 1974 film Fuji looks disjointed and crudely drawn. It doesn't involve a narrative simply instead, similar Ballet mécanique, develops according to principles of abstract course.
Fuji begins without a title or credits, equally a bell rings three times over blackness. A cutting leads not to animated footage but to a shaky, fuzzy shot through a train window, with someone's face and eyeglasses partially visible at the side in the farthermost foreground. In the distance, what might be rice paddies slide past. This shot and well-nigh of the residue of the picture are accompanied by the clacking, rhythmic sound of a railroad train. More black leader creates a transition to a very different image. Against a white background, two flat shapes, like keystones with rounded corners, alternate frame by frame, one red, the other green. The effect is a rapid flicker as the two colored shapes drift well-nigh the frame in a seemingly random pattern. Another stretch of blackness introduces a brief, fuzzy shot of a human in a dark adapt running across the shot in a foreign corridor.
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8th edition
A Homo Escaped
dir. Robert Bresson, 1956. From Picture show Art, 8th edition, McGraw-Hill (2006): 293–300.
Robert Bresson'due south A Human Escaped (Un Condamné à mort c'est échappé) illustrates how a variety of sound techniques can function throughout an entire movie. The story takes place in France in 1943. Fontaine, a Resistance fighter arrested by the Germans, has been put in prison and condemned to dice. But while awaiting his execution, he works at an escape program, loosening the boards of his cell door and making ropes. Just as he is prepare to put his programme in action, a boy named Jost is put into his cell. Deciding to trust that Jost is not a spy, Fontaine reveals his plan to him, and they are both able to escape.
Throughout the film, sound has many important functions. Equally in all of his films, Bresson emphasizes the sound track, rightly believing that sound may be just equally cinematic every bit images. At certain points in A Human Escaped, Bresson even lets his sound technique dominate the image; throughout the moving-picture show, we are compelled to listen. Indeed, Bresson is one of a handful of directors who create a complete interplay betwixt sound and image.
5th edition
High School
dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1968. From Film Art, 5th edition, McGraw-Hill (1996): 409–415.
Frederick Wiseman'south Loftier School is a good case of the cinéma-vérité approach. Wiseman received permission to motion picture at Philadelphia'due south Northeast High School, and he acted as audio recordist while his cameraman shot footage in the hallways, classrooms, cafeteria, and auditorium of the establishment. The film that resulted uses no voice-over narration and virtually no nondiegetic music. Wiseman uses none of the facing-the-reporter interviews that idiot box news coverage employs. In these ways, Loftier Schoolhouse might seem to approach the cinéma-vérité ideal of merely presenting a slice of life. Yet if we analyze the picture show'southward form and style, nosotros find that information technology yet aims to achieve particular effects on the spectator, and it yet suggests a specific range of significant. Far from being a neutral manual of reality, High School shows how picture show class and style, even in cinéma-vérité, shape the event we see on film.
fourth edition
Stagecoach
dir. John Ford, 1939. From Motion picture Fine art, fourth edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 366–370.
Film theorist André Bazin has written of John Ford's Stagecoach: "Stagecoach is the ideal example of the maturity of a way brought to classic perfection…Stagecoach is like a bicycle, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position." This effect results from the film's concentration on the creation of a tight narrative unity, with all of its elements serving that goal.
Hannah and Her Sisters
dir. Woody Allen, 1985. From Motion-picture show Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Colina (1992): 376–381.
Information technology'southward a typical approach that ane person or a couple role as the protagonists of a moving picture. Even so many Hollywood films use multiple protagonists. Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters examines the psychological traits and interactions amid a grouping of characters. We shall see that creating several protagonists does non necessarily make a motion-picture show any less "classical" in its form and mode.
Desperately Seeking Susan
dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985. From Pic Fine art, quaternary edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 381–387.
In many classical films, groups of characters interact to create causes and motivations. Their actions, added together, steadily button the action forward. In Badly Seeking Susan, however, the 2 protagonists, the staid New Jersey housewife Roberta and the wild, streetwise Susan, initially seem to accept lilliputian connection to each other. The early portion of the plot alternates sequences involving the two women, simply, although Roberta reads about Susan in the personals column and becomes fascinated with her, they do not interact directly. Still the two women'south lives gradually begin to intertwine, until they finally see at the end. The course of the film depends on devices of parallelism that bespeak up how the women are actually somewhat alike.
24-hour interval of Wrath
dir. Carl Dreyer, 1943. From Film Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 387–391.
Many films pose few difficulties for viewers who like their movies straightforward and piece of cake to digest. But not all films are so articulate in their form and mode. In films like Day of Wrath, the questions nosotros inquire often do not get definite answers; endings do not tie everything upwardly; film technique does not always function invisibily to advance the narrative. When analyzing such films, nosotros should restrain ourselves from trying to answer all of the film's questions and to create neatly satisfying endings. Instead of ignoring peculiarities of technique, we should seek to examine how film form and style create doubt — seek to understand the cinematic conditions that produce ambiguity. Twenty-four hours of Wrath, a tale of witchcraft and murder set in seventeenth-century Denmark, offers a practiced test case.
Concluding Year at Marienbad
dir. Alain Resnais, 1961. From Flick Art, fourth edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 391–396.
When Last Year at Marienbad was get-go shown in 1961, many critics offered widely varying interpretations of it. When faced with nigh films, these critics would have been looking for implicit meanings behind the plot. But, faced with Marienbad, their interpretations were attempts merely to draw the events that take place in the moving-picture show's story. These proved difficult to hold on. Did the couple really meet last yr? If not, what really happened? Is the film a grapheme's dream or hallucination?
Innocence Unprotected
dir. Dušan Makavejev, 1968. From Moving picture Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 401–406.
Like Final Year at Marienbad, Dušan Makavejev's Innocence Unprotected (more correctly translated as Innocent Unprotected) diverges markedly from the norms of classical narrative filmmaking. In analyzing the film, it is useful to think of its grade as a collage, an aggregation of materials taken from widely different sources. By playing upwardly the disparities among the film's materials, the collage principle permits Makavejev to use moving-picture show techniques and moving-picture show class in fresh and provocative ways. The outcome is a film that examines the nature of cinema — peculiarly, movie theater in a social and historical context.
Clock Cleaners
dir. Walt Disney, 1937. From Movie Fine art, quaternary edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 418–420.
Clock Cleaners is a narrative, but it does not adhere to the typical patterns of narrative evolution that are often at work in feature-length Hollywood films. Employing a strategy common in slapstick shorts, it sets upwards a state of affairs and and then has the characters perform a series of near cocky-independent skits or gags, building up every bit the film goes along. In this case, three familiar stars, Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck, all appear, each working in a unlike function of the huge clock belfry. They do not interact until near the finish of the motion-picture show. No overall pattern like a search or a journey helps the plot develop; although the characters could exist said to share a general goal of cleaning the clock, they have not achieved it past the terminate of the motion-picture show, and our sense of narrative progression has more than to practice with their mishaps than with whatsoever work they may get done.
Tout va bien
dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1972. From Film Art, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill (1992): 436–442.
If Meet Me in St. Louis uncritically affirms the value of family unit life and Raging Balderdash offers an clashing critique of violence in American lodge, Tout va bien strongly attacks certain features of the country of French society in 1972. Nosotros shall use it as an case of how a film may nowadays an ideological viewpoint explicitly and drastically opposed to that of about viewers.
2nd edition
The Man Who Knew Likewise Much
dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1934. From Film Art, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill (1988): 292–295.
Like His Daughter Friday, The Man Who Knew Too Much presents united states with a model of narrative structure. Its plot limerick and its motivations for action contribute to making the film what a scriptwriter would telephone call "tight." Moreover, the film as well offers an object lesson in the utilise of cinematic style for narrative purposes. Finally, the movie illustrates how narration can manipulate the audition'due south cognition, sometimes making drastic shifts from moment to moment.
Source: http://www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/
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