Today, we finished the notes on film studies. I have pasted them below. In addition to these, I handed out a sheet defining film genres and one providing examples of common symbols. If you were not here, these are in your portfolios. If you were here, I expect you to have read them for Monday.
Sound
Sound is often overlooked (really, no pun intended) in the study of film, though it is probably equally as important as the visual image is in its ability to create an effect on a viewer. A violin can make us feel sad
-during the deathbed speech, a gunshot can make us jump out of our seats, and a voice-over narration can help us follow the story, though we rarely comment on the "really awesome sound in that movie." There
are many ways to classify sound in film-dialogue, music, sound effects-and there are various ways to analyze the sound in a film-pitch, timbre, direction, whether it's on-screen or off-screen-but the categories
that are most important in their application to literature are these:
· diegetic,
· nondiegetic
· internal diegetic
Diegetic Sound
This is a confusing-sounding term for an easy concept. Any sound that could logically be heard by a character within the movie environment is called diegetic sound, pronounced "di-uh-je-tik." if a character speaks or coughs, or a cat growls, this is diegetic sound. Typical diegetic sounds include such things as background noise, traffic, dialogue between characters, and thelike. The important distinction to make is that the audience and the characters hear roughly the same thing. Or, at least, the characters could have heard the sounds the audience heard.
Nondiegetic Sound
Imagine that you are a character in the movie jaws. You're just swimming in the middle of the night in shark-infested waters, minding your own business when you hear "duh-duhn ... duh-duhn." Now, of course you would get out of the water quickly because you know a big fish is on its way. But why don't those stupid characters in the film do the same? Actually, they're probably not that stupid; it's because the sound is "nondiegetic"-that is, sound that cannot be heard logically by characters within the film. Any sound that is intended only for the audience and is not a part of the environment of the film is called nondiegetic.
Oftentimes this means music (but remember, music can also be within the film if the characters are listening to it), but it can also take the form of voice-over narration (Dukes of Hazzard). When the voice-over is saying something, you don't usually hear a character in the film respond to or correct the narrator,
because, again, this is nondiegetic, though there are some exceptions to these classifications of sound (Stranger than Fiction?).
Internal Diegetic Sound
What if a character is talking to himself? Or what if a character is remembering sounds she heard before? If only the one character can hear these things, the sound can be called internal diegetic (Dexter), since presumably
it is logical that the character hearing them can hear them, whereas other characters do not (and perhaps could not logically) hear them. This distinction could be called a mix of the two other sound types, but it is an important definition to have when thinking about narration and point of view in literature.
What's the point in making these three distinctions between types of sound? Sometimes the director-like a writer-wants to give information or clues directly to his or her audience without giving that same information to the characters, and it is important to be able to know when and how the director is doing this. Oftentimes, through the varying use of diegetic and nondiegetic sound, the director can create suspense, irony, or foreshadowing. Directors also play with these distinctions for other reasons. Mel Brooks, in his Western parody Blazing Saddles, shows a group of cowboys riding up a hill to the sounds of a swelling orchestral piece, but when they get to the top, they (and the audience) see that there is, in fact, an orchestra playing right there in the middle of nowhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOO0FQcacZ0
Editing
So far, the cinematic techniques that we have been discussing have boiled down to what the director decides to put into his or her frame or onto the soundtrack. The angle, the lighting, the focus, and the sound are parts of that shot, but how do shots get put together? That's editing.
In its simplest terms, editing refers to the methods by which a director chooses to move from one shot to another. The most common type of edit is called a "cut," which is what we saw earlier when we were
defining a shot: Quite literally, one piece of film is cut and then affixed to another piece, and the result is that tiny, split second of black (like a blink) before the next shot appears. This is far and away the most common and the quickest method of editing two or more shots together, but it is hardly the only type available to a director or editor. Others include the fade, the dissolve, the crosscut, the flashback, and the eye-line match.
The Fade
This type of edit occurs when the image on-screen slowly fades away and the screen itself is entirely black (or some other color) for a noticeable period of time, and then a new image slowly fades in from that black screen. Directors like to use the fade to denote the end of a scene, as an author might do by ending the chapter, perhaps, but it can also be used within the same scene to show that some measure of time has passed.
We probably remember this technique most from the old movies when the man and woman would go into the bedroom, the image would fade out, and then it would fade in on the two of them smoking cigarettes.
The Dissolve
As with the fade, the image slowly begins to fade out, but instead of fading all the way to black, it is replaced by another image that is slowly fading in. The dissolve is a slow transition, too, and because two images are on-screen at the same time, its effect cannot be underestimated.
The dissolve is often used as a way to make a connection between two objects or characters that the viewer might not have made without its use. Think, for example, of the next-to-last-shot in Psycho. We see Norman's face slowly dissolving into the skeleton face of his mother: the two are one again. Or think about the use of the dissolve in
The Titanic. The director shows the audience several shots of the ship as it currently appears on the ocean floor, and then dissolves into shots of the ocean liner in the past in all its shining glory. The effect is for the audience to see and feel the narrator bringing this tale and the boat back to life for us.
The Crosscut
Picture this: The scene is a quiet, suburban town, where children are playing in the front yards. The director cuts from this scene immediately to a shot of a missile screaming across the sky. Then another cut back to the town, and once more back to the missile. The audience knows exactly what is happening: that missile is coming to this town. This effect is accomplished by crosscutting, also called parallel editing, which allows the director to show that events occurring in different spaces are happening simultaneously. There is no logical reason for the audience to assume that the missile is going to destroy the town, but the grammar of the film language and its formalization through eighty years of use encourage this conclusion. Obviously, this type of editing can help to create suspense, as when the camera cuts back and forth between the oncoming train and the car stalled on the tracks.
But crosscutting is not used only to create suspense. This type of editing can also create linkages between characters, themes, or plots. Think about the ending of The Godfather. Director Francis Ford Coppola crosscuts from Michael Corleone, attending the baptism of his godchild, to the various brutal murders of his opponents, and back to Michael as he swears to renounce evil. This crosscutting isn't so much about creating suspense as it is to show exactly what kind of man Corleone is and what he is capable of. A film like Sleepless in Seattle couldn't exist without crosscutting, because the audience would not be able to see the growing connection between the two characters who have never seen each other. Of course, there are some who argue that this movie shouldn't exist even with the crosscutting.
The Flashback and the Flash-Forward
Like a flashback in literature, this method of connecting shots is designed to give the viewer important information about what has happened in the past. And as with the crosscut, audiences have grown accustomed to the conventions of the flashback and tend to recognize immediately the signals that one is coming up: The characters begin narrating a story ("It all started when ..."), perhaps they look up or
out through a window, maybe some nondiegetic music lightly fades in, and the shot dissolves into another scene, usually with a voice-over of the character still narrating the story. Flashbacks in film tend to happen less regularly than in literature because of the conventions that have to be used, as opposed to a novel that can simply say, "Then he thought back to a time when he was ...." It is always interesting in both mediums to examine why a flashback is given at that time: What information does it give to the audience, and who else does not yet have this information? But something that filmmakers can use more regularly than most fiction writers is the flash-forward, which can take the audience ahead of the story's present time.
The Eye-Line Match
Perhaps one of the most important ways in which shots can be assembled is to connect a series of usually three or more shots to form what's called the eye-line match or point-of-view (POV) shot. The series often begins with a shot of a person looking at something; the camera then cuts to whatever it was that the person was looking at, from that person's perspective, and the series normally ends with a return to the person to show his or her reaction.
This type of editing is very important because it can reveal what the character is thinking. Imagine a scene where we see a man standing on a subway platform. First we see him looking around, then the director cuts away to shots of purses dangling from women's arms and wallets sticking out of men's pockets. When the director cuts back to the first man, now smiling, we know, without one word of dialogue, that the man is a thief. In the film Philadelphia, a client with AIDS comes into a lawyer's office and, through a series of eyeline matches where we see that the lawyer is watching everything the client touches, we learn that the lawyer is paranoid about the disease and will not take the case. Again, we can learn the thoughts of a character without his having said anything. The eye-line match is also a way for a director to create empathy for-or at least a connection to-selected characters, because we ultimately feel what the characters feel when we look through their eyes. Obviously, this is manipulation on the part of the director, but that is his or her job: to make us feel for the characters.
Mise-en Scene
One of the more difficult film concepts is the idea of mise-en-scene (pronounced
"meez-ahn-sen"). The term actually comes from the theater as a way to describe what appears onstage, and when applied to film it refers to some of the elements that a film has in common with the stage: sets, costumes, lighting, and acting. So when we talk about the mise-en-scene of a particular shot or an entire film, we might want to look at what significant props surround the characters, or whether the bad guy wears a black hat, or how the light plays off a character's features. A director includes such important elements in every frame, and for particular purposes, and the concept of mise-en scene asks us to consider these elements.
No comments:
Post a Comment