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Film Studies

Film and Culture Series

John Belton, General Editor

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FILM STUDIES An Introduction

Ed Sikov

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2010 Ed Sikov

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51989-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sikov, Ed.

Film studies : an introduction / Ed Sikov. p. cm. — (Film and culture)

Includes index. ISBN 978-0-231-14292-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-14293-9 (pbk. : alk.

paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-51989-2 (ebook) 1. Motion pictures. I. Title. II. Series. PN1994.s535 2010 2009033082

A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup- ebook@columbia.edu.

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The author and Columbia University Press gratefully acknowledge permission to quote material from John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture, 3d ed. (New York: McGraw- Hill, 2008); copyright © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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http://cup.columbia.edu
mailto:cup-ebook@columbia.edu
for Adam Orman and the other great students in my life for John Belton and the other great teachers in my life

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CONTENTS

PREFACE: WHAT THIS BOOK IS—AND WHAT IT’S NOT INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTATION AND REALITY ONE MISE-EN-SCENE: WITHIN THE IMAGE

What Is Mise-en-Scene?

The Shot

Subject-Camera Distance—Why It Matters

Camera Angle

Space and Time on Film

Composition STUDY GUIDE: ANALYZING THE SHOT

WRITING ABOUT THE IMAGE

TWO MISE-EN-SCENE: CAMERA MOVEMENT

Mobile Framing

Types of Camera Movement

Editing within the Shot

Space and Movement

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STUDY GUIDE: ANALYZING CAMERA MOVEMENT

WRITING ABOUT CAMERA MOVEMENT

THREE MISE-EN-SCENE: CINEMATOGRAPHY

Motion Picture Photography

Aspect Ratio: From 1:33 to Widescreen

Aspect Ratio: Form and Meaning

Lighting

Three-Point Lighting

Film Stocks: Super 8 to 70mm to Video

Black, White, Gray, and Color

A Word or Two about Lenses STUDY GUIDE: ANALYZING CINEMATOGRAPHY

WRITING ABOUT CINEMATOGRAPHY

FOUR EDITING: FROM SHOT TO SHOT

Transitions

Montage

The Kuleshov Experiment

Continuity Editing

The 180° System

Shot/Reverse-Shot Pattern STUDY GUIDE: ANALYZING SHOT-TO-SHOT EDITING

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WRITING ABOUT EDITING

FIVE SOUND

A Very Short History of Film Sound

Recording, Rerecording, Editing, and Mixing

Analytical Categories of Film Sound

Sound and Space STUDY GUIDE: HEARING SOUND, ANALYZING SOUND

WRITING ABOUT SOUND AND SOUNDTRACKS

SIX NARRATIVE: FROM SCENE TO SCENE

Narrative Structure

Story and Plot

Scenes and Sequences

Transitions from Scene to Scene

Character, Desire, and Conflict

Analyzing Conflict STUDY GUIDE: ANALYZING SCENE-TO-SCENE EDITING

WRITING ABOUT NARRAT IVE STRUCTURE

SEVEN FROM SCREENPLAY TO FILM

Deeper into Narrative Structure

Screenwriting: The Three-Act Structure

Segmentation: Form

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Segmentation: Meaning

A Segmentation of Inside Man STUDY GUIDE: STORY ANALYSIS AND SEGMENTATION

WRITING ABOUT WRITING

EIGHT FILMMAKERS

Film—A Director’s Art?

Authorship

The Auteur Theory

The Producer’s Role

Teamwork STUDY GUIDE: THE PROBLEM OF ATTRIBUTION

WRITING ABOUT DIRECTORS

NINE PERFORMANCE

Performance as an Element of Mise-en-Scene

Acting Styles

Stars and Character Actors

Type and Stereotype

Women as Types

Acting in—and on—Film

Publicity: Extra-Filmic Meaning STUDY GUIDE: ANALYZING ACTING

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WRITING ABOUT ACTING

TEN GENRE

What Is a Genre?

Conventions, Repetitions, and Variations

A Brief Taxonomy of Two Film Genres—the Western and the

Horror Film

Genre: The Semantic/Syntactic Approach

Film Noir: A Case Study

Film Noir: A Brief History

Film Noir’s Conventions STUDY GUIDE: GENRE ANALYSIS FOR THE INTRODUCTORY STUDENT

WRITING ABOUT GENRES

ELEVEN SPECIAL EFFECTS

Beyond the Ordinary

Optical and Mechanical Special Effects

Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) STUDY GUIDE: EFFECTS AND MEANING

WRITING ABOUT SPECIAL EFFECTS

TWELVE PUTTING IT TOGETHER: A MODEL 8- TO 10-PAGE

PAPER

How This Chapter Works

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“Introducing Tyler,” by Robert Paulson GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

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PREFACE WHAT THIS BOOK IS—AND WHAT IT’S NOT

This book is designed to provide a basic introduction to the academic discipline known as film studies. It covers, in the first eleven chapters, the fundamental elements of formal film analysis, from the expressive content of individual images to the ways in which images link with one another; from the structures of narrative screenplays to the basics of cinematography, special effects, and sound. The book’s final chapter is a step-by-step guide to writing a final paper for the kind of course for which this textbook has been written.

Film Studies is a primer—a pared-down introduction to the field. It is aimed at beginners. It simplifies things, which is to say that the information it contains is straightforward and aimed at every student who is willing to learn it. It’s complicated material, but only to a point. The goal here is not to ask and answer every question, cover every issue and term, and point out the exceptions that accompany every rule. Instead, Film Studies tries to cover the subject of narrative cinema accurately but broadly, precisely but not comprehensively. It is a relatively short book, not a doorstop or makeshift dumbbell. It isn’t meant to cover anything more than the basic elements of formal film studies.

This book is about feature-length narrative cinema—movies that tell fictional stories that last from about ninety minutes to three or three and a half hours. It does not cover documentaries, which are about real people and events. It’s not that documentary filmmaking is not worth studying; on the contrary. It’s just that Film Studies is strictly an introduction to narrative cinema. Similarly, there is nothing in Film Studies about avantgarde films—those motion pictures that are radically experimental and noncommercial in nature. Film history is full of great avant-garde works, but that mode of filmmaking is not what

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this book is about. People who study movies think about them in different and

divergent ways. Scholars have explored sociological issues (race, ethnicity, religion, and class as depicted in films) and psychological issues (how movies express otherwise hidden ideas about gender and sexuality, for instance, or how audiences respond to comedies as opposed to horror films), to cite only a few of the various lenses through which we can view films. Researchers can devote themselves entirely to the study of film history—the nuts-and-bolts names, dates, and ideas of technological and aesthetic innovation that occurred on a global level. Similarly, the study of individual national cinemas has provided critical audiences with a broad range of cinematic styles to pursue, pinpoint, and enjoy.

Film Studies is not about any of these subjects. It is, to repeat, a primer, not an exhaustive examination of film interpretation, though the book has been expressly designed to accompany as wide a variety of film courses as possible.

This book centers on aspects of film form. You will learn the critical and technical language of the cinema and the ways in which formal devices work to create expressive meaning. Hopefully, if you go on to study film from a psychological or sociological perspective, or explore a particular national cinema, or take an upper-level film course of any kind, you will use the knowledge you gain here to go that much deeper into the films you see and study. This book serves as a first step. If this turns out to be your only exposure to film studies, you will still be able to bring to bear what you learn here to any film you ever see in the future.

Most film textbooks are awash in titles, names, and dates, and Film Studies is in certain ways no different—except in degree. In order to illustrate various points with examples, Film Studies does refer to a number of real movies that were made by important filmmakers at specific times in the course of film history. But in my experience, introductory students, when faced with the title and even the briefest description of a film they have never seen (and most likely will never see), tend to tune out. As a result, I draw a number of examples in Film Studies from hypothetical films; I will ask you to use your own

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imagination rather than draw impossibly on knowledge you don’t already have about films you haven’t seen. Moreover, each individual film class has its own screening list. Indeed, from a professor’s perspective, one of the great pleasures of teaching cinema studies classes lies in picking the films to show and discuss. Film Studies tries not to get in the way of individual professors’ tastes. In short, this book does not come with its own prearranged list of films you must see.

Some film studies textbooks contain hundreds of illustrations—film stills, drawings, graphs, and frame enlargements, many of which are in color. Film Studies does offer illustrations when necessary, but in order to keep the book affordable, they are not a prominent feature.

In fact, Film Studies tries to be as practical and useful as possible in many ways. It aims for the widest readership and is pitched accordingly. It draws most of its examples from American films because they are the films that most American students have seen in the past and are likely to see in the future. It is designed to accompany a wide spectrum of film courses but is focused most clearly on the type of mainstream “Introduction to Film” class that is taught in practically every college and university in the United States and Canada.

I hope it works for you.

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INTRODUCTION REPRESENTATION AND REALITY

Consider the word REPRESENTATION (see glossary). What does it mean —and what technology does it take—to represent real people or physical objects on film? These are two of the basic questions in film studies. The dictionary defines the verb to represent as “to stand for; to symbolize; to indicate or communicate by signs or symbols.” That’s all well and good as far as it goes. But in the first one hundred years of motion pictures, the signs and symbols onscreen were almost always real before they ended up as signs and symbols on movie screens.

We take for granted certain things about painting and literature, chief among them that the objects and people depicted in paint or described in words do not necessarily have a physical reality. You can paint a picture of a woman without using a model or even without having a specific real woman in your mind. You can paint landscapes you’ve never actually seen, and in fact you don’t have to paint any real objects at all. Your painting can be entirely nonrepresentational—just splashes of color or streaks of black paint. And bear in mind that all works of art, in addition to being representations, are also real things themselves. The woman Leonardo da Vinci painted against a mysterious landscape may or may not have existed, but the painting commonly known as the Mona Lisa is certainly a real, material object.

In literature, too, writers describe cities that never existed and people who never lived. But on film—at least narrative films like the ones you’re going to learn about in this book—directors have to have something real to photograph. Now, with the increased use of digital and computer-generated imagery (CGI), of course, things are changing in that regard, but that’s a subject for a later chapter. For the time being, consider the fact that in classical world cinema, in all but a few very rare cases, directors had to have something real to photograph

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with a film camera. A filmmaker could conceivably take a strip of CELLULOID—the plastic material that film is made of—and draw on it or paint it or dig scratches into its surface; experimental filmmakers have been known to use celluloid as a kind of canvas for nonrepresentational art. But otherwise a filmmaker must photograph real people and things. They may be actors wearing makeup and costumes, but they’re still real human beings. These actors may be walking through constructed sets, but these sets have a physical reality; walls that look like stone may actually be made of painted wood, but they are still real, material walls.

Even animated films are photographed: artists paint a series of ANIMATION CELS, and then each cel is photographed. The physical reality of The Hunchback of Notre Dame—the Walt Disney movie, not the Victor Hugo novel—is not the character of Quasimodo, nor is it an actor playing Quasimodo, but rather the elaborate, colorful, stylized drawings that had to be photographed, processed, and run through a projector to make them move. Those drawings have a physical reality, and Disney animators are masters at making them seem doubly real through shading, layering, and other means of creating a sense of depth.

Let’s approach this issue another way. If Picasso, Warhol, and Rembrandt each painted a portrait of the same person, most educated people would immediately understand that the result would be three very different-looking paintings. We recognize that a painting’s meaning is at least partly a matter of its FORM—the shape and structure of the art work. Even if three painters from the same general culture in the same general period painted the same person—say, Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer—we would see three different views of that person—three very different paintings.

The same holds true in literature. If, say, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Chuck Palahniuk all described the same person, we would end up reading three diverse pieces of prose. They’d all be written in English, and they’d be describing the same individual, but they simply wouldn’t read the same. Some details may be similar, but each writer would describe those details differently using different words and sentence structures. And because the form would be different in each

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case, we would take away from the writing three different impressions —three ways of thinking and expressing and feeling.

But photography, particularly motion picture photography, appears on the surface to be of a different order. You take a real thing, and you photograph it. You take an event and you film it. And unless you monkey with the camera or the film processing and do all kinds of things to deliberately call attention to your presence as the filmmaker, if you and your friend and her friend and her friend’s friend all filmed the same event, you would all come up with similar looking films—or so you might assume.

This book will show you how and why each of your films would be different and why those differences matter to the art form. You will learn to see the ways in which filmmakers express ideas and emotions with their cameras.

For example, let’s say that three aspiring directors—all from the University of Pittsburgh—decide to film what they each consider to be a characteristic scene at a major league baseball game. The three film students head over to PNC Park with nothing but small video cameras, and they don’t leave their seats in the right field grandstand. Ethan is planning to use his footage in the romantic comedy he’s making based on a guy he knows who is obsessed with one of the Pirates’ infielders. Ethan’s friend, Shin Lae, is making a drama about a little boy with autism who loves baseball. And Shin Lae’s friend, Sanjana, hasn’t yet figured out what her story will be let alone how she will develop it, but she already knows that she wants to include random shots taken at a baseball game.

When the Pirates’ Luis Cruz hits a foul ball into the stands, the three filmmakers each have their cameras running. It’s the same moment in time, the same foul ball, but the three young directors see the event from three different perspectives. Ethan wants to show the whole action from beginning to end in a continuous shot, so just before the windup he frames the pitcher, batter, and catcher in the same image so he can show the ball move from mound to plate to air and, eventually, thanks to his ability to move the camera he’s holding, the ball finds its way into a fan’s bare fist. His built-in microphone picks up the sharp crack of the bat connecting with the ball, the crowd’s initial

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roar of expectation, the collective groan of disappointment when the ball crosses the foul line, and finally a quick burst of distant applause at the fan’s catch.

Shin Lae, on the other hand, cares more about the boisterous reaction of a group of Cub Scouts nearby than she does about the particular batter or the events of the game itself. When she notices that the pitcher is about to wind up, she points her camera not at either the pitcher or the batter but instead at the scouts, who are a few rows above her. She simply records the boys’ shouts and facial expressions, which range from eagerness to glee to disappointment and finally to envy as the fan successfully nabs the ball. Sanjana, meanwhile, has not been paying attention to the baseball game at all. (She hates sports and has only agreed to come along in order to film things.) While Ethan and Shin Lae get increasingly wrapped up by the game, Sanjana has become fascinated by a group of shirtless, heavily tattooed, and increasingly drunk bikers to her right. She has already filmed a security guard telling them to quiet down, but something about this group of urban outlaws appeals to her—particularly the fattest, hairiest one. She aims her camera on him and him alone and just films him sitting there, yelling, drinking, swearing, and—eventually —raising his hairy paw and nabbing Luis Cruz’s foul ball to the cheers of the crowd. She tilts her camera up slightly to keep his head from leaving the image, and tilts it back down when the crowd stops cheering and the biker takes his seat again.

Same game + same scene + same action = three different films. Why? Because each filmmaker has made a series of choices, and each of those choices has artistic, expressive consequences.

This is one of the key aesthetic issues of cinema studies—learning to see that an apparently unmediated event is in fact a mediated work of art. At first glance, we tend not to see the mediation involved in the cinema; we don’t see the art. All we see—at first—is a representation of the physical reality of what has been photographed. And in a strange paradox, classical American filmmaking is saddled with the notion that it’s purely artificial. The lighting tends to be idealized, the actors’ faces are idealized by makeup, the settings are sometimes idealized. . . . Just to describe something as “a Hollywood vision of

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life” is to say that it’s phony. The objects and people in Hollywood films are thus too real and too fake, all at the same time. How can we make sense of this?

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CHAPTER 1 MISE-EN-SCENE: WITHIN THE IMAGE

WHAT IS MISE-EN-SCENE? Film studies deals with the problems of reality and representation by making an initial assumption and proceeding logically from it. This assumption is that all representations have meaning. The term MISE- EN-SCENE (also mise-en-scène) describes the primary feature of cinematic representation. Mise-en-scene is the first step in understanding how films produce and reflect meaning. It’s a term taken from the French, and it means that which has been put into the scene or put onstage. Everything—literally everything—in the filmed image is described by the term mise-en-scene: it’s the expressive totality of what you see in a single film image. Mise-en-scene consists of all of the elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: settings, props, lighting, costumes, makeup, and figure behavior (meaning actors, their gestures, and their facial expressions). In addition, mise-en-scene includes the camera’s actions and angles and the cinematography, which simply means photography for motion pictures. Since everything in the filmed image comes under the heading of mise-en-scene, the term’s definition is a mouthful, so a shorter definition is this: Mise-en-scene is the totality of expressive content within the image. Film studies assumes that everything within the image has expressive meanings. By analyzing mise-en-scene, we begin to see what those meanings might be.

The term mise-en-scene was first used in the theater to describe the staging of an action. A theater director takes a script, written and printed on the page, and makes each scene come alive on a stage with a particular set of actors, a unique set design, a certain style of lighting, and so on. The script says that a scene is set in, say, a

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suburban living room. Okay, you’re the director, and your task is to create a suburban living room scene on stage and make it work not as an interchangeable, indistinguishable suburban living room, but as the specific living room of the particular suburban characters the playwright has described on the page—characters you are trying to bring to life onstage. The same holds true in the cinema: the director starts from scratch and stages the scene for the camera, and every element of the resulting image has expressive meaning. Even when a film is shot on LOCATION—at a preexisting, real place—the director has chosen that location for its expressive value.

It’s important to note that mise-en-scene does not have anything to do with whether a given scene is “realistic” or not. As in the theater, film studies doesn’t judge mise-en-scene by how closely it mimics the world we live in. Just as a theater director might want to create a thoroughly warped suburban living room set with oversized furniture and distorted walls and bizarrely shaped doors in order to express her feeling that the characters who live in this house are crazy, so a film director creates mise-en-scene according to the impression he or she wishes to create. Sometimes mise-en-scene is relatively realistic looking, and sometimes it isn’t.

Here’s the first shot of a hypothetical film we’re making: we see a man standing up against a wall. The wall is made of . . . what? Wood? Concrete? Bricks? Let’s say bricks. Some of the bricks are chipped. The wall is . . . what color? White? No, let’s say it’s red. It’s a new wall. No, it’s an old wall, and some graffiti has been painted on it, but even the graffiti is old and faded. Is it indoors or outdoors? Day or night? We’ll go with outdoors in the afternoon. The man is . . . what? Short? No, he’s tall. And he’s wearing . . . what? A uniform—a blue uniform. With a badge.

Bear in mind, nothing has happened yet in our film—we just have a policeman standing against a wall. But the more mise-en-scene details we add, the more visual information we give to our audience, and the more precise our audience’s emotional response will be to the image we are showing them. But also bear in mind the difference between written prose and filmed image. As readers, you have just been presented with all of these details in verbal form, so necessarily

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you’ve gotten the information sequentially. With a film image, we seem to see it all at once. Nothing is isolated the way things are in this written description. With film, we take in all the visual information quickly, and we do so without being aware that we’re taking it in. As it happens, studies of human perception have proven that we actually take in visual information sequentially as well, though a great deal more speedily than we do written information. Moreover, filmmakers find ways of directing our gaze to specific areas in the image by manipulating compositions, colors, areas of focus, and so on. By examining each of these aspects of cinema, film studies attempts to wake us up to what’s in front of us onscreen—to make us all more conscious of what we’re seeing and why.

To continue with our example of mise-en-scene: the man is handsome in a Brad Pitt sort of way. He’s a white guy. In his late thirties. But he’s got a black eye. And there’s a trace of blood on his lower lip.

So we’ve got a cop and a wall and some stage blood, and we film him with a motion picture or video camera. Nothing has happened by chance here; we, the filmmakers, have made a series of artistic decisions even before we have turned on the camera. Even if we happen to have just stumbled upon this good-looking cop with a black eye standing against a brick wall and bleeding from the mouth, it’s our decision not only to film him but to use that footage in our film. If we decide to use the footage, we have made an expressive statement with it. And we have done so with only one shot that’s maybe six seconds long. This is the power of mise-en-scene.

What’s our next shot? A body lying nearby? An empty street? Another cop? A giant slimy alien? All of these things are possible, and all of them are going to give our audience even more information about the first shot. Subsequent shots stand in relation to the first shot, and by the time you get to the tenth or twentieth or hundredth shot, the sheer amount of expressive information—the content of individual shots, and the relationships from shot to shot—is staggering. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; this is the subject of chapter 4.

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THE SHOT By the way: what is a SHOT? A shot is the basic element of filmmaking —a piece of film run through the camera, exposed, and developed; an uninterrupted run of the camera; or an uninterrupted image on film. That’s it: you turn the camera on, you let it run, you turn it off, and the result—provided that you have remembered to put film in the camera —is a shot. It’s an unedited shot, but it’s a shot nonetheless. It’s the basic building block of the movies.

Despite the use of the word scene in the term mise-en-scene, miseen-scene describes the content not only of a sequence of shots but of an individual shot. A shot is a unit of length or duration—a minimal unit of dramatic material; a scene is a longer unit usually consisting of several shots or more.

Even at the basic level of a single shot, mise-en-scene yields meaning. The first shot of an important character is itself important in this regard. Here’s an example: Imagine that you are going to film a murder movie, and you need to introduce your audience to a woman who is going to be killed later on in the film. What does the first shot of this woman look like? What does she look like? Because of the expressive importance of mise-en-scene, every detail matters. Every detail is a statement of meaning, whether you want it to be or not. (These are precisely the questions Alfred Hitchcock faced when he made his groundbreaking 1960 film, Psycho.) Is she pretty? What does that mean? What is she wearing? What does that mean? If she’s really attractive and wearing something skimpy—well, are you saying she deserves to be killed? What if she’s actually quite ugly—what are you saying there? Do you want your audience to like her or dislike her? It’s your choice—you’re the director. So what signals are you going to send to your audience to get that emotion across? Let’s say you’re going to put something on the wall behind her. And it’s . . . a big stuffed bird. No, it’s . . . a pair of Texas longhorns. No, it’s . . . a broken mirror. No, it’s a crucifix. Or maybe it’s just a big empty wall. Each of these props adds meaning to the shot, as does the absence of props and decorative elements.

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This is why mise-en-scene is important: it tells us something above and beyond the event itself. Again: mise-en-scene is the totality of expressive content within the image. And every detail has a meaningful consequence.

Let’s say you’re filming a shot outdoors and a bird flies into the camera’s field of vision and out the other side. Suddenly, a completely accidental event is in your movie. Do you keep it? Do you use that shot, or do you film another one? Your film is going to be slightly different whichever TAKE you choose. (A take is a single recording of a shot. If the director doesn’t like something that occurs in Take 1, she may run the shot again by calling out “Take 2”—and again and again —“Take 22”—“Take 35”—“Take 59”—until she is ready to call “print!”) If you’re making the kind of film in which everything is formally strict and controlled, then you probably don’t want the bird. If however you’re trying to capture a kind of random and unpredictable quality, then your little bird accident is perfect. When film students discuss your work, they’ll be talking about the bird—the significance of random events of nature, perhaps even the symbolism of flight. That bird is now part of your film’s mise-en-scene, and it’s expressing something —whether you want it to or not. Whether critics or audiences at the multiplex specifically notice it or not, it’s there. It’s a part of the art work. It’s in the film, and therefore it has expressive meaning.

Here’s an example from a real film called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1953 musical comedy starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. There’s a scene in which Jane Russell performs a musical number with a crew of athletes on the American Olympic team. The number was supposed to end with a couple of the muscle boys diving over Jane Russell’s shoulders as she sits by the side of a swimming pool. As it turned out, however, one of the actors accidentally kicked her in the head as he attempted to dive over her into the pool. With the camera still running, the film’s glamorous star got knocked violently into the water and came up looking like the proverbial drowned rat. It was obviously an accident. But the director, Howard Hawks, decided to use that take instead of any of the accident-free retakes he and his choreographer subsequently filmed. Something about the accident appealed to Hawks’s sensibility: it expressed

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something visually about sex and sex roles and gender and animosity and the failure of romance. There’s a sudden and shocking shift in mise-en-scene, as Jane Russell goes from being the classically made- up Hollywood movie star in a carefully composed shot to being dunked in a pool and coming up sputtering for air, her hair all matted down, and improvising the end of the song. Hawks liked that version better; it said what he wanted to say, even though it happened entirely by chance. The shot, initially a mistake, took on expressive meaning through its inclusion in the film. SUBJECT-CAMERA DISTANCE—WHY IT MATTERS At the end of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), an aging star turns to her director and utters the famous line, “I’m ready for my close-up.” But what exactly is a close-up? Or a long shot? And why do these terms matter?

One way directors have of providing expressive shading to each shot they film is to vary the distance between the camera and the subject being filmed. Every rule has its exceptions, of course, but in general, the closer the camera is to the subject, the more emotional weight the subject gains. (To be more precise, it’s really a matter of how close the camera’s lens makes the subject seem to be; this is because a camera’s lens may bring the subject closer optically even when the camera is physically far away from the subject. See the glossary’s definition of TELEPHOTO LENS for clarification.) If we see an empty living room and hear the sound of a telephone ringing on the soundtrack but we can’t immediately find the telephone onscreen, the call may seem relatively unimportant. But if the director quickly cuts to a CLOSE-UP of the telephone, suddenly the phone call assumes great significance. Because the director has moved the camera close to it, the phone—once lost in the living room set—becomes not only isolated within the room but enormous on the screen.

A close-up is a shot that isolates an object in the image, making it appear relatively large. A close-up of a human being is generally of that person’s face. An extreme close-up might be of the person’s

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eyes—or mouth—or nose—or any element isolated at very close range in the image.

Other subject-camera-distance terms are also simple and self- explanatory. A MEDIUM SHOT appears to be taken from a medium distance; in terms of the human body, it’s from the waist up. A THREEQUARTER SHOT takes in the human body from just below the knees; a FULL SHOT is of the entire human body. A LONG SHOT appears to be taken from a long distance. Remember: lenses are able to create the illusion of distance or closeness. A director could conceivably usea telephoto lens on a camera that is rather distant from the subject and still create a close-up. The actual physical position of the camera at the time of the filming isn’t the issue—it’s what the image looks like onscreen that matters. The critical task is not to try to determine where the camera was actually placed during filming, or whether a telephoto lens was used to create the shot, but rather to begin to notice the expressive results of subject-camera distance onscreen.

There are gradations. You can have medium close-ups, taken from the chest up; extreme long shots, which show the object or person at a vast distance surrounded by a great amount of the surrounding space. If, at the end of a western, the final shot of the film is an extreme long shot of an outlaw riding off alone into the desert, the director may be using the shot to convey the character’s isolation from civilization, his solitude; we would see him in the far distance surrounded by miles of empty desert. Imagine how different we would feel about this character if, instead of seeing him in extreme long shot, we saw his weather-beaten face in close-up as the final image of the film. We would be emotionally as well as physically closer to him at that moment because we would be able to read into his face the emotions he was feeling. His subtlest expressions—a slightly raised eyebrow, a tensing of the mouth—would fill the screen.

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FIGURE 1.1 Extreme close-up: a single eye dominates the image.

FIGURE 1.2 Close-up: the character’s face fills most of the screen.

FIGURE 1.3 Medium shot: the character appears from the waist up.

FIGURE 1.4 Long shot: because the camera has moved back even further, the character now appears in a complete spatial context.

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FIGURE 1.5 Extreme long shot: the camera is now very far away from the character, thereby dwarfing him onscreen. What are the emotionally expressive qualities of each of these illustrations (figs. 1.1 through 1.5)?

Here’s a final observation on subject-camera distance: Each film

establishes its own shot scale, just as each filmmaker establishes his or her own style. Whereas Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941) employs an extreme close-up of Kane’s lips as he says the key word, “Rosebud,” Howard Hawks would never push his camera so close to a character’s mouth and isolate it in that way. The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer shot his masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) almost entirely in closeups; as a result, what would be a long shot for Dreyer might be a medium shot for John Ford or Billy Wilder. If we begin with the idea that the human body is generally the measure for subject-camera distance, then the concept’s relativity becomes clear: a close-up is only a close-up in relation to something else—the whole body, for example. The same holds true for objects and landscape elements. In short, we must appreciate the fact that subject-camera distances are relative both within individual films—the sequence in Citizen Kane that includes the extreme close-up of Kane uttering “Rosebud” begins with an equally extreme long shot of his mansion—and from film to film: Dreyer’s close-ups differ in scale from those used by Ford or Wilder. CAMERA ANGLE In addition to subject-camera distance, directors employ different camera angles to provide expressive content to the subjects they film. When directors simply want to film a person or room or landscape

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from an angle that seems unobtrusive and normal (whatever the word normal actually means), they place the camera at the level of an adult’s eyes, which is to say five or six feet off the ground when the characters are standing, lower when they are seated. This, not surprisingly, is called an EYE-LEVEL SHOT.

When the director shoots his or her subjects from below, the result is a LOW-ANGLE SHOT; with a low-angle shot, the camera is in effect looking up at the subject. And when he or she shoots the subject from above, the result is a HIGH-ANGLE SHOT; the camera is looking down. An extreme overhead shot, taken seemingly from the sky or ceiling and looking straight down on the subject, is known as a BIRD’S-EYE VIEW.

The terms close-up, low-angle shot, extreme long shot, and others assume that the camera is facing the subject squarely, and for the most part shots in feature films are indeed taken straight-on. But a camera can tilt laterally on its axis, too. When the camera tilts horizontally and/or vertically it’s called a DUTCH TILT or a canted angle.

FIGURE 1.6 Eye-level shot: the camera places us at the character’s height—we’re equals.

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FIGURE 1.7 Low-angle shot: we’re looking up at her; low-angle shots sometimes aggrandize the shot’s subject.

FIGURE 1.8 High-angle shot: we’re looking down at her now; this type of shot may suggest a certain superiority over a character.

FIGURE 1.9 Bird’s-eye shot: this shot is taken from the highest possible angle. What might be the expressive consequences of this shot?

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FIGURE 1.10 Dutch tilt (or canted angle) shot: the camera is not on its normal horizontal or vertical axes, and the resulting image is off-kilter; Dutch tilts are sometimes used to suggest a character’s unbalanced mental state.

Of everything you read in this book, the opposite also may be true

at times, since every attempt to define a phenomenon necessarily reduces it by ignoring some of the quirks that make films continually interesting. There’s a fine line to tread between providing a useful basic definition that you want and need and alerting you to complications or outright contradictions that qualify the definition. This is certainly true with any discussion of the expressive tendencies of low-angle and high-angle shots. Typically, directors use low-angle shots to aggrandize their subjects. After all, “to look up to someone” means that you admire that person. And high-angle shots, because they look down on the subject, are often used

to subtly criticize the subject by making him or her seem slightly diminished, or to distance an audience emotionally from the character. At times, a camera angle can in fact distort the object onscreen. By foreshortening an object, for example, a very high angle shot does make an object or person appear smaller, while a very low angle can do the opposite. But these are just broad tendencies, and as always, the effect of a particular camera angle depends on the context in which it appears. Film scholars can point to hundreds of examples in classical cinema in which a high- or low-angle shot produces an unexpected effect. In Citizen Kane, for instance, Welles chooses to film his central character in a low-angle shot at precisely the moment of his greatest humiliation, and a technical device that is often employed to signal admiration achieves exactly the opposite effect by

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making Kane look clumsy and too big for his surroundings, and therefore more pitiable and pathetic.

FIGURE 1.11 Two-shot: the definition is self-explanatory, but note the equalizing quality of this type of shot; these two characters have the same visual weight in a single shot.

FIGURE 1.12 Three-shot: the two-shot’s socially balanced quality expands to include a third person, but note the greater subject-camera distance that goes along with it in this example.

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FIGURE 1.13 Master shot: the whole set—in this case, a dining room—and all the characters are taken in by this type of shot.

Shots can also be defined by the number of people in the image.

Were a director to call for a close-up of his protagonist, the assumption would be that a single face would dominate the screen. When a director sets up a TWO-SHOT, he or she creates a shot in which two people appear, generally in medium distance or closer, though of course there can be two-shots of a couple or other type of pair walking that would reveal more of their lower bodies. The point is that two- shots are dominated spatially by two people, making them ideal for conversations.

A THREE-SHOT, of course, contains three people—not three people surrounded by a crowd, but three people who are framed in such a way as to constitute a distinct group.

Finally, a MASTER SHOT is a shot taken from a long distance that includes as much of the set or location as possible as well all the characters in the scene. For example, a scene set in a dining room could be filmed in master shot if the camera was placed so that it captured the whole dining table, at least two of the four walls, all of the

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people sitting around the table, and maybe the bottom of a chandelier hanging over the table. The director could run the entire scene from beginning to end and, later, intercut close-ups, two-shots, and three- shots for visual variation and dramatic emphasis. SPACE AND TIME ON FILM Like dance and theater, film is an art of both space and time. Choreographers move their dancers around a stage for a given amount of time, and so do theater directors with their actors. But a dance can run slower or faster some nights, especially if it isn’t connected to a piece of music. And if the actors in a play skip some of their lines or even talk faster than usual in a given performance, the play can run shorter some nights than others.

But a 110-minute film will be a 110-minute film every time it is screened, whether on the silver screen at a multiplex or on a standardspeed DVD player in your living room. This is because sound film runs at a standard 24 frames per second, and it does so not only through the camera when each shot is individually filmed but also through the projector when it is played in a theater. In the early days of cinema, camera operators cranked the film through their cameras by hand at a speed hovering as close as possible between 16 and 18 frames per second. If camera operators wanted to speed actions up onscreen, they would undercrank, or crank slower: fewer frames would be filmed per second, so when that footage was run through a standard projector at a standard speed, the action would appear to speed up. If they wanted to create a slow-motion effect, they would do the opposite: they would OVERCRANK, or crank faster, causing the projector to slow the movement down when the shot was projected. In short, undercranking produces fast motion, while overcranking produces slow motion.

The introduction of SYNCHRONIZED SOUND FILM—characters being seen and heard speaking at the same time onscreen—in the late 1920s meant that the IMAGE TRACKS and the SOUNDTRACKS had to be both recorded and projected at the same speed so as to avoid

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distortion. 24 frames per second was the standard speed that the industry chose. You’ll learn more about sound technology in chapter 5. And although videotape—unlike film’s celluloid—is not divided into individual frames, the same principle applies: video’s electromagnetic tape is recorded at the same speed at which it is transmitted and screened. A 60-minute video will always run 60 minutes—no more, no less.

There is a philosophical point to film’s technical apprehension of time. Unlike any other art form, motion pictures capture a seemingly exact sense of real time passing. As the great Hollywood actor James Stewart once described it, motion pictures are like “pieces of time.” Then again, a distinction must be made between real time, the kind measured by clocks, and reel time—the pieces of time that, for example, Spike Lee manipulated by editing to create Malcolm X, a film that covers the central events of a 39-year-old man’s life in 202 minutes.

One familiar complication, of course, is that when films are shown on television they are often LEXICONNED to fit them into a time slot and squeeze in more commercials. Lexiconning involves speeding up the standard 24 frames per second by a matter of hundredths of a frame per second, which may shorten the film as much by as 6 or 7 percent of its total running time. Also note the familiar warning that accompanies movies on TV: “Viewer discretion is advised. The following film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen and edited to run in the time slot allotted and for content.” People who love films hate this Procrustean process. (Procrustes was a mythical king who had a bed to which he strapped and tortured his victims. Those who were too short for the bed were stretched to fit it, and those too tall had their heads and legs chopped off.) Would an art gallery trim the top, bottom, and sides of a painting just so it would fit into a preexisting frame?

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FIGURE 1.14 A strip of celluloid, divided by frames, with the soundtrack running vertically down the left alongside the image frames.

COMPOSITION One confusing aspect of film studies terminology is that the word FRAME has two distinct meanings. The first, described above, refers to each individual rectangle on which a single image is photographed as the strip of celluloid runs through a projector. That’s what we’re talking about when we say that film is recorded and projected at 24 frames per second: 24 of those little rectangles are first filled with photographic images when they are exposed to light through a lens, and then these frames are projected at the same speed onto a screen.

But the word frame also describes the borders of the image onscreen—the rectangular frame of darkness on the screen that defines the edge of the image the way a picture frame defines a framed painting or photograph. Sometimes, in theaters, the screen’s frame will be further defined by curtains or other masking. Your television set’s frame is the metal or plastic edge that surrounds the glass screen. In fact, you can make threequarters of a frame as you sit reading this book simply by holding your hands in front of you, palms out, and bringing your thumbs together. The top of this handmade frame is open, but you can get a good sense of why the frame is an important artistic concept in the cinema just by looking around your room and framing various objects or even yourself in a mirror.

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Note that your literally handmade frame is more or less a square if you keep your thumbs together. Now create a wider rectangle by touching your right forefinger to your left thumb and vice versa. See how this framing changes the way the room looks. And be aware of the subjectcamera distance and camera angle of the imaginary shots you create. Ask yourself why certain “shots” look better than others. Do you find that you have a taste for oblique angle close-ups, for example, or do you see the world more at eye level?

The precise arrangements of objects and characters within the frame—the picture-frame kind of frame—is called COMPOSITION. Each time you moved your handmade frame, you created a new composition, even if you didn’t move any objects around on your desk or ask your roommate to move further away.