Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- What are your critical principles in watching films? Choose a most excellent film. What are your standards for establishing excellence in films?
It may be that we naturally identify with heroes in films, as we do in books. The characters played by extremely charismatic actors, like Jennifer Lopez or Matt Damon, almost always appeal to some aspect of our personalities, even if sometimes that aspect is frightening. Such may be the source, for instance, of the appeal of hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (Figure 12-3), in which Anthony hopkins not only appears as a cannibal but actually gets away with it, identifying his former doctor as his next victim, whose liver he plans to eat with some “fava beans and a nice Chianti.” FIGURE 12-3 Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). ©Orion/Kobal/rEX/Shutterstock jac16871_ch12_299-329.indd 304 12/11/17 11:58 AM 305
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There are two kinds of participative experiences with film. One is not princi- pally filmic in nature and is represented by a kind of self-indulgence that depends on self-justifying fantasies. We imagine ourselves as James Bond, for example, and ignore the interrelationship of the major elements of the film. The other kind of participation evolves from an acute awareness of the details and their interrela- tionships. This second kind of participative experience means much more to us ultimately because it is significantly informative: We understand the content by means of the form. The filM iMage The starting point of film is the moving image. Just as still photographs and paint- ings can move us profoundly by their organization of visual elements, so can such images when they are set to motion. Indeed, many experts insist that no ar- tistic medium ever created has the power to move us as deeply as the medium of moving images. They base their claim not just on the mass audiences who have been profoundly stirred but also on the fact that the moving images of the film are similar to the moving images we perceive in life. We rarely perceive static images, except when viewing such things as paintings or photographs. Watch- ing a film closely can help us perceive much more intensely the visual worth of many of the images we experience outside film. Charlie Chaplin is evoked in someone walking in a jaunty, jumpy fashion with his feet turned out. There is a very long tracking shot in Weekend (1967), by Jean-Luc Godard, of a road piled up with wrecked or stalled cars. The camera glides along, nervelessly imaging the gridlock with fires and smoke and seemingly endless corpses scattered here and there along the roadsides—unattended. The stalled and living motorists are obsessed with getting to their vacation resorts. The horns honk and honk. The unbelievable elongation of the procession and the utter grotesqueness of the scenes evoke black humor at its extreme. If in reality we have to face anything even remotely similar, the intensity of our vision inevitably will be heightened if we have seen Weekend. EXPERIENCING Still Frames and Photography Study Figures 12-1 through 12-8. How would you evaluate these stills with reference to tightness of composition? For example, do the details and parts interrelate so that any change would disrupt the unity of the totality? Compare with Figure 2-2. The still from The Lady from Shanghai (1947) in Figure 12-4 is carefully com- posed, a classic Hollywood close-up of Rita Hayworth, who plays Elsa Bannister. Orson Welles directed and acted in what has become a highly regarded example of film noir (dark film), a genre that usually involves crime and violence and is shot in sometimes threatening black and white. The emphasis on darkness reflects the attitude of the characters toward society, which is portrayed as ruthless, deceitful, and profoundly dangerous. Rita Hayworth is a “trophy wife” of Arthur Bannister, jac16871_ch12_299-329.indd 305 12/11/17 11:58 AM Movement in motion pictures is caused by the physiological limitations of the eye. It cannot perceive the black line between frames when they move rapidly. All it sees is the succession of frames minus the lines that divide them, for the eye cannot perceive separate images or frames that move faster than one-thirtieth of a second. The images are usually projected at a speed of twenty-four frames per second, and the persistence of vision merges them. This is the “language” of the camera. Because of this language, many filmmakers, both early and contemporary, at- tempt to design each individual frame as carefully as they might a photograph. (See “photography and painting: The pictorialists” in Chapter 11.) Jean renoir, the famous French filmmaker and son of painter pierre-Auguste, sometimes composed frames like a tightly unified painting, as in The Grand Illusion (1936) and The Rules of the Game (1939). Sergei Eisenstein also framed many of his images especially carefully, notably in Battleship Potemkin (1925). David Lean, who directed Brief Encounter (1945), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962, rereleased 1988), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Ryan’s Daughter (1970), also paid close attention to the composition of individual frames. Sam Worthington is Jake Sully in Avatar (Figure 12-5) and, despite being a spy whose avatar is gathering intel that would find the Na’vi weakness, falls in love with Neytiri. he ultimately joins the Na’vi and his brain is placed in his avatar permanently. In the still we see the tenderness in Neytiri and the strength in a strange, crippled criminal lawyer. His partner, George Grisby, has apparently concocted a scheme to kill Bannis- ter while appearing to have been murdered himself. The complexity of the plot is standard in film noir, and in The Lady from Shanghai Orson Welles plays Michael O’Hara, an Irish sailor who, despite his better judgment, signs up on Bannister’s yacht as an able seaman to pilot the boat through the Panama Canal to San Francisco. Grisby con- vinces O’Hara to pretend to murder him but never hints at his true motives. O’Hara follows through, but the situ- ation becomes complicated by Grisby’s murder and O’Ha- ra’s arrest. Because he had signed a confession, he is put on trial and Bannister defends him, without thinking he could get him off. O’Hara breaks out of the courthouse and is followed by Elsa, who hides him in Chinatown. O’Hara is drugged by Elsa’s Chinese friends and, when he wakes, realizes that Elsa has killed Grisby and originally intended to murder Ban- nister and pin the crime on O’Hara. The film ends with a dramatic encounter in a hall of mirrors funhouse, where nothing is what it seems to be. The 1940s film noir classics reflect a social unrest and unease in the face of dramatic change. The old order, so to speak, had given over to a new and unknown reality, all reflected in stark black and white. The close-up of Elsa reveals both the attraction of beauty and the potential for evil and destruction. FIGURE 12-4 The Lady from Shanghai (1947). This still from the film shows the use of strong light and dark shadow to intensify the allure and potential danger of Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), who is the mysterious lady from Shanghai. This chiaroscuro style distinguishes the entire film. Source: Columbia pictures 306 jac16871_ch12_299-329.indd 306 12/11/17 11:58 AM 307
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Jake’s avatar. Their relationship is emphasized by their overlapping figures and their isolation from the blurred figures in the background. By contrast, Figure 12-6 from Citizen Kane shows the emptiness of the relationship of Charles Foster Kane and his wife, Emily, who seem almost unaware of each other. The angle of the shot emphasizes their separation. The cluttered details in the background are in sharp focus, reminding us that physical objects are of utmost importance in Kane’s life. FIGURE 12-5 Avatar (2009). A close-up shot from the film, which was written and directed by James Cameron, with Zoe Saldana as Neytiri and Sam Worthington as Jake Sully. ©Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/ Kobal/rEX/Shutterstock FIGURE 12-6 Citizen Kane (1941). Kane (Orson Welles) and his first wife, Emily (Ruth Warrick), near the end of their marriage, are seen in a shot that emphasizes the distance between them both physically and emotionally. Placing the camera so far below the table produced an unsettling moment in the film. ©rKO/Kobal/rEX/Shutterstock jac16871_ch12_299-329.indd 307 12/11/17 11:58 AM 308 ChApTEr 12 Avatar is available as a regular film, but it was heavily advertised and projected in 3-D. Three-dimensional films have been a promise for more than a decade, but very few have been effective for more than the occasional shock value of objects flying at the viewer. Avatar, because of its setting in a hyperreal landscape and its flying mythical creatures, is more effective than most 3-D films. So far, it seems to be the most successful of such films. For some directors, the still frames of the film must be as exactly composed as a painting. The theory is that if the individual moments of the film are each as perfect as can be, the total film will be a cumulative perfection. This seems to be the case only for some films. In films that have long, meditative sequences, such as Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) or Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972), or se- quences in which characters or images are relatively unmoving for significant peri- ods of time, such as robert redford’s A River Runs Through It (1994), the carefully composed still image may be significant. Nevertheless, no matter how powerful, most stills from fine films will reveal very little of the significance of the entire film all by themselves: It is their sequential movement that brings out their effectiveness. however, the still frame and the individual shot are the building blocks of film. Controlling the techniques that produce and interrelate these blocks is the first job of the film artist. caMera PoinT of view The motion in the motion picture can come from numerous sources. The actors can move toward, away from, or across the field of camera vision. When something moves toward the camera, it moves with astonishing speed, as we all know from watching the images of a moving locomotive (the favorite vehicle for this technique so far) rush at us and then “catapult over our heads.” The effect of the catapult is noteworthy because it is a unique characteristic of the film medium. people move before us the way they move before the camera, but the cam- era (or cameras) can achieve visual things that the unaided eye cannot: showing the same moving action from a number of points of view simultaneously, for instance, or showing it from a camera angle the eye cannot achieve. The realistic qualities of a film can be threatened, however, by being too sensational, with a profusion of shots that would be impossible in a real-life situation. Although such virtuoso effects can dazzle us at first, the feeling of being dazzled can degenerate into being dazed. Another way the film portrays motion is by the movement or tracking of the camera. In a sequence in John huston’s The Misfits (1961), cowboys are round- ing up wild mustangs to sell for dog food, and some amazing scenes were filmed with the camera mounted on a pickup truck chasing fast-running horses. The mo- tion in these scenes is overwhelming because huston combines two kinds of rapid motion—of trucks and of horses. Moreover, the motion is further increased because of the narrow focus of the camera and the limited boundary of the screen. The recorded action excludes vision that might tend to distract or to dilute the motion we are permitted to see. Much the same effect was achieved in the buffalo run in Dances with Wolves (1990) thirty years later. The screen in motion pictures always constrains our vision, even when we imagine the space beyond the screen that we jac16871_ch12_299-329.indd 308 12/11/17 11:58 AM 309
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do not see, as when a character moves off the filmed space. Eliminating the space beyond the images recorded by the camera circumscribes and fixes our attention. And such attention enhances the rapidity and intensity of the moving images. A final basic way film can achieve motion is by means of the camera lens. Even when the camera is fixed in place, a lens that affords a much wider, nar- rower, larger, or smaller field of vision than the eye normally supplies will give the illusion of motion, since we instinctively feel the urge to be in the physical position that would supply that field of vision. Zoom lenses, which change their focal length along a smooth range—thus moving images gradually closer or far- ther away—are even more effective for suggesting motion. One favorite shot is that of a figure walking or moving in some fashion, which looks, at first, as if it were a medium shot but which is actually revealed as a long shot when the zoom is reversed. Since our own eyes cannot imitate the action of the zoom lens, the effect can be quite dramatic when used creatively. It is something like the ef- fect that slow motion or stop motion has on us. It interrupts our perceptions of something—something that had seemed perfectly natural—in a way that makes us aware of the film medium itself. PERCEPTION KEY Camera Vision 1. Directors frequently examine a scene with a viewfinder that “frames” the scene be- fore their eyes. Make or find a simple frame (or use your hands to create a “frame”) and examine the visual world about you. To what extent can you frame it to make it more interesting?