260MC: Placing your media production in context- film movements

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PART 1

Soviet Montage 1925-1930 (The Battleship Potemkin 1925)

Russian Revolution-1917, political, economical, social change

  • Marxist influenced socialism
  • Film Production nationalised after the Bolshevik Revolution.
  • Moscow film school- opened 1919, first dedicated film school-need for political propaganda (AgitProp)

“Of all the arts, for us, the cinema is the most important” Lenin

D.W Griffiths (1916)

Lev Kuleshov- founder Moscow film school

1920s experimentation

dissects and reconstructs Griffith’s intolerance discovering that reordering the images creates new meaning, meaning created through the assembly or montage shots.

By the combination of two “depictable” is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable.

“Down with the bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios. Lon live life as it is!” Dziga Vertov

Sergei Eisenstein

  • Metric Montage-edits based on length of shot
  • Rhythmic Montage– based on length and rhythm of action in shot
  • Tonal Montage– based on action, length, lighting and shape
  • Overtonal Montage– combined all above refers to how entire sequences relate to one another
  • Intellectual Montage– transcending the emotional response

Collision

“The shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage by what, then, is montage characterised and consequently its the cell by shot, by collision, by the conflict of two in opposition to each other.” Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein:

  • Strike
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • October
  • Alexander Nevky

Vsevold Pudovkin

  • Mother
  • The end of St Petersburg

Part 2

Italian Neorealism and Modernism “Facts as they are”

  • Highly contested term
  • showing “things as they are”- but what constitutes the real?
  • Chantal Akerman “When you try to show reality in cinema, most of the time its totally false, but when you show what’s going on in people’s minds that’s very cinematic.”
  • Andre Bazin “Realism in cinema can only be achieved through artifice.”
  • Conventions of realism change over time

Traces of realism in Italian Neorealism

  • Ceare Zavattini “realism is about embracing the contemporary”
  • Ceare Zavattini “facts as they are”
  • European Art Cinema- post war cinema that explored the ambiguities of representing reality on screen
  • EAC- developed in opposition to the Classical Hollywood’s cinema to create the ILLUSION of the reality

Definition:

  • 1943-1952
  • A reaction against the Hollywood-influences artificially of the pre-war and Fascist Italian Cinema (highly stylised ‘white telephone dramas’)
  • Roberto Rossellini “There are many kinds of neorealism; everyone has its own. Mine was a position, an effort to understand myself inside the phenomenon.”
  • Andre Bazin “Neorealism as both aesthetic

10 points of italian neorealism

  1. Cinema is a way of expression and communication on the true sense of this word.
  2. Topical scripts inspired by concrete events.
  3. A sense of detail as a means of authentication
  4. A sense of the masses and the ability to surprise or manipulate them in front of the camera.
  5. Realism but reality is filtered by a delicate e sensitivity.
  6. The truth of actors often non professionals
  7. The truth of decor and a refusal of the studio
  8. The truth of lighting
  9. Photography reminiscent of the reportage style stresses the impression of truth.
  10. An extremely free e camera; its unrestricted movements result from the use of post synchronizations.

According to Bazin… (visual devices)

  • As little editing as possible
  • Directors who put their faith in reality
  • Depth of field (deep focus) as an ultimate expression of the illusion of reality cinema (as opposed to fast cutting of soviet)

An aesthetic of reality

  • refusal of the ideology of fascism
  • revolutionary humanism
  • realism that is based not no a phyiscal notion of reality but a psychological notion

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini-1948)

  • Ruined Berlin corressponds with little Edmund’s state of mind

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica-1948

Part 3

French New Wave (1959-1968)

Cahiers Du Cinema (film magazine founded by Andre Bazin)

Francois Truffaut

  • The 400 Blows
  • Shoot the Piano Player
  • Jules and Jim
  • The Soft SKin
  • Fahrenheit 51
  • The Bride wore black

Jean Luc Goddard “Every story has a beginning, middle and an end but not necessarily in that order”

  • The Little Soldier
  • A woman is a woman
  • Alphaville
  • 2 or 3 thigns I know about her
  • Contempt
  • Band of Outsider
  • Masculine Feminine
  • Pierrot le fou
  • Breathless
  • La Chinoise
  • Weekend
  • Fin de Cinema

Part 4

Dogme 95- 20th May 1995… Odeon Cinema, Paris

  • Lars Von Trier
  • Thomas Vinterburg
  • Kristian Levring

Rules

  • Shooting must be done on location, props and sets must not be bought in
  • The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa
  • The camera be hand held
  • The film must in colour
  • Optical work and filters are forbidden
  • No superficial action
  • no temporal geographical alienation
  • no genre movies
  • ratio must be 4:3
  • Director must not be credited

Werner Herzog- Just put on this dress

11:00-12:00 Film movements

13:00-14:00 Guest Lecture ETG34

14:00-15:00 Tutorials-Basement

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