Leonard / Flynn Nerves in Patterns on a Screen

An Introduction to Film Studies
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9878062-4-6
Verlag: Flynnard
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 244 Seiten

Movies offer us images (and usually sounds) that 'throw our nerves in patterns on a screen' (Eliot). In other words, they express the neurological hyperactivity of modern subjects. Films are affect machines, in this respect. Each has its own heartbeat (narrative highs and lows), dramatic expansions and contractions (montage), and changing patterns and light (cinematography). The following chapters looks at films that have made impacts both in the history of film and, more broadly, in historical events of the Twentieth Century. Each chapter explores the ways in which modernity (the socio-historical, economic, and cultural context of the films) intersects with film content (character, plot, and various mise-en-scène elements that are part of the film's narrative) and with cinematic form (camera angles, shot types, editing, lighting, sound, and other cinematic elements that are not part of the story itself) in web-like relationships. At the same time, each chapter will consider the diachronic (across linear time) dynamic whereby films influenced their time and vice-versa. By looking at the way audience's own understanding of characters or events were (and continue to be) influenced by, for instance, German Expressionistic settings or Russian Formalist montage, we can learn a lot about how subjects were (and continue to be) 'directed' to see the world and to view themselves in it. By honing this ability to view films critically and consciously through a study of over 20 important films produced from 1895-2013, we can begin to identify the elements that have made film among the most powerful art forms of the 20th century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leonard, Garry

Flynn, Deirdre

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Arts of Exposure: From Still Photography to Way Down East In “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema” (New York Time Review of Books, 15 Aug. 2013) Martin Scorcese responds to a hypothetical critique of cinema: Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life. Scorcese here addresses three aspects of cinema that drew him personally to film and that have made film the preeminent art form of the 20th century: first, the often emotional relationship between film viewers and the movies they see; second, the “power” of cinematic language; and third, the “ongoing dialogue” between “film and life.” Cinema’s First Vision: Using light to project things moving through time and space These three factors were actually the catalyst and converter for the invention of moving pictures and for every innovation since. Cinema’s First Vision—using light to project things moving through time and space—was, in fact, triggered by a bet, so the intended viewer was both emotionally and financially invested in the “film.” The bet was made by a California Governor in 1872 (Leland Stanford), and it involved horses: do they lift all their feet while trotting and galloping, or do they keep at least one foot on the ground at all times. Stanford bet that horses lifted all the feet at some point, but he was not able to prove this due to the blurring effect of motion. He hired Edward Muybridge to use photography to do what the naked eye could not do: a single image made Stanford the winner, showing that horses are airborn at points when they trot and gallop. In the process of doing this work, Muybridge saw something remarkable: he could create a moving effect by quickly moving each still image (he had placed cameras at intervals along the track, such that when the horse hit a string, the camera snapped a shot) by placing them on a glass disk and spinning this disk in front of a light source. He called this device a zoopraxiscope and described it as follows: “[I]t is the first apparatus ever used, or constructed, for synthetically demonstrating movements analytically photographed from life, and in its resulting effects is the prototype of the various instruments which, under a variety of names, are used for a similar purpose at the present day” (Animals in Motion). The zoopraxiscope was an intermediary device between the “magic lanterns” of the seventeenth century and the first moving-picture-camera (the cinematograph), which was eventually created six year later. The zoopraxiscope created a new effect—not of images projected on walls, but of animals moving through time and space. This device pushed innovation, as photographers and scientists around the world started toying with moving image machines. The American inventor Thomas Edison was immediately working on such devices, as was the British photographer William Friese-Greene, whom Scorcese mentions as inspirational. In fact, the two were in a heated race to create the first movie camera. Friese-Green was fascinated by the old-fashioned magic lantern and he took this as a point of departure for his obsessive work creating a moving image, something he actually succeeded in doing, but only at great expense. Indeed, he patented his “chronophotgraphic camera,” but then he went bankrupt and had to sell it. It eventually ran out. Meanwhile back in the US, Edison was developing the kinetascope, which he first showed in prototype 1891, adding a sound-element in 1895 (in what he called the kinetaphone). Edison’s kinetascope was a big attraction at circuses. You’d put in a coin and stand and watch the moving image through a hole. In many ways, it’s like watching a short, funny cat video on Youtube, only without the endless ability to link to another one. It also paves the way for one side-trajectory in cinema’s evolution toward the narrative art form it became—that being the cinema of attraction. This type of cinema is by no means “gone,” as my Youtube reference suggests. In fact, as we will see in later chapters, elements of this cinema of attraction will later arise in avant-garde cinematic practices aimed at disrupting viewers’ experience of being inside a story-world when watching a film. However, before the power of narrative film could be challenged, it had to be established. The race was on, and, at first, it was mostly a race of technological innovation. In the lead were two sets of brothers: the German brothers, the Skladanowsky’s and some French brothers, the Lumière brothers. Both were scrambling to develop something better than Edison’s peephole. They wanted to be able to project the image on a screen, as you could with Friese-Greene’s chronophotographic camera. It seemed that the Skladanowsky brothers had beaten the Lumière brothers when they held a screening in Berlin on November of 1895, with something they called the Bioscop. There was a problem, though. They didn’t perforate the edges of the celluloid so they had little control of the speed of the projection, and the audience was unimpressed. Two months later, the Lumière Brothers figured it all out. In December of 1895 they held a screening in Paris with their device: the cinématographe. Suddenly you could shoot film, develop film, and project it all in the time it took to set up your tripod and camera. The creative possibilities were endless, but only if you think about the device creatively, as one through which to create art and communicate experiences. This is something the Lumière brothers did not fully realize when they made and screened “Train Arriving at the Station” or “Workers Leaving a Factory,” although they inadvertently set the stage for such narrative film by creating a stable viewing-point for the camera and by suggesting the possibility of a backstory and future-story as characters enter and exit the shot. Instead, they viewed the cinématographe in the context of the cinema of attraction. Gunning alludes to this “common view” as “a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès), and exoticism.” In hindsight we can see that the narrative possibilities for this new camera are endless, but at the time both brothers saw the cinema as a means to expose viewers to some new vision of reality. For this reason, they saw cinema as “a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever” (Louis Lumière). This is arguably one of the least correct predictions in modern history. How could the primary inventors of cinema as a commercial form have been so wrong about their own invention? The short answer might be that they were inventors, not sociologists or artists. They were innovators at the cutting edge in one field and of the technology available to them (the camera was heavy, so difficult to move; the lenses were primitive, with no capacity for zooming or shifting angles, and editing was not yet conceived, so one roll of film was shot for each film). Despite these limitations, the Lumière brothers do give evidence of cinematic genius in “Train entering the Station. For instance, the location of the camera is at a deliberate angle so that the train “arrives.” The very notion of having it “arrive” rather than “being there” is an early discovery of how to involve an audience, how to make them feel like an audience. Many if not most of the people seeing this film had never seen a film before, so they had no idea how to “watch” it, but all of them had gone to a train station to await the arrival of someone. So the Lumières constructed a viewing position for the audience. This was new, as Scorcese notes in his article: The Lumière brothers weren’t just setting up the camera to record events or scenes. This film is composed. When you study it, you can see how carefully they placed the camera, the thought that went into what was in the frame and what was left out of the frame, the distance between the camera and the train, the height of the camera, the angle of the camera—what’s interesting is that if the camera had been placed even a little bit differently, the audience probably wouldn’t have reacted the way it did. Scorcese pinpoints three critical elements that the Lumière Brothers implemented from their first films: they used light (and darkness); they created a sense of movement, and they created a sense of time. All these elements come into play and position the viewer in a different reality; they create, in other words, the “reality effect” of cinema. They also suggest a fundamental destabilizing vision with respect to objective reality: namely, they show that reality is an effect of one’s constructed viewpoint. In train entering the station, a subject position is created for the audience—an effect of reality is created. However, it is then broken as people exit the frame, making clear that it is a frame, that there is a camera, and that this camera is mechanically recording what...