Review of Movie Clips

Conventions of Narrative Cinema

Cinematic Conventions

• A set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards

• These standards or rules create an agreed upon film language that helps the viewer interpret a series of shots as a story.

Shot Scene Sequence

• Shot: A single stream of images, uninterrupted by editing.

• Scene / Sequence: A scene is a segment (series of shots) of a narrative film that usually takes place in a single time and place, often with the same characters. Sometimes a single scene may contain two lines of action, occurring in different spaces or even different times, that are related by means of crosscutting. Scene and sequence can usually be used interchangeably, though the latter term can also refer to a longer segment of film that does not obey the spatial and temporal unities of a single scene. For example, a montage sequence that shows in a few shots a process that occurs over a period of time.

• Sequence: as opposed to scene: You may find that combination of shots which contain Parallel editing or montage referred to as Sequences rather than scenes, because they contain more than one location.

Examples of Cinematic Conventions

• Continuity or Classical Hollywood Editing

• Montage

• Genre

• The 4th Wall

• Camera Moves

• anything we have discussed in class so far

Story Conventions

• Protagonist

• Will meets obstacle

• Conflict

• Protagonist overcomes obstacle

• Resolution

• Secondary Story Element: Disconnection/Connection

Genre

• refers to the method of film categorization based in similarities between narrative elements

• Action*Adventure*Comedy*Documentary*Noir*Horror*Romance*Sport*Thriller*War*Western

• What are qualities of each of these genres?

• Have any of these films defied any of these qualities (conventions)?

Montage

• approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing

• “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form"

• Metric

• Rhythmic

• Tonal

• Overtonal

• Intellectual

Intellectual Montage

• In The Godfather, during Michael's nephew's baptism, the priest performs the sacrament of baptism while we see killings ordered by Michael take place elsewhere. The murders thus "baptize" Michael into a life of crime.

•At the end of Apocalypse Now the execution of Colonel Kurtz is juxtaposed with the villagers' slaughter of a water buffalo.

• Eisenstein argues that montage, especially intellectual montage, is an alternative system to continuity editing. He argued that "Montage is conflict" (dialectical) where new ideas, emerge from the collision of the montage sequence (synthesis) and where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of the edited sequence. A new concept explodes into being. His understanding of montage, thus, illustrates Marxist dialectics.

Kuleshov Effect

The montage of a film, he (Lev Kuleshov) felt, overrode all other aspects of filmmaking, making them irrelevant.Mozhukhin isn't actually looking at anything and expresses no emotion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY

Montage (Classical Hollywood)

•is a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. It is usually used to suggest the passage of time, rather than to create symbolic meaning as it does in Soviet montage theory.

Parallel Editing

•Editing two different scenes together to suggest simultaneity

•Birth of a Nation, DW Griffith 1915

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-7SVbLjBw&feature=PlayList&p=6AEB00691FF061B4&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=4

Mise en scène

•literally means "putting on stage."

•everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting.

•Figure Behavior

•Sound Stage vs. Location

Diegetic vs. Non-Diegetic Sound

•Diegetic: Sound that can be heard by the cast member: Ambient Music, Ambient Sounds, Dialogue and some Sound Effects

•Non-Diegetic: Score, Voiceover Narration and some Sound Effects

Identification vs. Alienation

• Hollywood cinematic conventions engage the viewers to the point where they are almost “lost” in the movie

• Alienation: cinematic conventions are broken, so that the viewer may feel aware of the fact that they are watching the film

• Why is one better than the other?

• Bertholt Brecht: Threepenny Opera (1928)

• Unintentional Alienation?

Conventions of Documentary

•Talking head interview

•B-Roll

•Narrative Documentary?