Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique - Brossura

Fabe, Marilyn

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0520279972 ISBN 13: 9780520279971

Casa editrice: University of California Press, 2017

Riassunto

How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch. Ranging from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to James Cameron’s Avatar, and ending with an epilogue on digital media, Closely Watched Films focuses on exemplary works of fourteen film directors whose careers together span the history of the narrative film. Lively and down-to-earth, this concise introduction provides a broad, complete, and yet specific picture of visual narrative techniques that will increase readers' excitement about and knowledge of the possibilities of the film medium.

Shot-by-shot analyses of short passages from each film ground theory in concrete examples. Fabe includes original and well-informed discussions of Soviet montage, realism and expressionism in film form, classical and modern sound theory, the classic Hollywood film, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, auteur theory, modernism and postmodernism in film, political cinema, feminist film theory and practice, and narrative experiments in new digital media. Encompassing the earliest silent films as well as those that exploit the most recent technological innovations, this book gives us the particulars of how film—arguably the most influential of contemporary forms of representation—constitutes our pleasure, influences our thoughts, and informs our daily reality. Updated to include a discussion of 3-D and advanced special effects, this tenth anniversary edition is an essential film studies text for students and professors alike.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Marilyn Fabe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"Closely Watched Films fills a real need, educating the literate moviegoer to gain an awareness of how film works. Writing in a clear prose that is nevertheless based on a complex awareness of film history, criticism, and technique, Fabe takes us through the diverse film strategies of exemplary classic directors who have significantly shaped the history of film and made it into a potent cultural force. At the same time, she provocatively elaborates the political and aesthetic concerns of a number of contemporary films to indicate the new directions in today's motion pictures."—Claire Kahane, author of Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850-1915

"In Closely Watched Films, revered film teacher Marilyn Fabe brings to life on the page the many lessons proffered in her legendary courses at the University of California, Berkeley, in which she has taught successive generations of film students the art and the magic of film."—Linda Williams, Professor, Department of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley

"I am deeply impressed by this book and in awe of its scope. It imparts its wisdom about film with such seeming effortlessness, illuminating the ways that films work. Closely Watched Films is very lucidly and smoothly crafted, and Fabe writes with astonishing ease about a group of very complex and heterogeneous films. It is an extremely informed book and an extraordinary achievement."—Madelon Sprengnether, author of Crying at the Movies

"This text fills a real niche—the scholarship is superior, and Fabe approaches her material in an original and stimulating manner. The writing is fluid and down to earth yet also addresses relevant issues."—Tim Shively, De Anza College

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

"Closely Watched Films fills a real need, educating the literate moviegoer to gain an awareness of how film works. Writing in a clear prose that is nevertheless based on a complex awareness of film history, criticism, and technique, Fabe takes us through the diverse film strategies of exemplary classic directors who have significantly shaped the history of film and made it into a potent cultural force. At the same time, she provocatively elaborates the political and aesthetic concerns of a number of contemporary films to indicate the new directions in today's motion pictures." Claire Kahane, author of Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850-1915

"In Closely Watched Films, revered film teacher Marilyn Fabe brings to life on the page the many lessons proffered in her legendary courses at the University of California, Berkeley, in which she has taught successive generations of film students the art and the magic of film." Linda Williams, Professor, Department of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley

"I am deeply impressed by this book and in awe of its scope. It imparts its wisdom about film with such seeming effortlessness, illuminating the ways that films work. Closely Watched Films is very lucidly and smoothly crafted, and Fabe writes with astonishing ease about a group of very complex and heterogeneous films. It is an extremely informed book and an extraordinary achievement." Madelon Sprengnether, author of Crying at the Movies

"This text fills a real niche the scholarship is superior, and Fabe approaches her material in an original and stimulating manner. The writing is fluid and down to earth yet also addresses relevant issues." Tim Shively, De Anza College

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Closely Watched Films

An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique

By Marilyn Fabe

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-27997-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 The Beginnings of Film Narrative: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, 
2 The Art of Montage: Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, 
3 Expressionism and Realism in Film Form: F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Charles Chaplin's The Adventurer, 
4 The Conversion to Sound and the Classical Hollywood Film: Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, 
5 Expressive Realism: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, 
6 Italian Neorealism: Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, 
7 Auteur Theory and the French New Wave: François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, 
8 Hollywood Auteur: Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, 
9 The European Art Film: Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, 
10 Film and Postmodernism: Woody Allen's Annie Hall, 
11 Political Cinema: Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, 
12 Feminism and Film Form: Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, 
13 Digital Video and New Forms of Narrative: Mike Figgis's Timecode and James Cameron's Avatar, 
Notes, 
Glossary, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Beginnings of Film Narrative

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

D. W. GRIFFITH'S BACKGROUND AND EARLY CAREER

D.W. Griffith, arguably the most influential pioneer in the art of the narrative film, was born on a farm near La Grange, Kentucky in 1875, ten years after the Civil War. He came from a family of wealth on his mother's side. His father, known as "Roaring Jake" and "Thunder Jake" for his oratory skills, achieved glory on the battlefield as a colonel in the Civil War. But Griffith's father was also a wanderer and a gambler who left his family in debt when he died. Hence, after Griffith's mother moved the family to St. Louis, Griffith took a number of jobs to help his mother financially and never finished high school. A job at a bookstore sparked a passion for literature, and his prime ambition in life was to be a writer.

He was also, at an early age, intrigued by the theater. His eventual career as an actor, he claimed, was the result of advice he received from a stage manager who told him that a good playwright had to be an actor first. Although his literary success was limited (he produced one play and published one poem), his success as an actor was more considerable. After playing bit parts in repertory companies in St. Louis, he went on tour with various productions all over the country, often playing leading roles and receiving good notices. Eventually he settled in San Francisco where he gained steady employment and acted in better quality plays. He was on tour in Minnesota when the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 occurred. Rather than returning to the devastated city, he decided to try his fortunes as a playwright and actor in New York, where his career took an unexpected turn.

Married and short of cash, he took the advice of a colleague and approached a movie production company, the Edison Studio, for work as a scriptwriter. His scripts were too complex and expensive to produce, but film companies were eager to use stage actors because of the prestige they brought to film from the theater. Thus Griffith was hired not to write for films but to act in them. After playing a lumberjack in an Edison film directed by Edwin S. Porter, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), he got work, again as an actor, for a rival studio, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. He came at an auspicious moment. The company was flooded by the demand for short fiction films and, after a brief time acting, he was offered the opportunity to direct. Between 1908 and 1913 Griffith directed over 450 short films for the Biograph Company, molding the film medium into a sophisticated instrument for creating dramatic and suspenseful film narratives.

In order to appreciate the significance of Griffith's contribution to the creation of narrative film art, it is necessary to recall the state of the fiction film when Griffith began making movies in 1908. Film viewing by then was no longer a novelty but a regular mode of entertainment. People saw movies in small storefront theaters called nickelodeons because the price of admission was usually a nickel. Audiences saw anywhere from fifteen- to sixty-minute programs of short, mostly fiction films, lasting up to ten minutes each. But these films did not tell stories very well. They comprised a series of loosely spliced scenes or tableaus, shot with a static camera in long takes (sometimes lasting up to ninety seconds) with the camera remaining at a fixed distance from the action. The scenes proceeded in a strict chronological order, and the temporal and spatial relations between the shots were often ambiguous or unclear. The most common type of shot was the long shot, in which the human figure fills only a small portion of the lower quadrant of the frame, much as the human figure appears in the proscenium of stage dramas. In a theater, however, even though the actors may appear tiny, especially to spectators in the last row of the balcony, their words loom large, conveying dramatic excitement through the expressiveness of the human voice. This resource, of course, was not possible in the then-silent medium of film, which relied on static printed title cards to convey exposition or dialogue. Griffith found ways to compensate for the lack of spoken words, increasing the drama and emotional power of his fiction films in three ways. First, he paid close attention to elements of the filmic mise-en-scène. Second, he photographed his scenes in more imaginative ways. Third, he added complexity to his narratives through editing.

GRIFFITH'S REFINEMENT OF NARRATIVE FILM TECHNIQUES

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The term mise-en-scène denotes all the elements of film direction that overlap with the art of theater. Thus a film's mise-en-scène involves the director's choice of actors and how they are directed, the way the scene is lit, the choice of setting or set design, props, costumes, and make-up. Since Griffith was an actor before he came to film, it is not surprising that he carried over his experience from the stage to the screen. Griffith, more than other contemporary filmmakers, took the time to cast actors who looked the part and carefully rehearsed the players before shooting the scenes (a practice rare in early filmmaking). He also chose costumes, props, and settings with an eye to providing narrative information that would enhance the film's dramatic effect. Griffith realized, moreover, that blatantly artificial painted background details, common in early films, would undermine the realism of filmed fictions. In a pre-Griffith film such as The Great Train Robbery (1903), for example, a fairly realistic rendering of a railroad telegraph office is marred by a painted clock on the wall, its hands perpetually set at nine o'clock. Griffith insisted on the construction of authentic-looking three-dimensional props and sets for his films. He also brought increased realism to the screen by directing the players to act in a restrained, natural, less flamboyantly theatrical style.

THE ENFRAMED IMAGE

Griffith did more than improve the mise-en-scène of early cinema. Early on he began to shape and arrange the profilmic elements of the mise-en-scène into an emotionally charged picture language by exploiting the dramatic potential of techniques specific to the film medium. The term pro filmic refers to the objects placed in front of the camera to be photographed—the actors, sets, props, etc. It is a critically useful term because it calls attention to the difference between objects that exist in the world before they are photographed and these same objects once they have been enframed on celluloid. The choices the director makes in framing the images, whether they are in long shot or close-up, shot from a high or low angle, shot with a moving or static camera, or even how they are composed within the frame, can add powerful dramatic effects to the filmed action.

Griffith was especially sensitive to the impact of the close-up, a shot in which the head and shoulders of a character fill the screen. As noted above, in most film dramas prior to Griffith, the camera stayed back, showing all of the action in long or full shots. By moving the camera closer to a character at crucial moments of emotional significance in the narrative, Griffith made it possible for spectators to better observe and hence to relate empathetically to the expressions on the character's face, thereby increasing their emotional involvement in the story. Griffith did not limit his close-ups to the human face. His insertion of close-up details of a significant prop such as a gun or a flower also enabled him to direct the spectator's attention to objects that were crucial to the dramatic unfolding of the plot. In most narrative films before Griffith viewers had to pick out the significant details of the action from a mass of superfluous and contingent visual information. Griffith performs this job for us. By deciding when to insert a close-up of an actor's face or a detail of the film's mise-en-scène, he determines what viewers focus their attention on, as well as the most dramatic moment for a plot revelation. In addition, close-ups of objects in Griffith's films are often imbued with subtle symbolic resonance.

Griffith also understood the dramatic power of pulling the camera back, far away from the action. Extreme long shots, in which a small human figure is dominated by the landscape, can make characters seem vulnerable to larger forces beyond their control. Also, by incorporating spectacular panoramic shots of landscapes into his films—waterfalls, snowstorms, massive battle scenes—he enhanced his narratives with a grandeur and scope that far exceeded what was possible in even the most extravagantly produced stage dramas. Further, as we shall see in the analysis of a sequence from The Birth of a Nation, these panoramic landscape shots, like Griffith's close-ups of objects, often functioned symbolically in the narrative.

Griffith did not "invent" the use of the close-up in film, nor was he the first to use extreme long shots. A close-up had appeared in one of Edison's very first films, Fred Ott's Sneeze, made in 1888, and the pioneering films of the Lumière brothers in 1895 included panoramic scenes taken in extreme long shot. Not until Griffith came along, however, were shots taken from various distances from the camera systematically combined into sequential wholes to produce dramatic narrative effects. Karel Reisz in The Technique of Film Editing succinctly sums up Griffith's achievement:

Griffith's fundamental discovery ... lies in his realisation that a film sequence must be made up of incomplete shots whose order and selection are governed by dramatic necessity. Where Porter's camera had impartially recorded the action from a distance (i.e., in long shot), Griffith demonstrated that the camera could play a positive part in telling the story. By splitting an event into short fragments and recording each from the most suitable camera position, he could vary the emphasis from shot to shot and thereby control the dramatic intensity of the events as the story progressed.

EDITING

Once Griffith had taken the first crucial steps of breaking a scene down into numerous shots (instead of photographing the action in one lengthy, static long shot), he was faced with the problem of reconnecting the shots smoothly, so that what was in reality a discontinuous sequence of separate shots would appear to the viewer to be a smooth and continuous action taking place in a unified time and space. He wanted spectators to maintain the illusion of watching a seamless flow of reality and not become distracted or disoriented by jerky edits that called attention to the film medium. In order to accomplish this effect, Griffith systematically developed the editing device known as the "match" or the match cut.

The match cut, which has become a standard convention in the cinema, refers to any element in conjoined shots that smooths the transition from one shot to the next, so that viewers do not notice the cut or lose their orientation in relation to the screen space. In a movement match, for example, if a gesture of a character raising a hand to her face is begun in a long shot, the gesture must be smoothly continued in the subsequent close-up shot so that the viewer focuses on the gesture. The seemingly continuous gesture thus masks the fact that there has been a cut. In a direction match, the direction in which a person or object is moving is kept consistent across the splice. That is, in a chase sequence, a character moving across the screen from left to right must continue in the same direction from shot to shot. If the character exits screen right at the end of a shot, he or she must enter from screen left in the subsequent shot. If the character were instead to exit frame right and enter the next shot from frame right, it would appear that she had turned around and reversed direction.

To help maintain the spectator's orientation in a coherent screen space, Griffith made systematic use of the eye-line match. If he had established that Person A was positioned to the right of Person B, but then wanted to move the camera closer to photograph each of the characters separately for greater dramatic emphasis, he was careful to match the directions of the two characters' eye lines (or glances) so that they would seem to converge. Person A would look screen left, while person B would look screen right. If the actors both looked off in the same direction (let's say they both looked screen right), viewers would no longer have the impression that the two were facing each other and would lose their orientation in screen space. By carefully matching his shots in the ways described above, Griffith succeeded in breaking down the action of his narratives into a number of separate shots, creating dramatic emphasis, without drawing attention to the medium or confusing his audience.

Griffith also refined the use of transitional editing devices such as fade-ins and fade-outs and iris-ins and iris-outs to heighten the impact of his narratives. In a fade-in, a shot begins in darkness and gradually brightens until the image appears fully exposed. In a fade-out, the opposite occurs: the image slowly fades to black. In an iris-in, a black screen opens from darkness in an expanding circle of light. An iris-out reverses the process. These optical devices allowed Griffith control over the pacing of the narrative (a fade or iris effect could be rapid, or very slow and drawn out), and heightened its dramatic effect. When a sad or ominous action ends with a shot that fades to black, for example, the effect is to make the action seem all the more troubling. Griffith also used these transitional devices to signal that time has elapsed from the end of one sequence to the beginning of the next. While these editing devices do call attention to the medium, they quickly became familiar conventions, and audiences were not distracted by their artificiality.

More significant than Griffith's refinement of methods for smooth continuities and his use of creative transitions to signal time ellipses was his creative development of associative editing techniques. These are editing devices that cue viewers to mentally construe the screen action in a way that greatly increases their mental participation in the story. Griffith especially made dramatic use of the point-of-view or POV shot. A POV shot follows a shot in which a character looks pointedly at something offscreen, revealing, from the character's point of view, what the character sees. Through the technique of the POV shot, viewers are mentally lifted out of their theater seats and put in the place of a character up on the screen, seeing the action as if through that character's eyes. The POV shot is often followed by a reaction shot, a shot in which the camera captures the character's reaction to what was seen in the POV shot. The combination of a POV shot followed by a reaction shot is especially powerful because it gives us two ways of identifying with on-screen characters. First we identify with them because we are seeing through their eyes, and then we identify with the reactions we see on their faces. Especially powerful effects can be created when the reaction of the character is unexpected. (For example, a character might see something horrifying, and smile.)

The associative editing technique for which Griffith is best known is the cross-cut. A cross-cut is an alternation (a cutting back and forth) from one line of action to another, giving the impression that two or more spatially separated but plot-related events are occurring simultaneously. Although crosscutting appears in rudimentary form in a few early narrative films, the standard narrative practice when Griffith began directing in 1908 was to follow the actions of one character or a set of characters in an uninterrupted linear chronology. Griffith soon realized that more narrative excitement could be generated if he systematically intercut or alternated between two or more narrative threads happening simultaneously, thus thickening his plots by giving the spectator greater knowledge than the characters have. At the climax of The Lonely Villa (1909), for example, Griffith intercut three spatially separate simultaneous actions: (1) Shots of a mother and her three little girls alone in their isolated country house because the father has been called away on business; (2) shots of three male intruders trying to break into the house; and (3) shots of the father, who, after telephoning home, frantically rushes to the rescue in a borrowed gypsy wagon. Here the crosscutting of the three actions creates tremendous excitement, pace, and suspense, generating the question: Will the father get home before the intruders get to his wife and children? So much tension is built up by the crosscutting that, when the father arrives in the nick of time, the relief is enormous, even to audiences today. This crosscutting device became famous as the Griffith last-minute rescue, a convention that made failed last-minute rescues (the hero does not make it in time to prevent disaster) all the more devastating. Through constant experimentation with this technique, Griffith honed it into an increasingly powerful and complex narrative tool. Griffith became so excited by the potentials of crosscutting that in Intolerance (1916), the film he made after The Birth of a Nation, he told four separate stories, each taking place in different historical periods. At the end of the film, for a grand finale, he cut back and forth between the climaxes of the various tales.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: University of California Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0520279972
• ISBN 13: 9780520279971
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 312
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile