A tendency of French cinema. Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français Ces notes n'ont pas d'autre objet qu'essayer de définir une certaine tendance du cinéma Français-tendance dite du réalisme psychologique-et d'en esquisser les limites. Si le cinéma Français existe par une centaine de films chaque année, il est bien entendu que dix ou douze seulement méritent de retenir l'attention des critiques et des cinéphiles, l'attention donc de ces Cahiers. Ces dix ou douze films constituent ce que l'on a joliment appelé la Tradition de la Qualité, ils forcent par leur ambition l'admiration de la presse étrangère, défendent deux fois l'an les couleurs de la France à Cannes et à Venise où, depuis 1946, ils raflent assez régulièrement médailles, lions d'or et grands prix.
Au début du parlant, le cinéma Français fut l'honnête démarquage du cinéma américain. La guerre et l'après-guerre ont renouvelé notre cinéma. De l'adaptation telle qu'Aurenche et Bost la pratiquent, le procédé dit de l'équivalence est la pierre de touche. Remodernist Film Manifesto. The Films of Tom Sokalski | Slave. Touching the Film Object? Notes on the 'Haptic' in Videographical Film Studies. As a longtime devotee of observing from a scholarly distance, I had never been grabbed before -- or, indeed, 'clasped' or 'fastened' (the original meanings of the Ancient Greek verb haptein) -- by Laura Marks' notion of 'haptic visuality'.
But after I had made some video essays about films, the desire to explore hapticity and its workings took hold. This is how the above video/text collages and the below notes came into being. While I still believe that Marks' concept could benefit from a more thorough thinking through in relation to audiovisuality, hapticity -- a grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it -- seems to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what can take place in the process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced themselves. In the old days, the only people who really got to touch films were those who worked on them, particularly film editors.
Free scene analysis Essays and Papers. Part 3: Cinematography. Section 1 - Quality This section explores some of the elements at play in the construction of a shot. As the critics at Cahiers du cinéma maintained, the "how" is as important as the "what" in the cinema. The look of an image, its balance of dark and light, the depth of the space in focus, the relation of background and foreground, etc. all affect the reception of the image.
For instance, the optical qualities of grainy black and white in Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Maarakat madinat al Jazaer, Algeria, 1965) seem to guarantee its authenticity. On the other hand, the shimmering Technicolor of a musical such as Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952) suggests an out-of-this-world glamor and excitement. Early films were shot in black and white but the cinema soon included color images. These images were initially painted or stencilled onto the film but by the 1930s filmmakers were able to include color sequences in their films. And Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou (1990), for example. Eisenstein's montage theory. Montage--juxtaposing images by editing--is unique to film (and now video). During the 1920s, the pioneering Russian film directors and theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov demonstrated the technical, aesthetic, and ideological potentials of montage.
The 'new media' theorist Lev Manovich has pointed out how much these experiments of the 1920s underlie the aesthetics of contemporary video. Eisenstein believed that film montage could create ideas or have an impact beyond the individual images. Two or more images edited together create a "tertium quid" (third thing) that makes the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Eisenstein's greatest demonstration of the power of montage comes in the "Odessa Steps" sequence of his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. On the simplest level, montage allows Eisenstein to manipulate the audience's perception of time by stretching out the crowd's flight down the steps for seven minutes, several times longer than it would take in real time: Images - Ten Shades of Noir.