One more blog.

The final blog I ever enter will be on Easy Rider.  This was a weird move to me.  It sort of had a spaghetti western feel to it and I was expecting Indians to come running out of the desert at any moment.  The shots were really slow and random.  A lot of them are establishing shots and close up of the characters faces.  This movie came out in 1969, which according to Dr. Chalfa was “a great year for movies.”  Easy Rider was accompanied by other great films such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, which were also extremly popular at the time.  Easy Rider was a part of the New Hollywood phase during the late sixties and early seventies. The major studios realized that money could be made from low-budget films made by avant-garde director, which were influenced by the French New Wave.   Its interesting to me that most of the best films we have watched in this class have been about drugs, or violence in some way.  But the talent of the directors make it so that it is done well and not the entire focus of the film.  Like in Pulp Fiction, there is tons of drugs and violence, but the dialogue is so rich that the violence does not overwhelm.  Well done Quinton.  Easy Rider may not really be my style, but I can see how it revolutionized film in Hollywood at its time.

Home Video Invasion

Its hard to imagine living in a time with out a VCR, let along living without the DVD!  But there indeed was a time when neither of them were available.  IN 1967, Sony introduced its video tape recorder (VTR) but because it will so expensive, costing between 1,000 to 4,000 dollars, it was inevitable to fail in the market.  Some other products were also introducted into the market but they all failed because they were so freaking expensive!  By the time 1972 rolled around, Sony put out hte VCR for aproximately 1500 dollars.    Sony’s competition, AVCO, signed a deal with Columbia Pictures and offered “cartridge” with some movies  like High Noon and Stagecoach.  But for some reason, you could only watch each video once and you had to return them or exchange them.  To me this is a big waste of money and im surprised they sold even any.  A few years later, Sony introduced the VCR we know and loved.  It had play back capabilities and recording capabilities.  All the recipe for success.  Thank goodness today for the DVD!

Pulp Fiction

One of my favorite parts of the Film Pulp Fiction is the soundtrack. No score was every made for the film. Quentin Tarantino instead used an eclectic assortment of surf music, rock and roll, soul, and pop songs. This really added to the cool, upbeat vibe of the film. Even in the midst of violence, some cool song would make its way into the scene, giving it a weird metaphorical, but humorous feeling.  With a mix of cool music and witty dialogue, I can see how this film revolutionized independent films.  In class Friday, we watched the extra commentary from the actors about the film.  Each one of the actors interviewed talked about how amazing the script was and what an incredible mind and directorQuentin Tarantino is.  It seems like most of the brilliant film minds are kind of weird guys, and Tarantino is no exception.  It was really cool to see him in action and directing the actors to do exactly what he wants to make sure he gets the right shot.  He has a vision and he knows how to get it.  This is the first Tarantino film I have ever seen and I will most likely see another one soon.

MPAA Ratings System

The late sixties was a time of political and cultural change.  Along with this, came a breakdown of the traditional values held by many Americans.  Everything from literature, art, film, and music began to challenge what was considered acceptable.  In the film world, content was beginning to push the button.  The APAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, had to fire back.  Many directors were worried about impending threats from the APAA because they thought that regulations on language and profanity would compromise the overall message of the film.  The film Who’s affraid of Virgina Wolf was granted passage as long as the film bore the label S.M.A, which meant suggested for Mature Audiences.  This meant that children were not permitted to enter the theater.  Today, we have the MPAA rating system that forces films to have a rating in order to protect younger viewers from being exposed to something they are not yet ready to see.  Even today, standards and morals are evolving and will continue to evolve I’m sure.  As television and film gets more violent and risque, the codes will have to be edited in order to protect our children from seeing these types of things.

American International Pictures:Blueprint for success

American International Pictures founders Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson were revolutionaries in the film industry.  When the two met, they found that they shared many of the same interests and pooled their ideas and resources together.   In 1954,  Arkoff and Nicholson created American International Pictures.  At the time, they could have never imagined the impact they would have on the future of the film industry.  Just like every other revolutionary in history, they were laughed at and doubted.  After hiring a team of talented young producers and directors, they became the first organization to break into the untapped teen market.  They realized that teens wanted to go to the movies and get up off the couch and away from the television and their parents.  This realization led to the summer releasing season and summer box office hits.  These ideas turned into the drive-in movie pictures that all teenagers wanted to do in the summer.  AIP realized that they did not have to spend the big bucks on expensive sets, and highbrow actors.  They put their money in the actual film and this helped them churn out economical hits that would keep teenagers entertained for hours!  (not that anyone really watched the actual movie at a drive in anyway).

The emergence of Television

I think we can all agree that the invention of television is the most important thing that has happened to Hollywood.  Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn predicted that “we are about to enter what can be the most difficult competition imaginable with a form of entertainment in which all the best features of radio, the theater, and motion pictures may be combined.”  And he was right, today, competition between television networks is extremely evident.  Each network has to find a way to make their line-up of shows seem better than another’s.  However, some moguls did have some false predictions.  One said that viewers “…soon would get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”    The rise of television of course adversely affected cinema though.  Most people with a television set did not want to leave their living rooms to watch a movie.  Subsequently, cinema had to fight back.  To compete, film was converted to color, changed to wide screen, and gimmicks like 3-D and smell-o-vision.  Not so sure how that one would have worked.  Actress Mary Pickford thought that television and cinema should merge with one another in order to be more profitable.  Pickford said, “and he who maketh use of his enemy is indeed wise.”  She is right but unfortunately her ideas never really came into play.

Sharff cont.

In my last post, I defined and gave examples of four of Sharff’s eight basic models of structure.  Picking up with Moving Camera, it is defined as a shot used without cuts and from a camera counted on a dolly, crane, or steadicam.  A great example of this would be the Planet Earth series.  The scene that sticks out the most would be a scene where the camera is mounted on a helicopter and an entire hunt by wild dogs chasing an antelope is shown, uncut.  Multi-Angularity is a series of shots of contrasting angles and compositions.  I cant quite think of an example from a film, but I think someone being in a fun house and the mirrors reflection different angles would work.  Next, Master shot discipline is defined as a single shot or an entire dramatic action.  According to Sharff, this is a typical Hollywood structure for editing.  Sharff gives the example that a conversation is taped as a two shot, then it is re-shot in pieces from different distances and angles to construct the scene, these pieces are then inter cut with the master shot. Finally, Sharff talks about orchestration.  This is the arrangement of shots throughout the film that keeps the momentum flowing.  The main purpose for orchestration is to convey the feeling of the film and its voice to the viewer.  As Sharff says, orchestration harmonizes the cinematic continuum.

Sharff

Sharff, the author of The Language of Cinema has identified eight basic models of structure in film.  Those basic models are separation, parallel action, slow discourse, familiar image, moving camera, multi-angularity, master shot discipline, and orchestration.  Separation is the fragmentation of a scene into single images in alteration.  For example, two people having a conversation and the camera shows both of them individually but the viewer knows they are close to each other.   Parallel action is two or more narrative lines running simultaneously and presented by alternation between scenes.  The best example of this would be the film Crash.  There are like 4 narratives running at once.  Slow discourse is the gradual intro of pictorial information within a single or several shots.  An example of this would be a close up shot followed by a pulled back establishing shot.  Familiar Image is a stabilizing anchor image periodically reintroduced without variation.  In other words, its repetition of an image throughout the film.  To be continued..

The Language of Cinema

I had not had a chance to read The Language of Cinema handout yet but it is really insightful. My favorite quote by Stefan Sharff was, “Editing is the selection and ordering of shots to create a narrative structure that communicates ideas, feelings or attitudes. Out of this chaotic mass of images, the filmmaker, with either stationary or moving camera, captures shots selectively, framing them in a variety of graphic compositions and assigns then each a given time on the screen. The evolution of a cinema syntax made possible increasingly complex combinations of shots, which could then generate an even greater variety of messages and meanings.” I love this quote because he perfectly defines and sums up the beauty of good editing. Editing can completely change the way that a shot is perceived by the viewer. My favorite example of editing is in the tv show The Office. They do such a great job of getting shots of peoples reaction expression and cutting a scene to add to its humor.

Pulp Fiction

The other day in class, we started watching Pulp Fiction.  This is a movie I have always heard about but have never had a chance to see yet.  Even after watching just the first few minutes, I was beginning to understand what all the buzz was about.  The film has a really unique style that I have never really seen before.  I really enjoy the fact that even though a serious event is happening (like John Travolta and Samuel Jackson killing three people brutally with a gun) there is still a lot of humor in the dialogue.  Pulp fiction definitely has an all-star cast.  Besides the two mega stars already mentioned, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, and Christopher Walken are just a few of the stars that make this film so cool.  Tarintio, the director of the film, also does an amazing job at using the soundtrack as a way to make the film really modern, entertaining, and cool.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how the characters develop, as well as the plot.