Since the creation of films, their main goal was to appeal to mass audiences. However, once, the viewer looks past the appearance of films, the viewer realizes that the all-important purpose of films is to serve as a bridge connecting countries, cultures, and languages. This is because if you compare any two films that are from a foreign country or spoken in another language, there is the possibility of a connection between the two because of the fact that they have a universally understanding or interpretation. This is true for the French New Wave films; Contempt and Breathless directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and contemporary Indian films; Earth and Water directed by Deepa Mehta. All four films portray an individual’s role in society using sound and editing.
Godard creates a unique editing style in Contempt and Breathless through the combination of long takes and jump cuts. Godard’s use of these two editing techniques express two separate ideas in regards to an individual’s place in society. In Contempt, Godard’s use of editing illustrates how an individual can exist separate from society. While in Breathless, editing conveys the idea of how society can isolate an individual.
The use of jump cuts within Breathless and Contempt was an unconventional technique during the French New Wave and still is today because it violates one of the rules of Classic Hollywood Style. Jump cuts create “…discontinuities that the perceptual system will not ignore because the stimuli fall outside of the accommodation ranges for perceptual continuity, then spatial coherence breaks down” (Berliner). Even though jump cuts are not aesthetically pleasing, Godard uses them for the deeper meaning of the films.
One of the main plot points in Breathless is...
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...se, they are the ones being isolated and not the characters. In the beginning, of Contempt, Paul and Camille are talking to each other but the dialogue can barely be heard. This is caused by the use diegetic music. In a way, this cuts off the viewer as a voyeur but it still creates a heightened interest because the film begins after their moment of intimacy.
Works Cited
Berliner, Todd and Cohen, Dale J. "The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System." Journal of Film and Video 63.1 (2011): 44-63. Project MUSE. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. .
Hill, Rodney. "The New Wave Meets the Tradition of Quality: Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." Cinema Journal 48.1 (2008): 27-50. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. .
Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
The film Wendy and Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt, presents a sparse narrative. The film has been criticised for its lack of background story, and as a short film, much of the story is left to the viewer to infer from what is presented in the plot. However, Wendy and Lucy is able to depict the intimate relationship between Wendy and her dog as well as reflecting more broadly on the everyday, and commenting on the current economic state of the film’s setting in America. This essay will examine how film form contributes to the viewer’s awareness of the story in Wendy and Lucy and allows a deeper understanding of the themes presented. The aspects of mise-en-scene, shot and editing and sound in the film will be explored.
...ere also plays with the notion of suture in regards to the role of the audience. We enter into a dialogue with the film (using the shot/reverse/shot technique cutting/excluding/??), but then we realize that something is missing, the camera is hiding something from us (faces, names, speech, etc.). The scene is not complete, and we as an audience can only be passive observers. This is further demonstrated by the camera angles and how the camera seems to follow the protagonist as opposed to being side-by-side with him.
In conclusion, I have demonstrated how Coppola exploits a wide array of sound and editing to create suspense, intensity, and anxiety in the sequence to affect the audience’s emotions, using diegetic ambient sound effects, non-diegetic music, voice over and four editing types. With this sequence, Coppola has shown the savagery of war and our complicity in this violence as an audience.
The film Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais 1961) plays with fragmentation and chance to create a confusing narrative. Initially (and for a significant portion of the film) the story comes across as completely random and incoherent but as the film goes on patterns begin to arise. Chance and randomness become themes that unite the fragments. The whole organization of the film and the way the past is presented through the present is done using random chance. The way the disjointed clips seem to come together by chance to create a story shows how there can be order and purpose in the random. The film is further broken up by disturbances that are all chance events. Interruptions that would normally be random occurrences such as a glass breaking, gunshots or laughter come to form a sense of coherence and pace. In a work where randomness could potentially create more confusion, Last Year in Marienbad uses the element of chance and lack of a clear linear narrative to leave more room for the viewer’s own interpretation. A part of consuming art is promoting new ways of thinking. This film could easily come across as boring and pretentious to some but to others could be a thought-provoking puzzle or mystery to be solved. Randomness and discontinuity in art often make for the most stimulating conversations and analyses. Postmodern works often leave us asking, “why?” when there is no immediate meaning, the audience wants to find a
Gallagher, T. 2002. Senses of Cinema – Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?. [online] Available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ophuls/ [Accessed: 8 Apr 2014].
Eisenstein was radically more experimental than his contemporaries because in order to practice “intellectual montage”, one must be a practitioner of the avant-garde. Eisenstein’s theory of “collision montage” is that cinema never speaks through a single image, and the juxtaposition of several images act like words in a sentence, or parts of a character in Chinese or Japanese Calligraphy (Pg. 17, Eisenstein). Shots of foreign objects, or inserts, are not meant to contribute to a narrative but to deliver an idea intended by Eisenstein in the sequence. He also claims that montage films are faced “with the task of presenting not only a narrative that is logically connected but one that contains a maximum of emotion and stimulating power.” (Pg. 4, Eisenstein). A scene to illustrate this from Strike would be at the ending of the film where the putting down of the strike by the army is intercut with the footage of a cattle being slaughtered.
The characters are a crucial element in developing the narrative of a film. The characters in Breathless do not act the way one expects those of Hollywood cinema to act. The woman who distracts the police officer in the opening scene seems as if she may be important, but is in fact never seen again. This happens again in a subsequent ...
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
As an audience we are manipulated from the moment a film begins. In this essay I wish to explore how The Conversation’s use of sound design has directly controlled our perceptions and emotional responses as well as how it can change the meaning of the image. I would also like to discover how the soundtrack guides the audience’s attention with the use of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds.
The development of editing - Editing - actor, film, voice, cinema, scene, story. 2014. The development of editing - Editing - actor, film, voice, cinema, scene, story. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Editing-THE-DEVELOPMENT-OF-EDITING.html#ixzz2sNiIEQqt. [Accessed 10 February 2014].
...movie that I fell in love with. But most of all I love how the story line is a great overlap into the cinematically engaging movie. There is a great use of camera, timing, shots and story line that are portrayed in this movie without being too overwhelming. This allows the audience to relax during the movie and just take in the scenes as a story from reality. To this day, and even still doing this paper I still come to find different aspects of the movie that I missed the previous times I have watched it.
“Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine, some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.” - David Fincher. David Fincher is the director that I am choosing to homage for a number of reasons. I personally find his movies to be some of the deepest, most well made, and beautiful films in recent memory. However it is Fincher’s take on story telling and filmmaking in general that causes me to admire his films so much. This quote exemplifies that, and is something that I whole-heartedly agree with. I am and have always been extremely opinionated and open about my views on the world and I believe that artists have a responsibility to do what they can with their art to help improve the culture that they are helping to create. In this paper I will try to outline exactly how Fincher creates the masterpieces that he does and what I can take from that and apply to my films.
The use of sound has been greatly developed and is now considered as "one of the richest sources of meaning in film art." (Giannetti, 2002). When sound in film is being examined, two positions must be assumed; digetic sound and non-digetic sound. These positions relate to the basis of the sound in film and television. For example, digetic sound refers to the sound that materialises inside the creation of the film (if a character h...
Movies take us inside the skin of people quite different from ourselves and to places different from our routine surroundings. As humans, we always seek enlargement of our being and wanted to be more than ourselves. Each one of us, by nature, sees the world with a perspective and selectivity different from others. But, we want to see the world through other’s eyes; imagine with other’s imaginations; feel with other’s hearts, at a same time as with our own. Movies offer us a window onto the wider world, broadening our perspective and opening our eyes to new wonders.