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The theories of the window and frame had its origins in the schools of formalism and realism. Both schools main objective was to amplify the prestige of film. During that era of film was an upstart sideshow attraction, high class form of entertainment was the theater and the visual art forms of paintings and statues. Both schools saw cinema as a way of looking a through an aperture but keeping the audience at a distance from the subject on the screen. Whether looking through at frame or looking through a window the audience would be viewing the subject matter but they would only be able to absorb it. That’s where the similarities end the formalist lead by theorist Sergei Eisenstein saw film as frame and would create shock in an attempt to provoke or raise consciousness. Sergei Eisenstein would create what he wanted to the audience to see in his films. For example in the Battleship Potemkin Eisenstein wanted to address the situation with Russia and he created the situation in his film to incite a revolution by creating chaos. The realism school lead by André Bazin saw cinema as window. To Bazin a spectator would be apart of the film as more of a witness more than just a spectator. In the movie Rear Window Jefferies was witness to his neighbor wife murder while looking through window because while looking through a window what one sees is real.
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Sergei Eisenstein expresses that “an attraction is any aggressive moment in theater” (Sergei Eisenstein Montage of Attraction). So the attraction in cinema is based on what the spectator wants to see and what they expect to see but , it’s also moment in a film the invoke a reaction whether it be physical or cognitive. Depending on the film genre the audience enters the atrium wit...
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... the rain or sees ominous clouds that usually mean something bad is coming or a storm is on the horizon. Iconic signs usually resemble what they stand for like avatar for one Farmville or Mobsters account. All three signs are prevalent in cinematic image they each have there own niche but they work together seamlessly to create the cinematic image. A take for example the beginning of the Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960) Janet Leigh laying in her bra on the bed the Janet Leigh was icon of beauty and sexuality during that era. The characters Marion Crane and Sam Loomis were in an Arizona knowing that is in the southwest one first thought is that it must be hot and the sand must be everywhere those are indexical signs. The Cheap hotel was is a symbolic sign that both Crane and Loomis are doing something wrong or hey are to poor to go to a high class establishment.
The film, 'Rear Window' has an essence of 'urban isolation/ loneliness' in it. The entire film is made on one confined set. In the whole movie, the viewers can either see the apartment of the immobile protagonist, Jeff or the window views of his neighbors. With the idea of confined set, Hitchcock (director) showed the loneliness and urban isolation of Jeff. Due to his leg injury, Jeff can not go anywhere so he passes his time by peeping into his neighbors' life through his rear window and can see different stories going on in different apartments. Each apartment window is like a TV series for him, which he watches on a daily basis. This film shows the visual study of obsessive human curiosity.
In conclusion in “Rear Window” Hitchcock is shown off as an auteur and realist though his modification and implementation of his own creative mind and as a realist by conveying reality and occurrences of everyday life respectively. He also used methods such as eye line matching, cinema as window and frame, and potentially character specific lighting to connect the audience with the characters and to give the main characters more individualized
...m plays a considerable role in this film. Jeffries, the films protagonist is bound to his apartment, so for entertainment he watches people through his window without them knowing. From the very beginning these characters seem to so interesting, so no wonder Jeffries decides to watch them. While watching the film, we become witnesses of their private lives, making us voyeurists too. In this film windows are not used in a traditional sense, they expose people, they symbolize confinement, and they allude to suspenseful plot devices. Hitchcock’s aesthetic configuration of the film manipulates the audience into questioning several aspects of the film and in life in general. Hitchcock’s originality in Rear Window was not only successful during the golden age of Hollywood, but it continues to be creatively adapted and consistently influential in today’s cinema as well.
Hocus Pocus is a 1993 film directed by Kenny Ortega. It is a very enjoyable movie with a good cast. The movie genre is comedy, horror, and fantasy. The film is based on a story about Garris and David Kirchner. And it is starring Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker. The story follows the villainous trio of witches, who are inadvertently resurrected by a teenage male virgin. It takes place in Salem, Massachusetts.
Classical Hollywood Cinema is a chain of events that has a cause – effect relationship within a time and space. The environment looks realistic and believable to the viewers because the style is predictable, and the time is linear throughout the film. Each scene with the development of the plot and story is motivated by cause and effect. The filmmaking process involves four major steps that cut across the board. The process revolves around these levels that make it orderly to every individual involved in filming. The process has the following stages: Idea and Development, Pre-Production, Production and Post- Production. In Idea and Development it is normally
The article “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies”, written by Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi. The authors try to explain or prove that ghosts, vampires and zombies do not exist through scientific methods and explanations. The authors main argument to show that these claim are false, they say” we point out inconsistencies associated with the ghost, vampire, and zombie mythologies as portrayed in popular films and folklore and give practical explanations to some of their features” (Efthimiou and Gandhi “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies”) Their argument is obvious that they will point out the
Some of the main symbols of the novel are The Hanging Wall, the colours of the clothing of the different women and the Eyes. All these symbols add different features to the story which are important. Some add fear, suspense, and overall they all add an important understanding of the story line. Margaret Atwood, was able to successfully create symbols which added depth and helped with the understanding of the novel. With these symbols she used in the novel she proved the importance and the positive effects strong symbolism can have with plot and character
Standing Out in a Crowd: The Aesthetic of Modernist Cinema 2 Among the large objects, such as vast plains or panoramas of any kind, one deserves special attention: the masses. No doubt imperial Rome already teemed with them. But masses of people in the modern sense entered the historical scene only in the wake of the industrial revolution. Then they became a social force of first magnitude. Warring nations resorted to levies on an unheard-of scale and identifiable groups yielded to the anonymous multitude which filled the big cities in the form of amorphous crowds.
The nineteenth-century was an explosion of industry and technology. Evidence of how these advances made an impact on people's lives and how they viewed the world was prevalent in the art of the time. The influence of the Freudian revolution, having given artists insight into the human psyche, would give birth to movements in art such as Expressionism and Surrealism. As the nineteenth-century came to a close, an entirely novel mixture of art and technology found its inception, cinema. Beginning with French filmmaker Georges Melies' fourteen-minute silent film, A Trip to the Moon, released to the public in 1902 and based on a Jules Verne novel, the art of motion pictures would become the epitome of modern medium. As new technology continued to emerge, artists in this field would make of it a revolutionary industry deeply rooted in modern culture.
With this short but very interesting and informative class I have just scratched the surface of the what it takes to make a full fleged film. It takes much more than I had presumed to make a movie in Hollywood. The number of people that it takes to make a minute of a movie let alone the entire movie was astonishing to me. There are many things that it takes to start making a movie but without an idea of some sort there is no movie to be made.
Second, in the concept that takes stars as images, Dyer indicated the image is a complicated configuration of verbal, visual, and acoustic signs, instead of only the visual one. He explained additionally the composition constitutes by the common images of stardom, or a specific star. The former includes an anatomy of the lifestyle, which involves fashion, taste, the notion of beauty of stars, conspicuous consumption, and idols of consumption. This concept could be linked to commercial or product placement that shapes the image of a role in films of TV series under capitalism. The latter contains considering stars as social types or specific images. In general social types, Dyer used Klapp’s definition on it as ‘a collective norm of role behaviour
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
In 1867 in his paper "On a New List of Categories", Charles Peirce said that there were three kinds of signs: icons, indices, and symbols. According to Thomas Sebeok "a sign is said to be iconic when there is a topological similarity between a signifier and its denotata". Icons are then something that resembles the object that they represent. That similarity between icon and object is fundamentally what sets icons apart from the other two kinds of signs. Indices do not have any similarity with their significants, but have a cause and effect relationship. Symbols do not have any direct relationship with an object other than the meaning that imposed or collectively agreed upon a group of humans.
Eliminative Materialism tackles the subject of consciousness. It is defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia as "the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist". According to the required films, Eliminative Materialism if cannot be explained fully or comprehensively by mathematics, physics, chemistry, and so on it is okay to say "Well, God did it". The films also state, "when we scientifically advance we replace the old and outdated concepts with new and more accurate terminology which reflects new understanding of our universe". Thus, instead of talking about Thor we talk about electrical magnetic currents. Thus,
The concept of “window” is figured into the very form of cinema. Every ‘shot’ is a framed window that hints the vast reality just outside of our view. People viewing this “window” get connected to this reality, experience the happenings, feel the emotions and engrossed into a life whatever they have wished. This is the magic of cinema.