Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The evolution of filmmaking
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Since the beginning of Documentary Filmmaking, films have shown the eternal search for truth. Exposing reality as it is to the world through Film became a goal to Documentary Filmmakers. For a period of time Filmmakers lost their path along the way and became promoters who manipulated the audience around the world into believing what they wanted. During the 1960’s two special movements began to emerge in different parts of the world. Direct Cinema in North America and Cinema Vérité in Fance. These two movements brought back the notion of revealing the true through their Films. The new movements encourage Filmmakers to take the position of observers. Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité are often confused and classify as one movement. This is not a surprise since their principle is to capture the authenticity of life as it is lived, and to break through the veneer between the audience and the subject. But in reality Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité are different and should not be classified as one since their practitians take different approaches in the filmmaking process, Direct Cinema takes an objective aproach, while Cinema Vérité takes a reflective aproach.
Is important to point out that Cinema Vérité and Direct Cinema films aesthetic and philosophy was not first thought of during the 1960’s. The father of Documentary Robert Flaherty foreshadows key elements of Cinema Vérité and Direct Cinema. For example, the interest in studying real people in their actual environment. In Nanook of the North (1922) Flaherty Follows Nanook and his family for moths, to show the world Nanook’s background life style and culture. Another example is that Flaherty saw the Filmmaking process as and art of observation and afterward selection. Which relat...
... middle of paper ...
...diting Cinéma Vérité gives the impression that there is no room between the beginning, the end or the start of another shot, on the contrary to Direct Cinema which reveal to us a sequence of events.
The bottom line is that, Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité are often misplaced as one due to similarities between their rooots and their purpose of revealing the truth through the lense. But, despise their similarities they are two different movements. This is reflected by the different approach in which they both achieve their goal. Direct Cinema takes an objective observational approach in which the filmmakers try to influence as little as possible in the film by only observing and not participating. While Cinéma Vérité takes a reflective approach in which the filmmakers influence the movie by participating and provoking different situations and reactions to a subject.
"Stepping Razor" also has elements of Cinema Verite. "Cinema Verite…applies to a series of documentary films which strive for immediacy, spontaneity, and authenticity through the use of portable and unobtrusive equipment and the avoidance of and preconceived narrative line or concepts concerning the material." (Konigsberg:57) "Stepping Razor" may also be put under the category of art film. "Art film [is] a type of film with serious artistic intentions as distinct from the commercial films made in Hollywood."(Konigsberg:20) This film also has elements of a propaganda film. "Propaganda films [are] made with the intention of persuading the audience to a particular point of view concerning the subject…relying on the apparently real and factual nature of the images on the screen and often using an authoritative voice-over to sway.
This report aims to make light of certain elements of documentary making that are perhaps more susceptible to influence on the director’s part, and once again explore the effect of these decisions on the audience’s reaction to the information presented.
Most people are likely to relate Hollywood with money. If a person lives in the Hollywood area, people assume she or he is probably rich. If she or he is a Hollywood movie star, the person probably makes a lot of money. Therefore, to follow that line of thought, when Hollywood producers make a movie, they make it just for money. And some filmmakers do seem to make films only for the money the movies will earn. The action movie "Die Hard", the fantasy movie "Star Wars", and the adventure movie "Jurassic Park" are examples of exciting movies that were made just for the money by satisfying the audiences' appetite for escapism.
the visual medium. In a way that is unique to the cinema, the special effects disrupt the
Rascaroli, Laura. "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24-47. JSTOR. Web. 08 May 2014.
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.
...use of documentary style lighting and discontinuous editing that diverges from the Hollywood “invisible” editing. Through understanding the historical climates these two seemingly similar French cinematic movements were in, the psychology of a generation can be visualized in a way truly unique to the indexicality of the cinematic medium.
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.
Art has been always seen as a form to express self emotions and ideas; an artist creates an idea and shapes it by culturally known objects and forms to send encrypted message. Through the times both, ideas and materials used, separates art in to different periods and movements. In late 40’s and late 50’s two art and culture movements emerged, one from another. The first one, Lettrism, was under the aspiration to rewrite all human knowledge. From it another movement, Situationism, appeared. It was an anti-art movement which sought for Cultural Revolution. Both of these movements belong to wide and difficulty defined movement of experiment, a movement whose field is endless. Many different people create experimental films because of the variety of reasons. Some wishes to express their viewpoints which are unconventional. But most of them have an enthusiasm for medium itself. They yearn to explore what prospects the medium has and wishes to open new opportunities to create and to explore, as well as to educate. Experimental filmmaker, differently from mainstream filmmakers, wishes to step out from the orthodox notions. The overall appreciation is not the aim that the experimental filmmakers would seek for. Experimenters usually work on the film alone or with a small group, without the big budget. They intend to challenge the traditional ideas. And with intention to do so Lettrism tries to narrow the distance between the poetry and people’s lives, while Situationism tries to transform world into one that would exist in constant state of newness. Both of these avant-garde movements root from similar sources and have similar foundations. Nonetheless, they have different intentions for the art and culture world and these movements...
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.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
In documentary studies unpacked political and economic stresses of artistic commentary, and film theory gave me the language and form needed to discuss and review historical and classical structure. Additional classes have allowed opportunities to look at cinematic
In the four movies that I observed adequately, I noticed that each one of them had a unique visual element and stylistic technique. With a mixture of silent films, and sound films it was noticeable that as the years went on, the more complex films became. The difference between the camera shots and visual elements became more profound over time. Films started to become more movie like than theatrical. For the first silent film we watched titled “A Trip to the Moon,” there was one specific stylistic technique that I noticed.
‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.
Film offers the chance to visit worlds that wouldn’t exist, its your imagination on the big screen. The visual element of film brings story telling to life, it allows you to express yourself, be creative, make a new world that wouldn’t be possible in real life. This is evident in directors such as François Truffaut and Stanley Kubrick who have expressed themselves through their movies especially Francois Truffaut when directing ‘Les quatre cents coups’. Quentin Taratino has introduced me to the art of film, his violent films and significant camera techniques and special props allowed him to have his own significant style to each of the films he has directed was a catalyst for my love of films. Directors such as Jean Luc-Goddard who were identified as the start of the French film movement the Nouvelle Vague, which has subverted from the mainstream techniques in France in the late 1950s and 60s.