EXPLORING FILM FORM - Core

Focus of the unit

This unit focuses on the micro features of film and the construction of meaning and emotion.

Understanding will be fostered through:

• studying micro features of film: mise-en-scène, performance, cinematography, editing and sound

• identifying how these construct meanings and contribute to the sensory impact of film

• reflecting on individual response to micro features of film as a means of exploring the relationship between film and spectator

• creating a sequence to demonstrate how micro features produce meanings and responses.

Throughout this unit, the emphasis will be on the interaction of film and spectator.

Content (a)

The micro features of film

This unit requires the study of the micro features of film.

• Mise-en-scène includes setting, props, staging, costume and make- up, figure expression and movement and off-screen space.

• Performance includes physical expression, vocal delivery and interaction between performers (with reference to issues of staging/choreography where relevant).

• Cinematography includes photographic elements (e.g. camera position, colour, lens, depth of focus), lighting, framing and composition and special effects.

• Editing includes the organisation of time, both within a sequence and across sections of the narrative and the organisation of space, especially in creating coherence for the spectator. The principal conventions of continuity editing, such as shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule, will be studied. The uses of montage editing will also be considered.

• Sound includes diegetic sound, non-diegetic sound and the variety of ways in which aural elements (e.g. speech, music and noise) are used in relation to visuals.

Film Analysis: Reading Film Language & Creating Meaning

Editing/Mise-en-scene

Mise en scene

View more presentations from J Thrasher

Camera Angles: Character Positions & Dominant Framing (Power Relationships)

'Drive' (2011): The Quadrant System

Colour in 'Drive'

In one of the more gruesome scenes in Drive (2011), Driver (Ryan Gosling) stands in a motel room with blood aggressively streaked across his face. Throughout the early parts of the film, he’s predominantly painted in cool tints (subdued greens, blues and shades of grey). Here, though, his own actions have caused a grim and literal recolouring. He becomes emphatically warm and the visual change reveals shifting circumstances: at this point, he is so captivated by Irene (Carey Mulligan) that he is willing to engage more fully with the world of crime. Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, and Newton Thomas Sigel, the cinematographer, control colour expertly, using a fairly limited palette to enact in light the tensions that exist between characters and social worlds.

Despite the extensive use of red, white and blue, Refn is not concerned with American nationalism or issues of the flag. Instead, there’s a use of colour that enunciates personal emotions by playing with the split between warm and cool. In the beginning, as mentioned above, Driver’s face is washed almost exclusively with the latter. Gosling’s understated performance, which combines subtle gestures and few words, achieves a characterisation that is paralleled in light.

In contrast, Irene, coloured in warm reds, oranges and yellows, radiates care and maternal love.

Refn carefully arranges the frame during Driver’s and Irene’s early meetings so that tints of different temperatures remain quite firmly attached to each character.

But, as the attraction becomes greater, the breakdown of social barriers is paralleled in a blending of hues. The pair are first cast together in a warm glow in Driver’s car, though the effect quickly enters Irene’s domestic space.

Refn’s and Sigel’s use of colour is subtler, though, than simply revealing a movement from separation to unity. Throughout the picture, there’s a tension between gradation and delineation. A scene near the end brings this design into focus. Irene walks back to her apartment, having received no answer to her knock on Driver’s door. The walls are a rich brown and her face is a warm wooden orange. She passes a framed picture of the sea which is composed of blues and greens. The particular perspective of the painting echoes the framing of the ocean in an earlier scene in which Driver commits his ultimate act of violence (which, by the by, we’re not shown). So, then, this image that brings him to mind only reinforces that he has gone. The situation is summarised by the relationship between warm and cool tints (easily kept separate by a frame): the bloody mess that has stained Driver’s face and has escalated beyond control ultimately renders the pair like oil and water, rather than two drops in an ocean.

Edited from: atowninblackandwhite.com

Mise-en-scene: Guidance

Mise en scene lesson 1 from South Sefton College

Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, a towering, multifaceted edifice of sheer craft, offers many patterns for attentive fans to spot. Those unschooled in photography or other types of image composition may feel what the video means to shows them without being able to put it into words. All these shots — from films as varied as 2001, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, and A Clockwork Orange — use what’s called “one-point perspective,” which you get when “the painting plate (also known as the picture plane) is parallel to two axes of a rectilinear (or Cartesian) scene – a scene which is composed entirely of linear elements that intersect only at right angles.” In other words, all the visual lines in these shots appear to converge on a single point, usually dead ahead.

Edited from: openculture.com

Film Noir: Documentary

"All movies express social values, or the erosion of these values, through the ways in which they depict both institutions and relations between people. Certain institutions are more revealing of social values and beliefs than others, and the family is perhaps one of the most significant of these institutions. For it is through the particular representations of the family in various movies that we are able to study the process whereby existing social relations are rendered acceptable and valid." – John Blaser

Double Indemnity is the quintessential movie of its time. With the end of WWII, Double Indemnity used cinematic tricks and an authentic and strong story to control the audience. For the first time in films, Billy Wilder created a climate where the audience became sympathetic to the killer. Could these characters and plots be representative of American culture? How does the end of the War effect filmmaking? What were War torn viewers looking for in a movie? 

The classic noir film Double Indemnity (and others in the genre), explores the historical and social impact of the social climate of the 1940’s and 1950’s and has helped shape modern day cinema and its representations ever since.

New indie film noir: 'Trouble is My Business'

Here is a new indie film noir, Trouble is My Business, that harkens back to the 1940s, with a thriller-mystery scenario about a gumshoe on the skids who gets mixed up with two seductively dangerous sisters. The film’s 8 minute trailer certainly gets you interested, and the production values are impressive. Nice noir visuals and characterisations with a flavor of the irony reminiscent of that great 1948 film noir I Love Trouble starring Franchot Tone, promise a fascinating ride.

Check out the Vimeo trailer below.

Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/trouble-is-my-business-new-film-noir.html#ixzz2jnZK64p9

'The Shining': Crosses/Inverted Crosses in mise-en-scene