LECTURE 2

Films: Le Voyage dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (Georges Méliès)

The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Porter)

Some Terms

Realism: An approach that holds films should be as realistic as possible

Formalism: An approach which stresses form and structure rather than realism

foregrounding making somethign noticed. Sometimes called "marking" or "marked"

title The words that occur (usually at the beginning of a film) that list the title of the film and the people involved.

intertitle Words that appear between shots (usually in silent films) which give information about what a person is saying or where the events are ahppening.

subtitle Words that appear, usually at the bottom of the screen, which serve as translations for in language's being spoken in the film that the general audience probably doesn't speak. Foreign films are often subtitled (as opposed to "dubbed") and scenes in which characters speak in a language the audience is not likely to know are subtitled.

montage There are three basic meanings to the word. D.W. Griffith used a "thematic montage; there is a "Hollywood montage" and "montage" as used with refenerce to the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein. (see below) FILMS: GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY AND TRIP TO THE MOON

Early developments in flm included including special effects exploiting certain aspects of film that couldn’t be done in other media

Three early pioneers: Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis; Georges Melies; and Thomas Edison

The Lumière Brothers Often credited as the "fathers of the motion picture were not, although they introduced the world to the medium. THey patented their camera in 1895. Their films are largely documentary - workers leaving a facotory, the arrival of the train at a station and so on. Augustin Le Prince invented a motion picture camera and projector in 1888 perfecting in by 1890. This projector may have been he first to use sprockets and sprocket holes in the film to transport it through the aparatus.
Le Prince shot films in 1888 and may be more properly the father of the medium.

Edison may have been working on something akin to motin picture cameras and projectors in 1888 as well, but so it as an adjunct to his phonograph.He recorded on wax cylinders. He delegated the project to an assistant named William Kennedy Laurie Dickson who started to work on 35mm film.

The Edison comapny's first film Fred Ott's Sneeze was made by Dickerson and is often recognized as the first motion picture film. George Méliès saw the Lumière Brothers' 1895 screening of their films. He would patent his own camera and then walked arounf the streets of Paris filmimg everything he saw. One day his camera jammed. He stopped the camera, cleared the gate and continues filming. When the film ws processed, he discovered something amazing. A bus and hearse were traveling on the street and in the seconds that the camera was stopped the hearse "replaced" the bus and in effect the bus transformed into the hearse! Méliès had always been interested in magoc and the apparent "magic" of the event appealed to him.
His films became wild special effcts of transformations and appearances and disappearance unlike anything ever see, In a sense, the documentary appraoaches of the The Lumière Brothers contrasts with the fantastic of Méliès and leads to two schools of thought about film called REALISM and FORMALISM. Méliès very interested in "film magic". Film could do things easily not possible on stage.

Reversing the film and having things go backwards produces a kind of Screen magic - Wall goes up and down Méliès also began to work on artificially arranged scenes - that is the construction of a story line rather than just photographing what was thre (even though some of this was mildly narrative). His 1899 film Cendrillon (Cinderella) is his first with some 20 pre-arranged scenes. His films became very theatrical, using costumes and scenery, but were more than documentation of plays.

He still played with special effects in these films with people being decapitated and then refastening their heads back on their bodies

Then in 1902 he produced the film for which he is most remembered: Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) a major work which took more than 3 months to film and cost an amazing 10,000 francs - an unheard of sum in those days for a film. The film contains some memorable scenes with which virtually all film goers are familiar.

In 1902 Edwin S. Porter produced a film which overshadowed Méliès most ambitious film: The Impossible Voyage which toured the solar system. Audiences were apparently getting tired of the fantasy approach and Porter's film The Great Train Robbery dealt with a non fantistical subject. It also includes a remarkable "close up" in which a figure fires a pistol directly at the camera. This was so popular that the sequences was often shown before and after the film.What is particulalry interesting is not only that this may be the first close up, but that it is so detatched from the rest of the film

Montage

The word "montage" is used to describe three different things.

1. D.W. Griffith and the "thematic montage". This refers to the idea that in a single film there were multiple stories all linked with a similar theme. This occurs most obviously in his film Intolerance where thre difererent stories are told in three historical periods all linked by the same theme: intolerance.

2. In Russia there were developments with a film maker named Eisenstein who was experimenting with editing in new and novel ways. His interest is in what happens when scenes are "contextualized" and "recontextualized" The same scene may take on different meanings when justaposed with others. Einsenstein was interested in the way in which putting one shot up against another might alter the meanings of the shots

Eisenstein had 5 different kinds of montage: