Film Analyse

7/28/2019 Film Analyse

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YALE FILM STUDIES

Film Analysis Web Site 2.0

WHAT THE FILM ANALYSIS GUIDE COVERS

Welcome to the Yale Film Analysis Web Site.

The Film Analysis Guide was developed to meet the needs of faculty and students atYale who are interested in becoming familiar with the vocabulary of film studies and the

techniques of cinema. The user can either read the complete document or search out aparticular topic of interest. -- Related links within the Guide are provided as appropriate,as are links to film clips illustrating the topic or term in question.

HOW THE GUIDE IS ORGANIZED

The Guide is broken into six parts corresponding to the major divisions within cinematechnique and film studies. These major divisions are further broken down into sections,subsections and definitions for terms. The final Part (Analysis) offers basic examples ofhow to analyze two film sequences.

NAVIGATING THE GUIDE

If you see a drop down menu in the left frame, but no table of contents, click on thebutton below. (This problem occasionally arises with some older browsers that areunable to understand the particular JavaScript instructions used to create the table ofcontents.)

There are multiple ways to navigate the Film Analysis Guide, depending on the type ofbrowser being used and the visitor's needs. For those who wish to read the Guide

straight through without skipping around, the complete site can be navigated using theforward and backward arrows visible at the top and bottom of each page.

Most users are likely to prefer to browse the site using the navigational tools offered inthe left frame. The content for each of the major divisions (e.g., cinematography) isclustered in a single web page. In addition, particular topics within the major divisionscan be accessed by expanding the table of contents and clicking on the relevant link orby using the alphabetized index and search function. If you are unfamiliar with


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navigating this sort of site, more detailed instructions can be found in the menu itemlabeled About this Guide.

You can view the complete list of film clips used in the Guide by choosing the Film Clipsoption on the drop down menu to the left.

CONVENTIONS USED IN THIS GUIDE

When the film icon appears next to an image, that means that a film clip can be viewedthat illustrates the relevant topic or term. Click on the icon to start the clip. In order toview the clips, you must have the Windows Media Player and browser plug-in installedon your computer. If you do not, they can be downloaded for free athttp://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/default.asp .

Cross-links within the Guide are offered to direct the user to related concepts or toprovide a more detailed discussion of a particular topic.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Yale University's Film Study Center houses a large collection of films on a variety offormats. Click on Film Study Center or use the drop down menu on the left frame fromanywhere within this site to learn more.

Yale University Libraries host a research guide on film studies which will help you to findfilm related articles and publications. The URL ishttp://www.library.yale.edu/humanities/film/.

Click here, or on the drop down menu to check our weekly list of On-Campus FilmScreenings.

FEEDBACK

Send comments, corrections and suggestions about this site to Mariano Prunes.

CREDITS

Mariano Prunes, Michael Raine, Mary Litch


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Part 1: Basic Terms

AUTEUR

French for "author". Used by critics writing for Cahiers du cinema and other journals toindicate the figure, usually the director, who stamped a film with his/her own"personality". Opposed to "metteurs en scene" who merely transcribed a work achievedin another medium into film. The concept allowed critics to evaluate highly works ofAmerican genre cinema that were otherwise dismissed in favor of the developingEuropean art cinema.

Director Abbas Kiarostami appearing as himself in the last scene of Taste of Cherry(Ta'm e Guilass, Iran, 1997)

DIEGESIS

The diegesis includes objects, events, spaces and the characters that inhabit them,including things, actions, and attitudes not explicitly presented in the film but inferred bythe audience. That audience constructs a diegetic world from the material presented ina narrative film. Some films make it impossible to construct a coherent diegetic world,for example Last Year at Marienbad(L'annedernire Marienbad, Alan Resnais,1961) or even contain no diegesis at all but deal only with the formal properties of film,for instance Mothlight(Stan Brakhage, 1963). The "diegetic world" of the documentary isusually taken to be simply the world, but some drama documentaries test thatassumption such as Land Without Bread(Las Hurdes, Luis Buuel, 1932).

Different media have different forms of diegesis. Henry V(Lawrence Olivier, England,1944) starts with a long crane shot across a detailed model landscape of 16th century


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London. Over the course of its narrative, the film shifts its diegetic register from thepresentational form of the Elizabethan theater to the representational form ofmainstream narrative cinema.

EDITING

The joining together of clips of film into a single filmstrip. The cut is a simple edit butthere are many other possible ways to transition from one shot to another. See thesection on editing.


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Picture: YelizavetaSvilova at the editing table of Man with the MovieCamera(Cheloveks kinoapparatom, DzigaVertov USSR, 1929)

FLASHBACK FLASHFORWARD

A jump backwards or forwards in diegetic time. With the use of flashback / flashforwardthe order of events in the plot no longer matches the order of events in the story. CitizenKane(Orson Welles, 1941) is a famous film composed almost entirely of flashbacks andflashforwards. The film timeline spans over 60 years, as it traces the life of CharlesFoster Kane from his childhood to his deathbed -- and on into the repercussions of hisactions on the people around him. Some characters appear at several time periods inthe film, usually being interviewed in the present and appearing in the past as they tellthe reporter of their memories of Kane. Joseph Cotten, who plays Kane's best friend, isshown here as an old man in a rest home (with the help of some heavy make-up) and

as a young man working with Kane in his newspaper.

FOCUS


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Focus refers to the degree to which light rays coming from any particular part of anobject pass through the lens and reconverge at the same point on a frame of the filmnegative, creating sharp outlines and distinct textures that match the original object.This optical property of the cinema creates variations in depth of field -- through shallowfocus, deep focus, and techniques such as racking focus. DzigaVertov's films

celebrated the power of cinema to create a "communist decoding of reality", mostovertly in Man with the Movie Camera(Chelovek s kinoapparatom, USSR, 1929).

GENRES

Types of film recognized by audiences and/or producers, sometimes retrospectively.These types are distinguished by narrative or stylistic conventions, or merely by theirdiscursive organization in influential criticism. Genres are made necessary by highvolume industrial production, for example in the mainstream cinema of the U.S.A andJapan.

Thriller/Detective film: The Maltese Falcon(John Huston, 1941)

Horror film: Bride of Frankestein(John Whale, 1935)


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Western: The Searchers(John Ford, 1956)

Musical: Singin' in the Rain(Stanley Donen, 1952)

MISE-EN-SCENE

All the things that are "put in the scene": the setting, the decor, the lighting, thecostumes, the performance etc. Narrative films often manipulate the elements of mise-en-scene, such as decor, costume, and acting to intensify or undermine the ostensiblesignificance of a particular scene.

STORY / PLOT

Perhaps more correctly labelledfabula and syuzhet, story refers to all the audienceinfers about the events that occur in the diegesis on the basis of what they are shown

by the plot -- the events that are directly presented in the film. The order, duration, andsetting of those events, as well as the relation between them, all constitute elements ofthe plot. Story is always more extensive than plot even in the most straightforwarddrama but certain genres, such as the film noir and the thriller, manipulate therelationship of story and plot for dramatic purposes. A film such as Memento(Christopher Nolan, 2000) forces its audience to continually reconstruct the story told ina temporally convoluted plot.

SCENE / SEQUENCE

A scene is a segment of a narrative film that usually takes place in a single time andplace, often with the same characters. Sometimes a single scene may contain two linesof action, occurring in different spaces or even different times, that are related by meansof crosscutting. Scene and sequence can usually be used interchangeably, though thelatter term can also refer to a longer segment of film that does not obey the spatial andtemporal unities of a single scene. For example, a montage sequence that shows in afew shots a process that occurs over a period of time.


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SHOT

A single stream of images, uninterrupted by editing. The shot can use a static or a

mobile framing, a standard or a non-standard frame rate, but it must be continuous. Theshot is one of the basic units of cinema yet has always been subject to manipulation, forexample stop-motion cinematography or superimposition. In contemporary cinema, withthe use of computer graphics and sequences built-up from a series of still frames (eg.The Matrix), the boundaries of the shot are increasingly being challenged.

Part 2: Mise-en-scene

The representation of space affects the reading of a film. Depth, proximity, size andproportions of the places and objects in a film can be manipulated through cameraplacement and lenses, lighting, decor, effectively determining mood or relationshipsbetween elements in the diegetic world.

Section 1 - Decor

An important elememt of "putting in the scene" is dcor, the objects contained in andthe setting of a scene. Dcor can be used to amplify character emotion or the dominantmood of a film. In these shots from 2001: A Space Odyssey(Stanley Kubrick, 1969) thefuturistic furniture and reduced color scheme stress the sterility and impersonality of thespace station environment. Later, the digital nature of the HAL computer is representedby the repeating patterns and strong geometrical design of the set.

In Senso(Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1954) dcor emphazises the social difference betweena wealthy married woman in her richly furnished apartment and her soldier lover in the


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barren military barracks. Ultimately, she finds the contrast so appalling that she ruinsher reputation and financial standing in order to satisfy her lover's desire for a luxuriouslifestyle.

REAR PROJECTION

Usually used to combine foreground action, often actors in conversation, with abackground often shot earlier, on location. Rear projection provides an economical wayto set films in exotic or dangerous locations without having to transport expensive starsor endure demanding conditions. In some films, the relationship between scenes shoton location and scenes shot using rear projection becomes a signifying pattern. In otherfilms, it's just cheap...

Rear projection is featured extensively in Douglas Sirk's lush melodrama Written OnThe Wind(1956). Specifically, almost every car ride is shot in this way, a commonfeature in Classical Hollywood films, due to the physical restrains of shooting in thestudio. In addition, by speeding up the rate of the projected images in the background,or quickly changing its angle, rear projection allows for an impression of speed thatinvolves no real danger.

Even if one of the protagonists of Written On The Windis a fast-driving alcoholicmillionaire (and therefore there are multiple instances of careless driving), rearprojection is preferred to stunts both for economic and aesthetic reasons. For example,physical spectacle is not as important in a melodrama as it would be in an action film..


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Section 2 - Lighting

The intensity, direction, and quality of lighting have a profound effect on the way an

image is perceived. Light affects the way colors are rendered, both in terms of hue anddepth, and can focus attention on particular elements of the composition. Much likemovement in the cinema, the history of lighting technology is intrisically linked to thehistory of film style. Most mainstream films rely on the three-point lighting style, and itsgenre variations. Other films, for example documentaries and realist cinema, rely onnatural light to create a sense of authenticity.

THREE-POINT LIGHTING

The standard lighting scheme for classical narrative cinema. In order to model an actor'sface (or another object) with a sense of depth, light from three directions is used, as inthe diagram below. A backlight picks out the subject from its background, a bright keylight highlights the object and a fill light from the opposite side ensures that the key lightcasts only faint shadows.

Illustration courtesy of http://www.tcf.ua.edu/TVCrit/

These shots from Written On The Wind(Douglas Sirk, 1956) demostrate the classicaluse of three-point lighting. Laurel Bacall and Rock Hudson are rendered glamorous by


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the balanced lighting. Compare this to the manipulation of lighting for expressivepurposes on the high-key lighting and low-key lighting pages.

HIGH-KEY LIGHTING

A lighting scheme in which the fill light is raised to almost the same level as the keylight. This produces images that are usually very bright and that feature few shadows onthe principal subjects. This bright image is characteristic of entertainment genres suchas musicals and comedies such as Peking Opera Blues(Do Ma Daan, Tsui Hark, Honk

Kong, 1986)


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LOW-KEY LIGHTING

A lighting scheme that employs very little fill light, creating strong contrasts between thebrightest and darkest parts of an image and often creating strong shadows that obscureparts of the principal subjects. This lighting scheme is often associated with "hard-boiled" or suspense genres such as film noir. Here are some examples from Touch ofEvil(Orson Welles, 1958.)

Section 3 - Space

The representation of space affects the reading of a film. Depth, proximity, size andproportions of the places and objects in a film can be manipulated through camera


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placement and lenses, lighting, decor, effectively determining mood or relationshipsbetween elements in the diegetic world.

DEEP SPACE

A film utilizes deep space when significant elements of an image are positioned bothnear to and distant from the camera. For deep space these objects do not have to be infocus, a defining characteristic of deep focus. Staging in deep space is the opposite ofstaging in shallow space.

Deep space is used throughout many Iranian films such as The Color of Paradise(Rang-e Khoda,1999). Director MajidMajidi likes to integrate the characters into theirnatural surroundings, to map out the actual distances involved between one locationand another in order to emphasize just exactly how hard it is for a particular character

(especially children) to move from one place to another.

In this composition, Mohammad's father looks in apprehension at the school where hisblind son is visiting.In the far background, Mohammad is playing with his sister andother "normal" children, but his father does not believe Mohammad should try to minglewith them since he could never be their equal, due to his disability. On the other hand,Mohammad enjoys the company of his new friends in the countryside much more thanthe School for the Blind in Tehran, where he spends most of the year. The distancebetween the two points of view, as well as the impossibility of communication betweenMohammad and his father (the son is too respectful of his father, the father finds hisson's situation too painful), is reflected in the deep use of mise-en-scene.

FRONTALITY

Frontality refers to the staging of elements, often human figures, so that they face thecamera square-on. This arrangement is an alternative to oblique staging. Frontalstaging is usually avoided by the invisible style of continuity editing, since it supposedlybreaks the spectator's illusion of peeking into a separate world, by having characters


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look directly into the camera as if they were aware of the viewers' presence. Some filmsmay go even further and have the characters speak to the camera, in what is called adirect address. Accordingly, frontality is often used in films that are more willing to playwith, or openly defy, the distance between the screen and the spectator. In this shotfrom The Stendhal Syndrome(La Sindrome di Stendhal, Italy, 1996) Dario Argento

exploits the iconicity of frontal staging in multiple ways.

First, he situates his characters on a parallel plane with the famous profile portraits ofThe Duke of Urbino and his wife by Piero Della Francesca. Then, he flattens thecharacters by making the space between them and the paintings shallow with the use ofa zoom lens, while keeping all planes in focus. As a reflexive auteur, Argento thus usesfrontality to equate his characters with the paintings: both are fictional creations, theproduct of an artist's work. As a final self-referential pun, Argento has his Japanesetourist taking a picture of us!

MATTE SHOT

A process shot in which two photographic images (usually background and foreground)are combined into a single image using an optical printer. Matte shots can be used toadd elements to a realistic scene or to create fantasy spaces. In these four examplesfrom Vertigo(1958), director Alfred Hitchcock uses all possible combinations. In the firstimage, the white belfry is a model added on the foreground of a shot of the roof; in thesecond image, the sky in the background is clearly a painting, with the purpose ofmaking us believe the scene takes place on a bell tower's top floor, rather than on the

studio's ground.


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The other two shots belong to the fantasy sequence of Scottie's dream. In the first onehis face is superimposed over a campy "unconscious" image; the last one reverses theprocess, having a mixture of "real" and matted elements in the background (the roof andthe belfry) with the added silhouette in the foreground.

Matte shooting is one of the most common techniques used in studio filmmaking, eitherfor economical reasons (it's cheaper to shot a picture of the Eiffel tower than to travel toParis) or because it would be impossible or too dangerous to try to shot in the realspace. Sometimes, as when animation and real figures interact, that space may noteven exist. In recent years, however, special effects and computer generated imageshave taken over the function of matte shots.

OFFSCREEN SPACE

Space that exists in the diegesis but that is not visible in the frame. Offscreen spacebecomes significant when the viewer's attention is called to an event or presence in thediegesis that is not visible in the frame. Offscreen space is commonly exploited forsuspense in horror and thriller films, such as The Stendhal Syndrome(La Sindrome diStendhal, Dario Argento, Italy, 1996)


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As discussed in the offscreen sound entry, this scene from Life on Earth(La Vie surTerre, AbderrahmaneSissako, Mauritania, 1998) explores the difficulties of establishingcommunication in a postcolonial space that still depends on the former colonial masterfor its technology and even its calendar.

SHALLOW SPACE

The opposite of deep space, in shallow space the image is staged with very little depth.The figures in the image occupy the same or closely positioned planes. While theresulting image loses realistic appeal, its flatness enhances its pictorial qualities.Striking graphic patters can be achieved through shallow space. In these frames fromMy Neighbor Totoro(Tonari No Totoro, Japan, 1988) Miyazaki fills the entirebackground with a lamp-eyed, grinning catbus. Shallow space creates ambiguity: is thecat brimming with joy at the sisters' encounter, or is he about to eat them?

Shallow space can be staged, or it can also be achieved optically, with the use of atelephoto lens.This is particularly useful for creating claustrophic images, since it makes

the characters look like they are being crushed against the background.

Section 4 - Costume


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Costume simply refers to the clothes that characters wear. Costume in narrative cinemais used to signify character, or advertise particular fashions, or to make clear distinctionsbetween characters.

In this example from Life on Earth(La Vie sur Terre, 1998) filmmaker and actorAbderrahmaneSissako uses "similar" costumes (long loose clothes, big hats) to furtherstress the cultural and psychological implications of a nomadic existence, split between

the cold affluence of France and the colorful poverty of Mauritania.

Section 5 - Acting

There is enormous historical and cultural variation in performance styles in the cinema.Early melodramatic styles, clearly indebted to the 19th century theater, gave way inWestern cinema to a relatively naturalistic style. There are many alternatives to thedominant style: the kabuki-influenced performances of kyu-gekiJapanese period films,the use of non-professional actors in Italian neorealism, the typage of silent Soviet

Cinema, the improvisatory practices of directors like John Cassavettes or Eric Rohmer,the slapstick comedy of Laurel and Hardy, or the deadpan of Buster Keaton andJacques Tat, not to mention the exuberant histrionics of Bollywood films.

TYPAGE

Typage refers to the selection of actors on the basis that their facial or bodily featuresreadily convey the truth of the character the actor plays. Usually associated with theSoviet Montage school, these filmmakers thought that the life-experience of a non-actor

guaranteed the authenticity of their performance when they attempted a dramatic rolesimilar to their real social role. Typage is related to the use of stereotype incommuicating the essential qualities of a character. Although current casting practicescan no longer be described as typage, the use of performers with experience in the rolethey played is common to most films, whether they rely on the star system, or on non-professional actors. In Pudovkin'sStorm Over Asia(PotomokChingis-Khana, USSR,1928), professional and non-professional actors are used alike. The cast was selected


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