Hollywood Classic Filmmakers worksheet assignment

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fill out the below work sheet by picking a film still,after watching a film.Summareize reading and lecture.

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Reading Week 8
Hollywood Classic Filmmakers
Below is a writer we will revisit several times, the famous French critic and theoretician Andre Bazin,
writing about Orson Welles
WELLES
Bazin on Kane
Design of the image. It is not that Welles denies himself any recourse whatsoever to the expressionistic
procedures of montage, but just that their use from time to time in between sequences of shots in depth
gives them a new meaning. Formerly montage was the very stuff of cinema, the texture of the scenario. In
Citizen Kane a series of superimpositions is contrasted with a scene presented in a single take,
constituting another and deliberately abstract mode of story-telling. Accelerated montage played tricks
with time and space while that of Welles, on the other hand, is not trying to deceive us; it offers us a
contrast, condensing time, and hence is the equivalent for example of the French imperfect or the English
frequentative tense. Like accelerated montage and montage of attractions these superimpositions, which
the talking film had not used for ten years, rediscovered a possible use related to temporal realism in a
film without montage
Bazin and Welles
Bazin believed that the more faithfully a film presents the real world, the more room is left for ambiguity
and freedom, since the viewer is left to decide for himself what is important and where to look, rather
than being led by the nose.
Bazin wasn’t against creativity. On the contrary, he believed that the realism of cinema gives it greater
creative power because it taps directly into the power of creation itself, to the creative power of God.
Bazin’s realism was ultimately personalist, rooted in a belief in the world as revelatory and sacramental,
the work of God, the Supreme Person. At its best, film can capture transcendence amid transience and
make us aware of sacredness in the midst of fleeting reality: a “Holy Moment,” to cite a catchphrase that
is not Bazin’s but has become associated with him.
In Citizen Kane, Bazin saw a “revolution in the language of the screen” — one that blew away the
conventions of standard Hollywood storytelling at that time through techniques like deep focus,
prolonged takes, chiaroscuro lighting and unusual camera angles and movements. Although Citizen Kane
didn’t pioneer these techniques, Bazin argued that it invested them with new meaning and power.
By using deep focus or large depth of field (keeping objects in the foreground and background sharp at
the same time) and prolonged takes, Citizen Kane was able to use a single shot where another film might
have needed four or five, thus maintaining what Bazin called a “unity of image in space and time.” One of
the most obvious examples is the key scene in which young Charles is seen through the window of his
mother’s boarding house playing in the snow, unaware that the rest of his life is being decided by three
adults inside.
Bazin even found a bracing challenge to Hollywood artifice in some of the film’s more artificial
techniques, such as its dramatic use of highlight and shadow (chiaroscuro) and unusual camera angles
revealing the ceilings of sets. (Most Hollywood sets didn’t have ceilings because sound-recording
equipment and lighting were suspended overhead. Kane overcame this difficulty in some scenes by
stretching fabric over sets, creating “ceilings” that were translucent and sound-permeable.)
Thanks to conventional Hollywood techniques, Bazin wrote,
We had come to believe that the faces of beautiful women, when we look at them from up close, are
naturally lit by various, judiciously arranged sources; we had come to believe that people don’t turn their
Reading Week 8
backs when saying important things and that ceilings never confine our existence. (“The Technique of
Citizen Kane”)
Citizen Kane overturned all those expectations — and in doing so, for all its artifice, it realized Bazin’s
hopes for cinematic realism to an extraordinary degree.
Recommended
Sikov Ch 8
How to capture a frame:
Watch any film in any way.
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●
●
Youtube
VLC
Media Player etc.
Pause on a frame you like, on a PC press the ‘ctl’ key while at the same pressing the ‘PRTSCN’ key.
For further instructions on capturing the frame, see here:
http://www.gcflearnfree.org/techsavvy/taking-screenshots/1/
Then crop the screen shot so that only the fame is in the picture. You can do this in almost any program
on your PC or Phone. Microsoft word, paint, also google photos etc
Here is an example:
Cropped to:
Then Copy and paste the
Frame Analysis Worksheet Below and fill it out.
Look at mise en scene
● setting
● costume
● makeup
● props
● acting (expressions gestures etc)
● how objects are arranged
● Use of space
● Use of light
Consider cinematography
● Framing
● Shot choice (ls, ms, cu)
● Angle
Synthesis (what from above seems important)
The other option is to make notes on all of the above and create a voice thread
Go to blackboard,
Navigate to this class,
Click the voicethread button,
Create a voicethread,
Drop your still image in and comment on it using audio or video (the pencil to draw on the frame will
come up on voice thread when you start recording.

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summary

film

Hollywood

filmmakers

intro to moving imagies

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