1. What drives cinema?
The film business would say that money is what drives movies, but what really drives cinema are ideas, stories, innovation, and images that convey feelings and meaning. In the end, it’s really humans and their inherent humanity what really drives cinema.
2. Edison Light:
Edison realized that light was essential to film making. So Edison made this sort of huge camera oscura called a Black Maria in which he filmed short movies that were projected on a small box.
3. Shock of the New:
When something that you are not used to or that you’re not expecting happens you are momentarily shocked and confused. An example is when the first Lumière movie was projected, the audience ran out of the room, thinking that the train on the screen was going to run them over.
4. Escape/Mirror:
Films, as any art form, serve at the same time as an escape from reality, a small break from logic and reason and a set story with the same people everyday over and over, a break in a comfrotable routine; and as a mirror for that same routine, what you’re seeing is someone else’s story, someone else’s set reality.
5. Low Brow Art:
Art that is made for the lower classes, easily understable, boring, and predictable. Art that is unsophisticated.
6. France took filmmaking seriously:
Since the French Revolution, France has believed that their story needs to be shared with the rest of the world, and their best way to show it and share it was through cinema. Some of the most important directors from early cinema where born here.
7. Phantom Ride:
A shot in which you feel as though you’re travelling through a path or following a route you have never been in.
8. Widescreen:
The use of a broader negative to give a bigger image.
9. How does editing make film?
Flow of action, liberation from actuality… It allows the filmmakers to tell a chronological story no matter how it was filmed. And this was something that could never happen in theater because time cannot be stopped and moved like that, and this discovery was important to cinema, allowing cinema reproduce a more loyal mirror of reality.
10. Parallel Editing:
A way to advance to storylines at once, the way of saying “meanwhile in cinema”
11. Reverse Angle:
When actors turned their back to the camera, and instead of just filming the actor’s back, they changed the angle from which they were filming to keep with the action.
12. Movie Star, characteristics of:
Actors started being the center of attention in film a short while after the reverse angle was invented. What drove the movies was then actors, rather than backgrounds, and more so the emotions they portrayed. People started going to films to see the actors that were in them.
13. Luxury, Costuming:
The way directors transformed actors from themselves into the film’s character. They also used costumes to tell a story within the story, to draw the audience in and to reveal something about the film’s character silently and subtly.
14. Drawing on Film:
To draw an image over the film itself.
15. The Phantom Carriage:
The name of the 1921 film by Viktor Sjostrom. It had stories in stories, and told the story of a carriage that arrive in the middle of the night to collect the souls of the death. It showed the souls in another light than the physical world.
16. Departure of Garbo and Bergman:
They were seduced by the Hollywood glamour and they left Scandinavia for it. Scandinavia as a result became, again, unknown in the film making industry until a few years back.
17. Youth and Glamour:
No one was supposed to look less than perfect. “Young and beautiful” was and has been since Hollywood’s motto. The whole point was to keep the audience enthralled by showing them something that was close to their reality but not quite. Not really attainable.
18. Why Hollywood:
Because of the weather. And because in the East Coast most of the advances for filmmaking were patented and you had to pay the inventor to use their ideas, California, however was very far away and you could break the law there.
19. 180 Degree Rule:
To make it look like people were looking at each other, or talking to each other, or generally interacting with each other, even if they were in different shots the camera had to stay in the same angle in both shots.
20: Women immigrants:
Hollywood was built by people who were creative, and wanted to work, but were also essentially outcasts in other professions.
21. Alice Guy and Lois Weber:
Two of the first women directors. Alice Guy was one of the first to really put a film together that included story arch and she brought a “poetry” and “subtlety” into filmmaking that had been lost to men. Lois Weber was one of the most innovative directors and she actually used herself as an actress in some of her films, she used a split screen to show simultaneous action and invented the “rear view mirror shot”.
22. Wall Street:
Wall Street entered into the business when film became popular. When it was evident that being a filmmaker made money because people liked to see the world that existed beyond what they knew. And it was then that filmmaking started to be taken seriously and when men wanted in on the fun.
23. D.W. Griffith:
He showed the wind in the trees, AKA a sense of the outside world. He added natural details into filmmaking. He was one of the best cinematographers in the business. He also made the edges of the films darker to give an air of elegance. And played with the focus of the camera.
24. Backlighting
A way to light the shots to make the light in the scene seem more natural. Less theatrical and leaning more toward real life.
25. Intolerance
He used angles that didn’t show everything and played into stereotypes. His movie The Birth of a Nation talks mainly about the KKK.
26: Intercuts:
“Dickens intercuts” Changing between one story and another, without losing a what is happening during the time we’re seeing the other story unfold.
27: Interconnecting storyline.
Intercuts allowed to develop an interconnecting storyline in which various stories intertwined and in the end they come together.