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 A simple example of a cliché in an art form is that of a western film where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one dons a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the "western" genre, it is clear to the informed audience that they are watching a gunfight showdown between a good guy and a bad guy.
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A simple example of a cliché in an art form is that of a western film where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one dons a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the "western" genre, it is clear to the informed audience that they are watching a gunfight showdown between a good guy and a bad guy.

"The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground." -- Frank Zappa


"They can keep their Bressons and their Cocteaus. The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema." --Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953) by Ado Kyrou


“What are commonly called true cinephiles are mental retards (débile mentale) who love “the movies”, people who run to any theatre to submit to viewing any film. They consume with the same pleasure whatever genre of film. That is what is known as cinephilia. It’s an illness, though a less common one than it used to be [during the heydays of the Nouvelle Vague ]”. --Alain Robbe-Grillet


The rise of cinema and "moving pictures" in the first decade of the 20th century gave the modern movement an artform which was uniquely its own. -- Sholem Stein, Dec 2004


"The Kino is a vulgar modern entertainment and I doubt if it can tell us anything serious about the modern condition [...]" --Sigmund Freud


[ Cinema is] "a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries . . ., a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence . . ., which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a 'star' in Los Angeles."--Scènes de la vie future (1930) by Georges Duhamel


"Fantasy, which has for so long been accepted as an expression of the whimsical state of mind, is, of course, within the legitimate sphere of the Cinema."--The New Spirit in the Cinema (1930) by Huntly Carter


"With the arrival of cinema, French philosopher Henri Bergson felt the need for new ways of thinking on movement and coined the terms "image-temps" and "image-mouvement" in Matter and Memory (1896). Gilles Deleuze, another French philosopher, took Matter and Memory to explain his views in his Cinéma I & II (1983-1985)." --Sholem Stein


"Romantic authors such as Novalis or Jean Paul, while anticipating the Expressionist notions of visual delirium and of a continual state of effervescence, also seem almost to have foreseen the cinema's consecutive sequences of images. In the eyes of Schlegel in Lucinde, the loved one's features become indistinct: 'very rapidly the outlines changed, returned to their original form, then metamorphosed anew until they disappeared entirely from my exalted eyes.' And the Jean Paul of the Flegeljahre says: 'The invisible world wished, like chaos, to give birth to all things together; the flowers became trees, then changed into columns of cloud; and at the tops of the columns flowers and faces grew. In Novalis's novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen there are even superimpositions."--The Haunted Screen (1952) by Lotte H. Eisner


"Any list of cult films will include, by decade, Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Un Chien Andalou (1929), Freaks (1932), La Main du diable (1943), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Peeping Tom (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Videodrome (1983), Audition (1999), Russian Ark (2002) and Joker (2019)."--Sholem Stein

This page Film is part of the film series.Illustration: screen shot from L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat
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This page Film is part of the film series.
Illustration: screen shot from L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat
In 1963, Roger Corman directed The Raven, a horror-comedy written by Richard Matheson very loosely based on the poem, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. It stars Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff as a trio of rival sorcerers.
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In 1963, Roger Corman directed The Raven, a horror-comedy written by Richard Matheson very loosely based on the poem, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. It stars Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff as a trio of rival sorcerers.
Extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
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Extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

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Film is a visual art used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.

The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects.

Traditionally, films were recorded onto celluloid film stock through a photochemical process and then shown through a movie projector onto a large screen. Contemporary films are often fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution, and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack (a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other sounds that accompany the images which runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it, and is not projected).

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures. They reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, and a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens. The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles to translate the dialog into other languages.

The individual images that make up a film are called frames. In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame, in turn, is moved into position to be projected, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears. The perception of motion is partly due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon.

The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photoplay, and flick. The most common term in the United States is movie, while in Europe film is preferred. Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, and cinema; the last of these is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and critical essays. In early years, the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen.

Contents

In the history of fiction

history of fiction

In the history of fiction, film became the dominant medium after the arrival of sound film in the late 1920s and early 1930s, displacing the novel and theatre. Until the arrival of home video, film was a community based entertainment medium. In recent years, video games have displaced films as the top grossing entertainment medium.

History

The New Spirit in the Cinema

Motion pictures developed gradually from a carnival novelty to one of the most important tools of communication, entertainment, artistic expression and mass media in the 20th century.

Although as a medium its importance has been eroded by television, video games and internet, motion picture films have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology, and politics, and it can be argued that it is still the people's favorite way of consuming fiction.

A major event in the recent history of film history was the arrival of home video.

Cinema

Cinema is synonym for film. The word borrows from French cinéma, shortening of cinématographe (term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s), from Ancient Greek κίνημα (kínēma, “movement”)

Film director

A - Fatih Akin - Woody Allen - Pedro Almodóvar - Robert Altman - Paul Thomas Anderson - Kenneth Anger - Michelangelo Antonioni - Darren Aronofsky - Fernando Arrabal - B - Paul Bartel - Mario Bava - José Bénazéraf - Ingmar Bergman - Bernardo Bertolucci - Bertrand Blier - Peter Bogdanovich - Walerian Borowczyk - Stan Brakhage - Tinto Brass - Catherine Breillat - Robert Bresson - Luis Buñuel - Tim Burton - C - James Cameron - Jane Campion - John Carpenter - Donald Cammell - Claude Chabrol - Larry Clark - Jean Cocteau - Coen brothers - Larry Cohen - Tony Conrad - Alex Cox - Francis Ford Coppola - Roger Corman - David Cronenberg - D - Joe Dante - Guy Debord - Jonathan Demme - Cecil B. DeMille - Maya Deren - E - Sergei Eisenstein - Thomas Edison - Jean Epstein - F - Oskar Fischinger - Louis Feuillade - Tom Ford - Georges Franju - Abel Gance - Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Federico Fellini - Abel Ferrara - Jesús Franco - Riccardo Freda - G - Alex Garland - Terry Gilliam - Michel Gondry - Peter Greenaway - Alain Robbe-Grillet - H - Michael Haneke - Todd Haynes - Werner Herzog - I - Alfred Hitchcock - Alejandro G. Iñárritu - Teruo Ishii - Juzo Itami - J - Gualtiero Jacopetti - Derek Jarman - Just Jaeckin - Alejandro Jodorowsky - Spike Jonze - K - Krzysztof Kieślowski - Stanley Kubrick - Akira Kurosawa - L - Fritz Lang - René Laloux - Yorgos Lanthimos - José Ramón Larraz - Patrice Leconte - Spike Lee - Sergio Leone - Michel Lemoine - David Lynch - M - Guy Maddin - Dušan Makavejev - Louis Malle - Chris Marker - Antonio Margheriti - Yasuzo Masumura - Georges Méliès - Radley Metzger - Russ Meyer - Takashi Miike - F. W. Murnau - Eadweard Muybridge - N - Gaspar Noé - Christopher Nolan - O - Nagisa Oshima - François Ozon - P - Park Chan-wook - Pier Paolo Pasolini - Max Pécas - Roman Polanski - Otto Preminger - Q - Brothers Quay - R - Jean Renoir - Alain Resnais - Alex de Renzy - Leni Riefenstahl - Jacques Rivette - Nicolas Roeg - Jean Rollin - George A. Romero - Ken Russell - David O. Russell - S - Salvatore Samperi - Joe Sarno - John Sayles - Barbet Schroeder - Vilgot Sjöman - Jack Smith - Martin Scorsese - Paolo Sorrentino - Jos Stelling - Josef von Sternberg - Erich von Stroheim - Jan Švankmajer - T - Jacques Tati - Quentin Tarantino - Guillermo del Toro - Lars von Trier - François Truffaut - Roger Vadim - V - Gus Van Sant - Dziga Vertov - Denis Villeneuve - Luchino Visconti - W - Kōji Wakamatsu - Peter Walker - Alex van Warmerdam - John Waters - Orson Welles - Wim Wenders - Robert Wiene - Michael Winterbottom - Doris Wishman - Ed Wood--Jahsonic's film canon

This page Film is part of the film series.Illustration: screen shot from L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat
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This page Film is part of the film series.
Illustration: screen shot from L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat

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A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design and all the creative aspects of filmmaking. Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film.

The film director gives direction to the cast and crew and creates an overall vision through which a film eventually becomes realized or noticed. Directors need to be able to mediate differences in creative visions and stay within the budget.

There are many pathways to becoming a film director. Some film directors started as screenwriters, cinematographers, producers, film editors or actors. Other film directors have attended a film school. Directors use different approaches. Some outline a general plotline and let the actors improvise dialogue, while others control every aspect and demand that the actors and crew follow instructions precisely. Some directors also write their own screenplays or collaborate on screenplays with long-standing writing partners. Some directors edit or appear in their films or compose the music score for their films.

See also

Film theory

Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is generally distinguished from film criticism, which concentrates on evaluating individual films.

History

In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory anticipated the development of film theory at a time that the cinema was just being born as a new medium—the early 1900s. He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer.

These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form.

In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema, arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality.

In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguistics.

During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an indexical image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion of the Real, Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of the gaze extensively used in contemporary film analysis. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers such as Tom Gunning.

Specific theories of film

List of film theorists

Specific theories of film

See also

Bibliography

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Film" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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