Through reading this book I've discovered why modern movies leave me cold, compared to past ones; something I've never really really been able to put my finger on in a technical way. Now I know it's because the pace of cutting between cameras has doubled over the past few decades, leaving everything, even non-action movies, having something of a frenetic ADD sort of feel. Also, modern movies are made with television and DVD releases in mind, making camera work focus more on close-ups and a set form of easily partitioned scenes rather than grand-tableau long-shots and theatrically inspired middle shots. Now I know this, I have better idea of what in mind to look for when sorting out new releases to view. Andreas Rost was host and organizer, and he went on, with the cooperation of Ingo Fliess of Verlag der Autoren, to edit and publish the talks in German. This little volume has a nifty design, with lovely pictures and a user-friendly layout.

Like Last Year at Marienbad, Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected (more correctly translated as Innocent Unprotected) diverges markedly from the norms of classical narrative filmmaking. In analyzing the film, it is useful to think of its form as a collage, an assemblage of materials taken from widely different sources. By playing up the disparities among the film’s materials, the collage principle permits Makavejev to use film techniques and film form in fresh and provocative ways. The result is a film that examines the nature of cinema — particularly, cinema in a social and historical context. In Chapter 6 “The Relation of Shot to Shot: Editing”, covering LA Confidential, The Birds, The Maltese Falcon and others, the authors talk about how editing shots together can create a pace and effect the viewer. This section has the most primal value to the film viewer who ultimately looks to the movie itself when analyzing film. I believe that the visual medium of filmmaking holds the meaning that so much theory attempts to uncover- Bordwell and Thompson seem to be at their strongest when evaluating purely visual value of movies aside from the theory. Another of my favorite sections is Chapter 8 “Style as a Formal System” which covers how many combined elements such as mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound are combined by a filmmaker to develop a style. The authors talk about how style is plastic to the filmmaker and what it means to the viewer. Many films pose few difficulties for viewers who like their movies straightforward and easy to digest. But not all films are so clear in their form and style. In films like Day of Wrath, the questions we ask often do not get definite answers; endings do not tie everything up; film technique does not always function invisibily to advance the narrative. When analyzing such films, we should restrain ourselves from trying to answer all of the film’s questions and to create neatly satisfying endings. Instead of ignoring peculiarities of technique, we should seek to examine how film form and style create uncertainty — seek to understand the cinematic conditions that produce ambiguity. Day of Wrath, a tale of witchcraft and murder set in seventeenth-century Denmark, offers a good test case. full sizeAnother venture into poetics, this time concentrating on international stylistics. It’s a book of historiography, reviewing three major trends in understanding the history of film style: the orthodox position that emerged in the 1920s (and still governs most history-writing); a counter-position that emerged with André Bazin’s generation in France during the 1940s and 1950s; and a modernist wave that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, epitomized by the work of Noël Burch. A fourth chapter brings the story up to date, concentrating on “revisionist” work in early cinema (Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Kristin Thompson, Ben Brewster, etal.). Each chapter offers some criticisms. The fifth chapter suggests studying the history of style as linked problems and solutions, and the approach is illustrated through a history of depth staging.I’ve added online supplements to the published chapters, with the advantage of color illustrations. Film Art: An Introduction" es un libro de David Bordwell y Kristin Thompson que como bien dice el título, nos habla en más de 500 páginas sobre el arte del cine de una manera más analítica. Chapter 3 “Narrative as a Formal System”, covers what narrative is, ultimately defining the concept as a cause-and-effect chain of events occurring over a period of time. The authors talk about the films like Citizen Kane and others that manipulate time duration, and causality to create meaning. My favorite section is Part Three Film Style, because it covers a number of aesthetic elements and gives good examples that exist in current films and examples as well from historical artifacts.

A fairly decent but not great book on film art, this book is more about the technical aspects of moviemaking and the history of film than seeking to find what makes film great or even art at all. So it comes across as large informative rather than enlightening. I’ve read many books on film and am a tremendous “Criterion” cinephile, really my point in reading a currently used college textbook was to find out what I didn’t know, and there were a few things.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-03-26 14:05:17 Associated-names Thompson, Kristin, 1950- Bookplateleaf 0006 Boxid IA40082305 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-658 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier A decent textbook focussed on different aspects of how to analyze a film – definitions and discussions of what constitutes narrative in film, examinations of the roles of editing/cinematography/lighting choice – Lccn 2009042923 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9974 Ocr_module_version 0.0.12 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18670 Openlibrary_edition full sizeMy third book-length director study, again seeking to do several things at once. First, it gives an overview of Eisenstein’s cinematic work—the films he made, the theories he generated. Taking him as a director trying to fuse theory and practice, I analyze his theoretical writings and all of his films. Secondly, as usual, the book tries to put the director into a pertinent context. Traditionally he is thought of as Comrade Film Constructivist, cinema’s Rodchenko or Mayakovsky. But this doesn’t allow for what he did after 1930, except to consider it a sad decline into official art. full sizeAn effort to propose a poetics of popular film, while also celebrating a tradition I love. It’s also a mix of academic film history and film analysis with a looser, more informal writing style. Writing it was quite hard, since the subject kept changing from week to week: new films, a fresh crisis in the industry, another batch of books and articles, a new wave of information bursting off the Net. But I hope both fans and nonspecialists find some of it worthwhile. Other Hong Kong pieces are noted in the articles section.

My main criticism of the book is the format of 1) stills from a film and 2) associated sentences or paragraphs of text explaining what the reader should be learning.

Godzilla – The Art of Destruction

Me gusta como nos da ejemplos todo el tiempo para ilustrar los puntos. Estis ejemplos suelen ser fotogramas de películas que podemos ir viendo durante todo libro.