Film Studies: Essential Concepts and Techniques
Film Form
- Analysis: Suspends judgment; breaks film into parts and explains how they work.
- Function: How something in a film works.
- Motivation: Why something is in a film (justification).
- Unity & Disunity: Connection between aspects of two pieces of film that fit remarkably well (e.g., Toto in *The Wizard of Oz*).
- Similarity & Repetition: Object, sound, or person that is repeated throughout the film.
- Motif: Any significant repeated element that contributes to the overall film (e.g., marigolds in *Monsoon Wedding*).
- Plot Segmentation: Outline of the film that breaks it into major and minor parts.
Narrative Form
- Narrative: A chain of events linked by cause and effect, occurring in time and space.
- Story: Aspect of narrative that includes events that are only presumed or inferred by the spectator.
- Narration: The moment-by-moment process by which a film gives us cues about how to interpret events and how to reconstruct the world of the story/story out of the plot.
- Plot: Everything visibly and audibly presented before us (giving and withholding of information).
- Time:
- Order: Flashback/flashforward; proportion of the story that the plot presents out of chronological order.
- Duration: Certain stretches of a story; the sum of story duration equals overall plot duration.
- Frequency: Seeing the same action in several ways, with dialogue reappearing (e.g., *Inception* – story within a story).
- Range:
- Restricted Narration: Limited information.
- Unrestricted Narration: Unlimited information.
- POV Shot: A shot taken from a character’s optical standpoint (subjective to sound and perception).
- Shock Cut: A cut that juxtaposes two radically different scenes to shock the viewer.
- Whip Pans: A camera technique that involves moving the camera back and forth quickly on its x-axis, creating a blur effect.
- Montage: A series of short shots sequenced to condense space, time, and information.
- Deep Focus Cinematography: Uses a wide-angle lens (lenses with extreme focus that can keep the background and main object in focus).
Mise-en-scène (Put in Scene)
What appears in front of the camera.
- Long Take: Doesn’t condense real time, can create parallels and contrast between and within scenes, can have its own beginning, middle, and end, and can present a complex pattern of events moving toward a goal.
- Setting: Time and place the story takes place.
- Costume & Makeup: Simple or extreme changes to reveal or withhold information about a character or scene.
- Lighting: Shapes objects by creating highlights and shadows.
- Frontal Light: Eliminates shadows.
- Sidelight (Cross Light): Light from the left or right.
- Backlight: Light behind the subject.
- Three-Point Lighting: (Not a technique, but a setup)
- Key Light: Main light.
- Fill Light: Directional, softens or eliminates shadows.
- Backlight: Light behind the subject.
- High-Key Light: “Realistic” everyday scenes in Hollywood cinema.
- Low-Key Light: Opposite of high-key (e.g., *Citizen Kane*).
- Staging & Acting (Blocking): Staging refers to the arrangement and movement of actors, props, and cameras within a scene; relies on nuanced emotions and realism.
- Overlap: A cue for suggesting represented depth in the film image by placing objects partly in front of more distant ones.
- Shallow & Deep Space: Seems like few planes of depth versus multiple planes.
Cinematography
All manipulations of the film strip by the camera in the shooting phase.
- Contrast: The difference between the brightest and darkest areas within the frame.
- Exposure: The adjustment of the camera mechanism to control the amount of light that strikes each frame.
- Wide-Angle Lens: Wide field of view, distorts straight lines lying near the edges of the frame.
- Normal Lens: Normal view.
- Telephoto Lens: Flattens the space and depth along the camera axis; cues for depth and volume are reduced.
- Lumière Brothers: Created the hand-cranked device that made the first film in history.
- Zoom: Apparent movement of the camera that is not a camera movement at all.
- Focus: Amount of light that enters the lens to create a sharp outline and distinct texture.
- Depth of Field: Measure of the closest and farthest planes in front of the camera.
- Deep Focus: Keeps objects in both close and distant planes in sharp focus.
- Rack Focus: Shifting the area of focus from one area to another during a shot.
- Superimposition: Exposure of more than one image on the same film strip/shot.
- Scale: (ELS, LS, MLS, MS, MCU, CU, ECU – Extreme Long Shot, Long Shot, Medium Long Shot, Medium Shot, Medium Close-Up, Close-Up, Extreme Close-Up).
- Angle:
- Low: Looking up, the subject looks large, conveying power.
- Normal: Eye level, equal size, equal power.
- High Angle: Looking down, the subject looks small, conveying weakness.
- Pan: Turns left or right.
- Tilt: Turns up and down.
- Track/Dolly Shot: Mobile, forward, backward, laterally.
- Handheld Camera: The operator is used as the body of the camera.
Editing
- Cut: The joining of two strips of film together with a splice; an instantaneous change from one framing to another.
- Fade-Out: Shot that disappears as the screen darkens or whitens.
- Dissolve: Transition where the first image disappears while the second appears and blends.
- Wipe: A transition between shots in which a line passes across the screen.
- Graphic Match: Two successive shots joined so as to create a strong similarity of compositional elements (e.g., *The King’s Man* aging scene).
- Rhythmic Cutting: Cuts that either speed up, slow down, or stay the same; paces the film.
- Spatial Relations: Set the tone and influence the emotional impact of a scene.
- Temporal Relations: Order of presentation of events; flashforward/flashback; condense or expand the duration of a scene/shot.
- Overlapping Editing: Cuts that repeat part or all of an action, expanding viewing time and plot duration (e.g., Jackie Chan sliding down a pole).
- Continuity Editing: A system of editing used in film to maintain spatial and temporal continuity, ensuring a smooth and logical progression from shot to shot.
- Axis of Action: An imaginary line that passes through the main actors or the principal movement. The axis of action defines the spatial relations of all the scene elements as being to the right or left. The camera is not supposed to cross the axis at a cut and thus reverse those spatial relations. Also called the 180° System, it dictates that the camera should stay on one side of the action to ensure consistent left-right spatial relations between elements from shot to shot.
- Analytical Editing: Sets up conceptual situations with the setting or atmosphere – longer shots to shorter shots.
- Establishing Shot: A shot that shows the spatial relations among the important figures, objects, and setting in a scene.
- Shot Reverse Shot: Two or more shots edited together that alternate characters, typically during conversation (over-the-shoulder framing, one looking left and the other framing right).
- Eyeline Match: The first shot focuses on the eyes of the character.
- Reestablishing Shot: A return to a view of an entire space (e.g., *The Maltese Falcon* office scene).
- Cheat Cut: A cut that presents continuous time from shot to shot but mismatches the positions of figures or objects (e.g., the lunch scene with Hilde, Walter, and Bruce).
- Crosscutting: Alternates shots of two or more lines of action occurring in different places, usually simultaneously.
- Montage Sequence: A segment of film that summarizes a topic or compresses a passage of time into brief symbolic or typical images.
- 30-Degree Rule: A guideline in continuity editing that states the camera must move at least 30 degrees between consecutive shots of the same subject to avoid a jarring “jump cut.”
- Match on Action: A single action is seamlessly continued across two different shots. This creates a smooth visual flow, maintaining continuity and keeping the audience engaged without noticing the cut (e.g., the boxing scene in class).
Sound
- Rhythm: (Beat, pulse, tempo).
- Mickey Mousing: Matching the sound with the movements and actions on the screen (e.g., the *Steamboat Willie* scene).
- Fidelity: The extent to which the sound is faithful to the source as we conceive it.
- Diegetic & Nondiegetic Sound: Whether or not the sound comes naturally from the world of the film.
- External and Internal Diegetic Sound: Does the sound come from the mind of the character, or does it have a physical source?
- On/Off Screen Sound Does the source come from on or off the screen?
- Sound Bridge: Sound carries over a transition between two scenes, creating a smooth connection between them.
- Dialogue Overlap: A character’s dialogue continues across a cut from one shot to another, often used to create a sense of continuity, realism, or tension.
- Synchronous Sound: Needs to be synchronized with whatever is happening on the screen.
- Asynchronous Sound: The opposite of synchronous sound.
- Foley: Creating and recording custom sound effects to enhance a film’s audio realism.
- Music: Enhances storytelling, evokes emotions, and sets the tone. It can be original compositions, pre-existing songs, or a mix of both.
- Simultaneous Sound: Diegetic sound that is represented as occurring at the same time in the story as the image it accompanies.
- Non-Simultaneous Sound: Sound that comes from a source in time either earlier or later than the image it accompanies.