Wide:

• Makes background appear farther away from subject than “normal” --Photographing with a  wide lens is a method to separate foreground objects or persons from background objects or persons – visually pushes them apart
• Room size appears larger than “normal”
• Objects / people diminish rapidly in size the deeper they are set in the frame
• Increases apparent speed of objects coming to or away from camera because they grow – or shrink so quickly
• Reduces sense of lateral speed
• Accentuates keystone effect
• Focus: at same physical distance from subjects as the other lenses, greatly increases depth of field
• Exmple: in 35mm cinematography: 14mm

Normal:

• Appearance of people/objects = roughly as eye sees them
• Example: in 35mm cinematography: 50mm

Long:

• Makes background appear closer to subject than “normal” -- Photographing with a long lens is a method to push foreground objects or persons against  background object(s) or person(s) – visually compresses them together
• Room size appears smaller than “normal”
• Objects / people diminish little in size when placed deep in the frame
• Decrease apparent speed of objects coming to or away from the camera because they grow or shrink slowly
• Accentuates lateral movement (Washizu  & Miki ride through the forest)
• Reduces keystone effect
• Focus: at same physical distance from subjects as the other lenses, greatly reduces depth of field
• Example:  in 35mm cinematography: 200mm

• a term from theater: refers to the invisible wall that separates actors and audience. The audience pretends that the actors are real people in a real world, and the actors equally pretend they are in a real world and the audience is not there. When an actor suddenly breaks character and speaks directly to the audience, that is called breaking the 4th wall. There are several examples of this "breaking" in Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard, including the very last shot of the movie.

Subjective camera:

• the camera takes the place of one of the characters and sees action or people as if it were the character. We see an example of a subjective camera in Throne of Blood when Washizu, as he goes back into the forest to consult again with the witch, looks wildly around him . We cut to shots raking the forest as if the camera had become Washizu. In Breathless there is an example when Patricia rolls up a poster and peers through it to Michel. We cut to the camera seeming to zoom through the rolled up poster as Michel stares into the lens -- into Patricia's eyes.

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http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Golden%20rectangle

• A little bit of Color History:

Once again,

·         From the beginning of film, there were a multitude of Attempts to bring color to the screen. For a long time, the only working solution was to hand tint each print.

• Birth of a Nation

• Burning of Atlanta = tinted red

• Night scenes blue

·         Color begins around 1935: Once again technology advance sets film art backwards for a while

·         Needed huge amounts of light, prohibiting the deep shadows of so many great black and white films. While that sort of lighting can work for musicals and conventional comedies, it severely limits the filmmaker. For the Technicolor process, you had not only a DP setting lighting, but a Technicolor engineer overseeing him.

• First 3-color movie that also moved past extremely limiting “gee whiz” notions that if it’s color it’s good: 1935, Becky Sharp, Robert Mamoulian – FIRST 3-Strip COLOR FEATURE

• Problems color:

• Tendency to prettify everything

• Need for lots and lots of light – film stocks not sensitive

• Eventually DP’s and directors began to use color to stylize, emphasize the story

• Red Desert   

• Dir = Michelangelo Antonioni, DP = Carlo Di Palma, 1964;

• An extreme use of color: spray painted natural locales to emphasize psychological states.

•  “Red Desert’s credits roll over undefined shapes covered in a choking yellow industrial fog. When the credits end, the scene sharpens into a series of cuts showing different views of a slate-gray tableaux of factories in the rain. In this grim, rainy world, the people — factory workers — are as gray as the road, the sky, and the buildings, and as undifferentiated — with two exceptions. A woman in a bright green coat is walking along the same gray road, accompanied by her small son in a bright red suit. This is the first indication that the woman, Giuliana (Vitti), is somehow apart from the dreary, hopeless world around her.” – cf for a graphic description of the plus and negative of this film, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/reddesert.html

• Marking Michelangelo Antonioni's entry into color film, Red Desert is a visually dense, metaphoric, and emotionally austere portrait of spiritual desolation, technological disconnection, and environmental malaise. Exploring similar themes of estrangement and ennui as his seminal trilogy of alienation (L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse), Antonioni's color palette juxtaposes muted earth tones and bold, artificial (and often primary) colors to reflect the unnaturality and inherent competition between natural order and industrialization in a modern, and increasingly alienated, society: the automated rhythm of toxic, yellow fume emissions from the plant as Giuliana and Valerio pass nearby that bookend the film; the brightly painted, color-coded pipes that populate the interior spaces of the control facility as Giuliana pays a visit to the emotionally distant Ugo; the bright red, high power antennas that visually bisect the landscape during Giuliana and Corrado's walk … Antonioni further manifests the encroachment and toll of industrialization through disquieting ambient noise (modulated high frequency sounds and monotonous drone), bleak and polluted landscapes (the blackened desolate area where Giuliana consumes her appropriated sandwich and the fishing ban on the waters surrounding the disused shack), and the intrusion of man-made objects into the frame (the repeated image of ships traversing the horizon). Inevitably, the seeming cure to Giuliana's indefinable illness proves to be a resigned acceptance and emotional immunity to the irreconcilable chaos of her dehumanized and alienating environment.” -- http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/antonioni.html#red_desert

• Today, we have color negatives that create fabulous images at extremely low light levels, and can also embrace a huge range of light values, from deep black to pure white and enormous shades in between. Video not there yet, but getting there.

• Early experiments in Juxtaposition:

     Experiments of Lev Kuleshov, 1899-1970, about 1919 or 20:

• Juxtaposed unrelated images to produce a new meaning:

• juxtaposed the same shot of a famous actor, Ivan Mozhukhin, with shots of a bowl of soup, a woman lying dead in a coffin, and a child playing with a teddy bear. To one group of viewers, he showed shots of the actor and a bowl of soup. To another group, the same shot of the actor with a child's coffin, and to a third the same shot of the actor and the child. Then he asked, what is the actor showing us? The first group thought the actor was expressing hunger. The second thought he was showing sorrow. The third group thought the actor was expressing love of child. All groups thought he was an excellent actor. Viewers also assumed the actor was in the same physical space as the other images. Viewers assume a connection between the shots.

• The power of juxtaposition:  something new created that is not in either of the original shots.
   

• movie of both run together :  http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T112/EditingIllustrations08.htm

• for a long and very interesting discussion of Lev Kuleshov's films, and especially "Your Heart is Beating Too Loudly" set in America, see: http://www.ce-review.org/99/20/kinoeye20_horton.html 
   

• "In another experiment, Kuleshov spliced together another series of shots which had been filmed entirely out of sequence and in different times and places: a waiting man, a walking woman, a gate, a staircase, and a mansion. The audience read spatial and temporal 'sense' into the sequence, deciding that they saw the man and the woman meeting in front of the gate at the same time. This demonstrated the viewer's essential role in creating a film's continuity and advanced the notion that a filmmaker creates a 'fictive space', with the freedom to shoot out of sequence and join together unrelated shots. Kuleshov used these discoveries to advance the theory of montage as the central device of cinema, later adapted by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Pudovkin." -- http://www.ouc.bc.ca/fina/glossary/k_list/kuleshov.html

• Eisenstein and Pudovkin both his students and deeply effected: narrative is created not by the content of the individual shots in a film but by their interaction.

Efforts to use sound date from the beginning of film.

·         Example:  place actors and noisemakers behind the screen to speak and make sound effects more or less in sync with the picture

·         Example: Edison worked to link a phonograph and picture projector, the Kinetoscope.

·         Example: live piano music, sometimes entire orchestras

·         Eventually a system to record sound optically on the side of the film; 2 competing systems: variable density vs variable area

·         Another striking example of how technology changes at first adversely effect film production. Now the camera had to be housed in a huge, hot box, largely unable to move; actors had to hit very pricise marks where microphones were hidden. The fluidity of filmmaking reverted to rigid practices of the very beginning of film.

·         effect on actors – many silent film stars plummeted as their voices were terrible

·         Dire predictions that sound would set film way back, since at first the only editing one could do was at shot changes (no VO, no overlap, no mixing.)

·         Eisenstein believed sound would kill the very soul of film art.

·         1927, The Jazz Singer, Alan Crosland, music and several talking sequences, first popular sound success

·          http://library.sdsmt.edu/friendsvideos/Jazz%20Singer%20f.jpg

·        1928, the first all talking film, Lights of New York, directed by Bryan Foy – to our eyes today, it is just awful.

·        Shot in one week at a cost of $23,000, "Lights" was originally meant as a two reeler but Foy took advantage of Jack Warner's absence to extend it to six. When Warner discovered this he ordered Foy to cut it back to the original short. Only when an independent exhibitor offered $25k for the film, did Warner actually look at the film, which went on to make a staggering $1.3 million.

Seen now this is an extremely hokey piece, with acting that ranges from the passable (Eugene Pallette) to trance like (Eddie's Granny in a particularly risible scene) and much of the playing is at the level of vaudeville. [About all the actors do is talk,] and very slowly at that. The script feels improvised, visual style is non existent (apart from the shooting scene done in silhouette) and scenes grind on interminably. Title cards are intercut which redundantly announce characters and locales. – for more comments, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019096/usercomments

·          

·        One of the first movies with sound on the film that got past seeming restrictions of the technology: 1929, Applause, Robert Mamoulian

·         http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/movie/coverv/19/217019_thumb.jpg·        by 1930, creative artists were once again getting a hand on the new technology: french director René Clair thought:

·        sound should be used selectively;

·        sound can be edited in the same way images can;

·        the camera can explore visual information while voices play over it. He often dubbed sound in later, freeing up the camera to move – ahead of its time.

·         1931, Le Million,

·         After WWll, commercially available magnetic tape to record sound

·         By 1950 – recording onto tape replaces optical records; allows separate sound tracks for dialogue, music, sound effects, narration, etc.

·         at first, recorded onto 35mm full stripe – sound truck for every feature (when I began as an assistant director in 1963.)

·         the Nagra was the next break through: record high quality on ¼” tape -- portability

·         (When I began making documentaries at KQED in 1968, we had a Nagra. For our documentaries, We transferred the audio onto 16mm full coat. We could mix up to 6 tracks at a time, but we could not cut into a recording without creating a pop – had to mix the entire show in one pass – accept many compromises.