ENGLISH 1135 - INTRO TO FILM ART
Welcome to English 1135 - Intro to Film Art. This landing page will act as a resource directing you to information on each of the films we are studying this semester. Before we move into the course itself, I want to offer a little bit of guidance for how we're going to approach our learning this semester. As a way of kicking us off, I want to quote from Russian cinema theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote extensively about the potential for film as an art form. This is a selected passage from one of his famous essays on cinema:
“Yet, what is most essential is that cinema as an art in general, and, further, as an art not only equal to, but in many respects superior to, its fellow-arts, began to be spoken of seriously only with the beginning of Socialist cinematography. Though it was a matter of years before the full realization of our cinema, that some of the greatest minds pointed in our country to the cinema as the most important of the arts and the one of greatest mass-potency, it required the appearance of a brilliant constellation of Soviet films before people across the frontier began to speak of the cinema as an art deserving as serious attention as is ordinarily given the theater, literature, or painting. It was only then that the cinema rose above the level of the music-hall, the amusement park, the zoo, and the chamber of horrors, to take its place within the family of great arts.
|
Soviet film theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein at work in the editing room, where his most lasting ideas would take shape.
|
"The cinema would seem to be the highest stage of embodiment for the potentialities and aspirations of each of the arts. Moreover, the cinema is that genuine and ultimate synthesis of all artistic manifestations that fell to pieces after the peak of Greek culture, which Diderot sought vainly in opera, Wagner in music-drama, Scriabin in his color-concerti, and so on and on. For sculpture—cinema is a chain of changing plastic forms, bursting, at long last, ages of immobility. For painting—cinema is not only a solution for the problem of movement in pictorial images, but is also the achievement of a new and unprecedented form of graphic art, an art that is a free stream of changing, transforming, commingling forms, pictures, and compositions, hitherto possible only in music.
Music has always possessed this possibility, but with the advent of cinema, the melodious and rhythmic flow of music acquired new potentialities of imagery—visual, palpable, concrete (true, our practice of the new art knows as yet but few cases of any complete fusion of aural and visual images). For literature—cinema is an expansion of the strict diction achieved by poetry and prose into a new realm where the desired image is directly materialized in audio-visual perceptions. And finally, it is only in cinema that are fused into a real unity all those separate elements of the spectacle once inseparable in the dawn of culture, and which the theater for centuries has vainly striven to amalgamate anew.”
Music has always possessed this possibility, but with the advent of cinema, the melodious and rhythmic flow of music acquired new potentialities of imagery—visual, palpable, concrete (true, our practice of the new art knows as yet but few cases of any complete fusion of aural and visual images). For literature—cinema is an expansion of the strict diction achieved by poetry and prose into a new realm where the desired image is directly materialized in audio-visual perceptions. And finally, it is only in cinema that are fused into a real unity all those separate elements of the spectacle once inseparable in the dawn of culture, and which the theater for centuries has vainly striven to amalgamate anew.”
Each week, resources for the films we are studying will become available here. You can click either the subject title or the image, both of which will take you where you need to go.
Film content
Like other storytelling mediums, narrative cinema makes use of plot, theme, character, setting, and more.
|
film form
Cinema differs greatly from other mediums in its heavy reliance on a multiplicity of formal elements.
|
images
The image is the major unit of currency in the cinematic art form.
|
editing
Images are chained together through editing, which creates meaning through linking ideas and emotions across multiple shots.
|
mise-en-scene
Everything inside the frame reflects a specific choice on the part of the filmmakers.
|
staging
A holdover from theatre, one of cinema's most direct ancestors, the staging of actors shapes audience perceptions of characters.
|
music
Both composed score and carefully selected popular tracks combine with images to express grand emotions.
|
Sound
A visual medium at birth, cinema acquired the ability to express itself through audio.
|