Intro to History of Film

Dawn of Cinema

Readings:

David W. Griffith

  • The father of “film technique” (1875-1948)
  • Biograph Company (1908 – 1913) »G. W. “Billy” Bitzer
  • Narrative techniques:
    • Deep elaboration of the mise-en-scène.
    • Use of naturalistic exteriors
    • Tracking shots
    • Crane shots
    • Graphic Techniques as “fade”, or “iris”
    • Narrative Techniques (Editing parallel scenes)
    • Screen acting
  • With all these elements of film-making that he invented or refined, Griffith created a FILM SYNTAX that would determine the language of cinema in the next decades

Elements of Film Syntax

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  • Shot / take
    • Static Shots:
      • Close up (extreme close up)
      • Medium Long Shot
      • Medium Shot
      • Full Shot (extreme full shot)
      • Low Shot
      • High Shot
    • Dynamic Shots:
      • Pan Shot or Travelling Shot
      • Tracking Shot /  Parallel Tracking shot
      • Crane Shot
  • Scene
  • Sequence

Griffith’s Golden Age

  • The Birth of a Nation (1915)
  • Intolerance (1916) 
  • Broken Blossoms (1919)
  • Way Down East (1920)
  • Orphans of the Storm (1921)
  • Star System: Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Lionel Barrymore, Donald Crisp, Henry B. Walthall and Wallace Reid.

Russian Ideological Realism

  • No magic, symbolic or imaginary elements.
  • Movies as rapid soviet revolutionary propaganda – as a means of mass persuasion.
  • Lev Kuleshow:
    • The Kuleshow Effect
    • The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924)
  • Dziga Vertov:
    • Kino-Pravda (Cinema truth, 1922-25)
    • The Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
  • Vsevolod I. Pudovkin:
    • The Mechanics of Brain (1925)
    • Mother (1926)
    • The End of St. Petersburg (1927

The Kuleshow Effect

Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898-1948)

  • Directorial Debut: The Wise Man (1923)
  • Do You Hear, Moscow? (1923)
  • October (1929)
  • The General Line (1929)
  • The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
    • Originally planned to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1905 soviet revolution.
    • The film is divided into five acts: Men and Maggots; Drama on the Quarterdeck; An Appeal from the Dead, The Odessa Steps; and Meeting the Squadron.
    • The film is 86 minutes long and contains 1346 shots.
    • The Odessa Steps scene has an average shot length of 2 second.
    • Eisenstein intercut moments of personal tragedy into scenes of documentary realism.

The Battleship Potemkin – Odessa Steps Sequence