Introduction to Film Studies Film Form and Film

Introduction to Film Studies Film Form and Film Style

Order • Flashforward – a scene that takes the narrative forward in time from the current time of the plot • Nichola Roeg’s Don’t Look Now • A man sees his wife in black on a boat, though she is supposed to be away. At the end of the film, it is revealed that she is with her husband’s coffin.

Frequency • An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular) Today I went to the bar. • An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative) I used to go to the bar. • An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive) I went to the bar. Other people saw me going to the bar. • An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple) I used to go to the bar and other people saw me going to the bar a number of times.

Frequency • Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989) – three stories featuring different characters take place in the same run-down hotel and are connected by a gunshot. There is only one gunshot but it is heard three times in three different episodes.

Duration • Difference between discourse time and narrative time • Discourse time – time spent to narrate the event Narrative time – real time that has passed for an event to take place • ‘ 5 years later’ a lengthy narrative time, but it could be a matter of second in discourse time

Duration • Narrative time is normally shorter than discourse time • Several million years are covered in Space Odyssey by 161 minutes • Kane’s life covered in Citizen Kane in 119 mins. • Many years covered in Amadeus by 138 minutes • Four days covered in North by Northwest by 136 minutes • One day covered in Hiroshima, mon amour by 90 minutes

Duration • In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey several million years are skipped in a few seconds between the scenes in which an ape throws upward a bone and a spaceship cruises in the space.

Duration Tokyo Story • Elipsis: the omission of a large section of a narrative • Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story - the scene of mother lying in coma cut to the morning scene, in which she is already passed away.

Duration Empire • In some films discourse time, plot time last as long as narrative time or real time. • Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) 485 minutes of the Empire State Building at night • Cezare Zavattini’s experimental omnibus film, Love in the City (1953) Tre ore di paradiso

Duration • Discourse time is longer than narrative time, a rare case • Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad • 10 second 100 meter race is lengthen to 30 seconds • Tokyo Olympiade

Voice • Voice is connected with who narrates and from where • Where the narration is from: Intra-diagetic: inside the text (narrated from the film narrative) Extra-diagetic: outside the text (narrated from outside film narrative)

Voice • Who narrates: Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in a film Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in a film • First person narrating (intra-diegetic & homodiegetic) and third person narrating (extradiegetic & hetero-diegetic)

Voice • Intra-diegetic, homo-diegetic first person narrating • David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) – a housewife who is having an affair with a married doctor whom she met in a station is narrating what is going on inside herself. Rachmaninov’s music as a extra-diegetic element.

Voice • Alain Resnais’s short documentary film about Auschwitz, Night and Fog (1955). The script was written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and narrated by Michel Bouquet

Mood • Mood – the various degree of ‘distance’ created between the narrator of a film and what she narrates. • Distance helps the viewer to determine the degree of precision in a narrative and the accuracy of information conveyed. • Unreliable narrator: the distance between a narrator and what he narrates is wide: • The narrator in Citizen Kane – a journalist gathering information about who Kane really is and what ‘rose bud’ really means.

Mood Lady in the Lake • First-person perspective – the camera become the viewpoint of the film as well as a character • Robert Montgomery’s ambition to create a cinematic version of the first-person narrative of Raymond Chandler in Lady in the Lake (1947)