Film Art: An Introduction

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full sizeKristin Thompson and I grew concerned that film history textbooks didn’t reflect the growing scholarship in the field, particularly on early film and non-Western film. Too often U.S.books relied chiefly on films which had distribution here, forgetting that many outstanding films don’t get access to American audiences. Most textbooks also tended to ignore the primary sources, both print and film. (For example, most books didn’t use frame enlargements to illustrate the films but relied instead upon production stills.) So we decided to write a history text. It couldn’t be comprehensive or definitive, but we thought we could offer something different. As with Ozu, I try to challenge received opinion. I treat Eisenstein as seeking to synthesize many artistic traditions, both avant-garde and academic. In my account, he becomes a “conservative Constructivist” and an avant-garde Socialist Realist. The “poetics of cinema” theme enters too, but in a different key. Eisenstein himself set out to create a poetics of cinema, particularly of film style, and so the book tries to delineate that and show how it still has value for us. The Cinema of Eisenstein is my only book to win an award; it won the 1993 Theatre Library Association Award for the outstanding book in film, broadcasting, or recorded performance. It has been translated into Chinese (Taipei: Yuan-Liou, 1995) and Spanish (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, 1999). The second edition contains a new preface. Italian readers may wish to consult “La stilistica della scenografia nel tardo Ejzenstejn,” in Sergej Ejzenstejn: Oltre il cinema, ed. Pietro Montani (Venice: La Biennale diVenezia/ Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1991), pp.138–145. I’m focusing more on live action films in this list, but you can find more animated films in my collection of Disney artbooks and Pixar artbooks which are both animation-oriented. The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Film theorist André Bazin has written of John Ford’s Stagecoach: “ Stagecoach is the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection… Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position.” This effect results from the film’s concentration on the creation of a tight narrative unity, with all of its elements serving that goal. Los temas que cubre son sobre la producción cinematográfica, las formas narrativas, el estilo cinematográfico (donde nos habla sobre como lo conforma la puesta en escena, los planos, el encuadre, el montaje & sonido) nos da análisis críticos de películas (nos va poniendo ejemplos de análisis completos de películas, no solo clásicas si no también de género alternativo, documental, animación, de ideologías y nos explica como podemos escribir nuestro propio análisis) y por último nos habla de la historia de cine desde sus comienzos hasta el nuevo cine alemán. Hollywood churns out the finest talent in visual arts and it’s the largest entertainment center anywhere in the world. Because of this you’ll often find a lot of talent in movie art books featuring concept art, vis dev art, and custom sets/props.Translated into long form Chinese (Hong Kong: Arts Council Film Critics Society, 2001) and simplified Chinese (Beijing: Hainan, 2003). Italian readers might be interested in a journalistic essay, “Senza Inibizioni: Introduzione al cinema di Hong Kong,” Segno cinema no.80 (July/ August 1996), pp. 12–14.

This is a revised and updated version of the 2000 edition mentioned below. It adds a chapter on the recent history of the Hong Kong film industry and a chapter on artistic trends over the same period—genres, stylistic options, and the emerging importance of three filmmakers: Wong Kar-wai, Stephen Chow, and JohnnieTo. There are also two more “interludes,” one devoted to the Infernal Affairs trilogy, the other to Johnnie To’s crime films as carrying forward particular traditions in local filmmaking. The pdf file includes over 440 illustrations, nearly all in color. Me gusta como nos da ejemplos todo el tiempo para ilustrar los puntos. Estis ejemplos suelen ser fotogramas de películas que podemos ir viendo durante todo libro. full sizeThis book develops and extends some of the arguments in the sixth chapter of OntheHistoryofFilmStyle. I consider how we might study cinematic staging, particularly ensemble staging, and take four major directors as examples of various staging strategies. The work of LouisFeuillade, MizoguchiKenji, TheoAngelopoulos, and HouHsiao‑hsien allows me to trace some staging devices across about 100years of film history. More generally, FiguresTracedinLight argues that we can profitably explain a lot about film style by considering the craft context within which filmmakers work, and the last chapter defends this argument against some criticisms it has received elsewhere. Film Art: An Introduction" es un libro de David Bordwell y Kristin Thompson que como bien dice el título, nos habla en más de 500 páginas sobre el arte del cine de una manera más analítica. Conner made A Movie, his first film, in 1958. Like Léger, he worked in the visual and plastic arts and was noted for his assemblage pieces—collages built up of miscellaneous found objects. Conner took a comparable approach to filmmaking. He typically used footage from old newsreels, Hollywood movies, soft-core pornography, and the like. By working in the found-footage genre, Conner juxtaposed two shots from widely different sources. When we see the two shots together, we strive to find some connection between them. From a series of juxtapositions, our activity can create an overall emotion or concept.I think, after readers dwell on this book, they won't see the film as they were. Their mind will questioned and analyzed the effectiveness and the appropriateness of the elements on films. full sizeAn effort to propose a poetics of popular film, while also celebrating a tradition I love. It’s also a mix of academic film history and film analysis with a looser, more informal writing style. Writing it was quite hard, since the subject kept changing from week to week: new films, a fresh crisis in the industry, another batch of books and articles, a new wave of information bursting off the Net. But I hope both fans and nonspecialists find some of it worthwhile. Other Hong Kong pieces are noted in the articles section. I’ve added online supplements to the published chapters, with the advantage of color illustrations. Lccn 2009042923 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9974 Ocr_module_version 0.0.12 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18670 Openlibrary_edition

Comprehensive in scope, and structured to cover the industry as well as aesthetic concerns of film and newer media developments in video, Film Art is set up in six parts with a total of 12 chapters. Also be advised: at least in my copy (8th edition), the included CD-ROM does not function properly unless your computer has a PowerPC processor. full sizeMy third book-length director study, again seeking to do several things at once. First, it gives an overview of Eisenstein’s cinematic work—the films he made, the theories he generated. Taking him as a director trying to fuse theory and practice, I analyze his theoretical writings and all of his films. Secondly, as usual, the book tries to put the director into a pertinent context. Traditionally he is thought of as Comrade Film Constructivist, cinema’s Rodchenko or Mayakovsky. But this doesn’t allow for what he did after 1930, except to consider it a sad decline into official art. Through reading this book I've discovered why modern movies leave me cold, compared to past ones; something I've never really really been able to put my finger on in a technical way. Now I know it's because the pace of cutting between cameras has doubled over the past few decades, leaving everything, even non-action movies, having something of a frenetic ADD sort of feel. Also, modern movies are made with television and DVD releases in mind, making camera work focus more on close-ups and a set form of easily partitioned scenes rather than grand-tableau long-shots and theatrically inspired middle shots. Now I know this, I have better idea of what in mind to look for when sorting out new releases to view. Another of my favorite sections is Chapter 8 “Style as a Formal System” which covers how many combined elements such as mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound are combined by a filmmaker to develop a style. The authors talk about how style is plastic to the filmmaker and what it means to the viewer.

Very good bibliographies at the end of each chapter – this book has gotten me reading many other books and articles about film by Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Truffaut, Lotte Eisner, Siegfried Kracauer, Bruce Kawin, Bill Nichols and many more.

Chapter 3 “Narrative as a Formal System”, covers what narrative is, ultimately defining the concept as a cause-and-effect chain of events occurring over a period of time. The authors talk about the films like Citizen Kane and others that manipulate time duration, and causality to create meaning. My favorite section is Part Three Film Style, because it covers a number of aesthetic elements and gives good examples that exist in current films and examples as well from historical artifacts. And you’ll find a bunch of interviews with production team members from every part of the creative process. In Chapter 6 “The Relation of Shot to Shot: Editing”, covering LA Confidential, The Birds, The Maltese Falcon and others, the authors talk about how editing shots together can create a pace and effect the viewer. This section has the most primal value to the film viewer who ultimately looks to the movie itself when analyzing film. I believe that the visual medium of filmmaking holds the meaning that so much theory attempts to uncover- Bordwell and Thompson seem to be at their strongest when evaluating purely visual value of movies aside from the theory. full sizeIt was inevitable, once my old friend Noël Carroll came to Madison’s philosophy department in 1991, that we’d wind up collaborating. This anthology was an effort to gather a range of work in film theory, film analysis, film history, and the philosophy of film which seemed not to fit into the agenda canonized in academic cinema studies. The field had become defined by anthologies claimed that poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and multiculturalism was where the action was—a Big Theory that was best qualified to explain cinema. So this book tries to suggest that there are alternatives: analytic philosophy, cognitive theory, close analysis of films, social theory that recognizes transcultural affinities, and empirical history. We hoped to open a dialogue with what the discipline took as its leading edge. Several essays in Post-Theory have been translated into various Eeuropean languages. The descriptions of many films are given in excruciating detail, sometimes for no particular reason, and that made it difficult to read the book the whole way through instead of skimming certain bits. Many chapters felt incredibly repetitive and frankly didn't need so many examples to illustrate the point. The part about the history of the cinema was very surface level and insubstantial (and the authors said as much) to the point that it almost made no sense to have it in the book, especially since the same authors already have a separate book dealing with this topic.It's not a manual book of film techniques. Yet it does encompass that issues from an artsy point of view. This book discusses elements of films (e.g., shots, lighting, color, mood, tone, narrative, plots, acts, genres, hollywood era, and many more), precisely on how they constitue the overall look as well as meaning of a film. The vast explanations on every chapters are very informative for freshies in film study as they can understand film and the elements deeper than common viewers. Part One, Film Art and Filmmaking, Chapter 1 “Film as Art: Creativity, Technology, and Business”, is a good introduction in which the authors talk about the basic activity surrounding film. An overview of the major film companies and distributors as well as some perspective on the collaborative creativity involved from many diverse areas such as financing, marketing, and art direction, planning, and others, complete this section. What holds the viewer interested in Comparative Literature or a Post-Modernist evaluation of Film is primarily attended to in Part Two, Film Form, in which the authors discuss the principles a filmmaker uses to construct a film. A fairly decent but not great book on film art, this book is more about the technical aspects of moviemaking and the history of film than seeking to find what makes film great or even art at all. So it comes across as large informative rather than enlightening. I’ve read many books on film and am a tremendous “Criterion” cinephile, really my point in reading a currently used college textbook was to find out what I didn’t know, and there were a few things.