Film 7 - 9

Week 7
The Fog of War Errol Morris 2003
Night and Fog Alain Resnais 1955

Estrangement  - making the familiar strange
Cinema verite - 50s and 60s - films real objects, people, and events in a confrontational way in which the reality of the subject continually acknowledges the reality of the camera recording it.

Week 8
Shoot the Piano Player Francois Truffaut 1960

French New Wave - 1959 - 1964 - created by film critics for Cahiers du Cinema and it's editor Andre Bazin - exposed to lots of film (cineastes) and national film archive Cinematheque Francaise - rejects "tradition of quality films" and emphasize acting and mise en scene rather than dramatic camera work
30 Degree Rule - a rule that requires a change in camera position form one shot to another. unless there is a significant change in camera distance, the camera must move at least thirty degrees away from its original position
Jump cut - elippitical cut that has an insufficient change in camera angle, camera distance, and/or the content of two (or more) shots appearing in succession

• Uses "documentary" techniques 
• hand-held camera, shooting on location, using available light, direct sound recording,  and use of zoom lense

• Long takes - dead time
• Disjunctive editing
• double action, jump cuts, breaking 180 degree rule, mismatching image and sound
• "improvised" acting - incidental characters
• playfulness
• intertextual references and self reflectivity
• startling changes in tone
• loose and ambiguous narrative
• "trick" effects
• slow motion, freeze frame, special opticals

 Week 9
Psycho Alfred Hitchcock 1960

Auteur Theory - originates in france, when hollywood studios are in decline Andrew Sarris popularized the auteur theory in the US with his article "notes on the auteur theory in 1962"

1. Technician - the director should have technical competence
2. Stylist - the director should impose his personality on his works with a signature style
3. auteur: has qualities of technitian and stylist gives to each work an interior meaning "extrapolated from the tension between a director's personality and his material"

Hitchcock as an Auteur

• Themes
• Proximity of "normal" and "abnormal"
• Voyeurism
• Style
• careful shot composition and camera placement and use of Storyboards
• "subjective" shots POV and not POV shots
• Visual correlatives "charged objects"
• Alternating between long takes and editing