Film Chapter 3
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- What else did Griffith use similar editing styles to elicit?
- flashbacks or 'switchbacks' as he called them
- How many films did Griffith direct in the five year period followiing his hire?
- 450 one and two-reelers
- A little bit about Griffith
- He grew up in Kentucky, and loved Victorian poets. His life was similar to Dickens in that when his father died at the age of 10 they moved to the city and lived in poverty. He was forced to quit school and help provide for the family. He wanted to be an actor and traveled around with a stock company doing little odd jobs here and there. Married Linda and started writing. He sold hos first play a Fool and a Girl for $1000 but it got bad reviews, so he started writing little things for magazines. He was fired as an actor by AB and eventually became a director.
- What was Griffith's methodology when it came to his innovations?
- he didn't have a direct methodology and his innovations were usually happening without him realizing it, but if he did have one it would be creating analogies between the conventions of stage narrative and certain cinematic devices he discovered as he went along.
- Griffith's first major innovation
- was in the films of 1908-9 and was to alternate shots of different spacial length. Later he would mix shots of all camera setups to render a single dramatic scene from multiple views.
- Changing the position of his camera mid scene
- enabled the audience to see the emotion in the actors faces instead of having to infer them from broad gestures. It also solved the problem of not being able to emphasis the exchange of a small gift
- What can the close up affect do phenomenologically?
- it can isolate a detail from its background and give it greater dramatic emphasis by making it fill the screen.
- 180-degree system
- is the method that evolved for maintaining screen direction which assumes that a scene's action will always progress along a straight like from the right to left or left to right with the axis of action becoming the center of motion
- long shot
- a shot that includes the full of body of the subject and a good amount of background
- medium long shot
- a shot usually showing the actors full figure of three fourths of the figure from the knees up.
- The problem with Griffith
- He has been debated continuously because while he was a creative genius of narrative film, he was also a muddleheaded racial bigot who saw all life in terms of melodrama. He was sounthern in multiple ways.
- What do some contemporary scholars debate?
- That Griffith didn't have that large of a role in the innovations he is known for, and that they would have happened anyways by the production system already in place just advancing like it has been.
- What is the author's argument?
- That Griffith was a prominent and leading figure in the transformation of the production system from its early mode to the mode it is now.
- Griffith was known as...
- the father of film technique; the man who invented Hollywood; the cinema's first great auteur; and the Shakespeare of the screen.
- What else did he use cutting for?
- He used it to create 'objects of attention' where he would piece together a scene of someone looking at something off screen and then a scene of what he or she was looking at. These have come to be known as 'motivated point-of-view' sots, and by placing the camera in the position of the character they create an optical subjectivity.
- American Biograph
- AB was the result of Dickson having a fall out with the buisness maganer from Edison Laberatory. He met up with some others and tried to perfect a motion picture technology to rival Edison without going over the patents. In 1907 they werent doing so hot and one of their directors was becoming ill. They hired Griffith for the job who had previously been working as an actor and story writer. He shot The Adventures of Dolly in two days.
- What was Griffith's second major innovation?
- the alternation of shots of varying temporal lengths added to the differing spacial lengths. the idea was to change the length of the shot and shorten them as you got closer to the most dramatic point. The point was to transform the dramatic climax of his films into the visual and cinematic climax as well.