b Li Xiaolong San Francisco California November d July
Bruce Lee is to the martial arts film what Charlie Chaplin is to the silent comedy, what James Dean is to the teen film, and what John Wayne is to the Western, with something of all of them in his timeless screen persona. Decades after his death he remains an icon of international screen culture, still invoked in films the world over. Lee's family moved to Hong Kong from San Francisco after World War II, and Bruce became a child star in the low-budget Cantonese cinema. Legend has it that he...
Song Exercise
While I usually do the Fallout for most of my students, there are always a few who don't take to the exercise. For these students, the Song Exercise achieves some of the same results the full expression of mind-to-heart-to-will but through a slightly different method that incorporates singing. I will often suggest the Song Exercise for an actor based on my observation of his body, tensions, lack of physical freedom, or will to get out there with himself. This has far more movement than the...
The Titles for American Psycho
I would now like to contrast the titles for Psycho and Se7en, and the milieu that produced them, with a rather different take on the notion of evil. American Psycho 2000 is based on the notorious Bret Easton Ellis novel of the same name and was directed by Mary Harron, whose credits also include I Shot Andy Warhol 1996 and episodes of the TV shows Oz 1997-2003 and Homicide Life on the Street 1993-99 . While it features Hollywood stars such as Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon, and Willem Dafoe,...
The battles of Lige Tannenberg and the Marne River
The first historical battle to be waged was the one with Belgium at the beginning of August 1914. In the original film, this battle scene was indicated by the intervening caption 'Siegesrauschen', which is lacking in the compilation film. The violation of Belgian sovereign territory, which according to international agreements would stay neutral, is not mentioned. In the film, the conquest of Belgium is confined to the battle of Li ge, one of the towns closest to the German border, circled by...
Type Typography and Lettering Writing Evil
Kyle Cooper is the guru of main titles. He's the Saul Bass of now. A title sequence does not exist without text. And this is the key, perhaps, to understanding why graphic designers have become the preeminent creators of contemporary opening credit sequences it is their specific understanding of how to orchestrate images and words, and their ready skill in selecting and manipulating lettering and type, that make designers particularly adept at title design. A key debate - at least in design and...
Conclusion Historicizing Moreau And Deneuve
Thus far, we have interpreted Moreau and Deneuve in terms of well-established western archetypes of women, but can we historicize their star images more precisely In other words, was there anything specific about the period in which they became stars that facilitated imagery of the Red and the white, the dirty and the clean, in female stars The answer lies in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Kristin Ross's excellent analysis of French culture in the fifties and sixties. Ross reveals in great detail the...
Glamour and PostModern Style
An important feature of post-modern questioning of deep-seated values was the revival of 1930s Hollywood glamour. Just as Wolfe observed the customizers' identification with streamlining, so glamour was revived and celebrated in fine art, interior decoration and fashion. Its revival also informed the development of post-modern architectural criticism. Just as the traditional structures and personalities of the world's most powerful film industry had disintegrated and were superseded by a...
Contrast Control with Paper Grades
For historical and technical reasons, paper grade 2 or variable contrast filter 2, or the equivalent mix of blue and green light on variable contrast heads is usually considered Normal for negatives with Normal contrast. For example, this is the grade of paper I used as the standard for my testing procedure see Chapter 9 . This means that paper grade 2 would become the target of all of your Zone System negative contrast adjustments, and theoretically your negatives would print well on that...
The Digital Photographic Process
There are four basic steps that every photographic frame goes through that each has a dramatic effect on the quality of the final print Both film and digital photography share these steps and it's important to understand them. Experienced photographers take each of these steps very seriously and therefore get generally better results. Beginning or casual photographers don't understand the implications of these steps and either neglect or try to automate them, which is why they generally get...
The Godfather Part II
director and producer Francis Ford Coppola co-producers Gray Frederickson and Fred Roos associate producer Mona Skeger story Mario Puzo screenplay Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola director of photography Gordon Willis editors Peter Zinner, Barry Malkin and Richard Marks production designer Dean Tavoularis Interiors filmed at American Zoetrope A Paramount Coppola Company Production Released by Paramount Pictures 200 minutes Cast Al Pacino Michael Corleone Robert Duvall Tom Hagan Diane Keaton...
A Note On Personal Pronouns
Every writer of instructional manuals today encounters problems with personal pronouns. How should I refer to the actor or the student, since the singular pronouns include both he and she In the past, authors had simply used the masculine pronoun, referring to every generic usage as he. But these are more liberated times, and I have a problem with using only he, since approximately half of my students are female. Some authors will solve this problem by using he or she or he she, both of which I...
Schedule III Notice Cure and Arbitration Agreement
1. With respect to any dispute relating to the delivery of the Film the following provisions will apply a. Distributor shall issue a notice 'Objection Notice' specifying the defects in the Completion and Delivery of the Film as defined in the Completion Guaranty to which this Schedule III is attached hereafter 'Delivery' b. The Objection Notice shall specify with particularity and in detail the purported defects in Delivery of the Film, and all items that must be corrected, delivered or...
Jeanhugues Anglade And Romantic Masculinity
The hints of a tamed, domesticated, and hence romantically accessible masculinity that emerge from Betty Blue were to form a crucial part of Anglade's star image. They are reiterated most evidendy in his role as Marco in Mkita 1990 , where he is feminised first by his job - cashier at a supermarket - and later by identification with the domestic space - he stays at home, cooking and designing boats, while Nikita goes to work as an action hero ine . It has been observed that the romantic hero in...
Stretching the Histogram
So far what we have is a static representation of the pixels in this digitized image. To understand how digital editing software tools use histograms to manipulate the contrast of digital photographs, and how all of this relates to digital exposure, begin by imagining that you are trying to reproduce a smooth, continuous gradation by drawing thin lines of tonal values on a strip of rubber. If you think of each line as a pixel tonal level this becomes a very good analogy. If you use enough lines...
OUSMANE SEMBENE b Ziguinchor Senegal January
Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembene is a pioneer of African cinema south of the Sahara. He has been highly influential in shaping the evolution of African film practices over forty years, including a style of filmmaking known as African cinematic realism. After working as an apprentice mechanic and bricklayer in Dakar and as a dockworker in Marseille, Sembene published three novels Le docker noir translated as The Black Docker, 1987, 1956 , O pays, mon beau people O my country, my...
Conclusion
''By 1960,'' as broadcast historian J. Fred MacDonald put it, ''television had become a mature and streamlined business, a great 'cash cow.'''60 The focus had shifted from ''invention to convention,'' and the networks' concerns had gone from carving out an acceptable social role for themselves ''to counting the rewards of investment, planning, and monopoly.''61 In this first cycle of television talk shows, none of the founders had originally aspired to be television personalities television had...
The Importance of Planning
Everyone I know has worked for nothing for a great period of time. Eventually you realize your skills have come to a point where you can actually get paid Frey Hoffman, Freydesign Productions, Chicago I agreed to meet Frey Hoffman on a trip to Chicago after he had sent me a sample reel, as I needed a local shooter for a project. Unfortunately, the night before I had tripped over a garden hose at a friend's house and landed face down on concrete. By the time Frey and I gathered at Frey Hoffman,...
Rko Radio Pictures
The history of RKO aka Radio-Keith-Orpheum, aka RKO Radio Pictures is utterly unique among the Hollywood studios, particularly the Big Five integrated majors. It was the last of the major studios to be created and the first and only studio to expire, with its corporate lifespan bracketed and defined by two epochal events, the coming of sound and the coming of television events that circumscribed not only RKO's history but classical Hollywood's as well. Moreover, because it was created in...
The Lights
Because film and TV lighting is an art that is both varied and precise, there is a vast array of lights to fill every purpose, from lighting a football field to putting a sparkle in the eye of a leading lady. Gaffers refer to the lights themselves as heads, by the way, as in, Get the stands out of the truck and put the heads on them. When a DP is looking for a hard light to use as a key light, more often than not, she will reach for a fresnel pronounced fur-NELL . The original fresnel was...
Structuring the Permissible Executives Censors and Informal Controls
In addition to producers and segment producers who plan TV talk, and writers and directors who shape it, a range of middle managers manage the talk seen by viewers over the air each evening. They make sure the talk that appears on the air fits the time and institutional requirements of network television and in noway interferes with the commercial imperative of sponsors who foot the bill. The job of network middle managers is to see that nothing goes out that will offend viewers or sponsors or...
Overdevelopment 1
4. Look at those prints that are too contrasty with empty, glaring white areas. 5. When you compare the negatives of these prints with negatives from prints that have detailed and textured highlight areas, you will see that the overdeveloped negatives are too dense or opaque. Overexposed or underdeveloped negatives are slightly more difficult to read, but the principle is the same. The reason exposure and development affect the film in different ways is a function of the way film responds to...
Gibberish
A speech teacher of mine once said that speaking is an ahhhh sound with the articulation of the mouth, tongue, and lips. I remember thinking, Oh, that's easy I can do that, no problem. I'm still trying to do it. What we're going to try and do is not to speak, per se, but to make sounds by moving the mouth, tongue, and lips vigorously, while connecting to our thoughts. In other words, we're going to speak Gibberish. Webster's dictionary describes gibberish as rapid and inarticulate talk,...
At Home with Modernity
The lure of the outdoor life and the theme of the ocean liner inspired the design of private houses and apartment block buildings during the 1930s in Britain, particularly in coastal and suburban areas. Like the hotels discussed already, they frequently featured balconies for sunbathing, sun terraces or even sleeping porches. Geographically, moderne houses were most frequently constructed in the more prosperous south of England, with very few examples in the north of the country. They were...
Joan Rivers And The Latenight Talkshow Wars Of
Joan Rivers was part of a rising movement of women stand-up comics in the 1980s.53 They included comedians like Rita Rudner, Abby Stein, Beverly Mickins, and Kate Clinton, some of whom survived into the 1990s. But Joan Rivers was the only one of this group to become a national talk-show host and even to challenge Johnny Carson himself. Although she failed in her late-night bid, Rivers opened up territory on television for other women comedians like Roseanne Connor and Rosie O'Donnell and for...
I Disaster Terrorism and Television
Fast-forwarding from the ancients to the age of terrorism, we discover that television plays a crucial role as a site of public memory and memorialisation in the face of large-scale disaster. This is more than ironic, for many argue that television is, if not the cause of terrorism, then certainly a major contributing factor to increases in terrorist activities.ii In 1946 a militant Zionist group orchestrated an elaborate plan to bomb the British military and administrative headquarters in the...
Anaglypta
Trade name A type of wallpaper made from the pulp of cotton fiber now used to refer to any type of paper with embossed patterns created by hollow mouldings that can be painted, stained, and aged. It is more flexible and lighter than its similar counterpart Lincresta and was cheaper when it was first produced during the nineteenth century. It is very durable and is most commonly used below the dado rail in halls and stairways. It was invented in 1886 by Thomas Palmer, was adored by the...
Lincresta
A type of wall covering made of wood pulp strengthened with linseed oil, gum, and resins. It is usually spread over canvas and given an embossed pattern with engraved metal rollers. It can be painted or stained, and it is both waterproof and durable making it perfect for hallway walls and ceilings. It was invented in 1877 by Frederick Walton and, like Anaglypta, was commonplace in Victorian and Edwardian homes. Not much later, it was also embossed out of pressed tin for the same uses. It is...
Sex Kitten
As Edgar Morin has remarked, the young Bardot already famous at Cannes before she had starred in any well-known films combined extreme innocence with extreme eroticism, and was thus 'la plus sexy des vedettes b b , le plus b b des vedettes sexy'.16 Morin locates this mixture of the innocent child and the sexual animal in Bardot's appearance, especially her face 10s 'Perhaps because of a tradition taken from the theatre, actresses in French cinema have always played certain types the ing nue,...
Ian Conrich
The cult film is generally seen as a development of postwar cinema, and includes a range of texts that can be used as sites for nostalgia, cultural allegiance and amplified pleasures, and which tend to be associated with camp, low culture, subversion, excess, the unexpected, the absurd, the eccentric, the extreme or the forbidden. Cult films effectively create communities of avid audiences who respond in ways that carry personal meaning yet are familiar and ritualistic. Most commonly, the film...
iighting EQUIPMENT
Somewhere back in the Stone Age of movie lighting, somebody had a sense of humor. Somebody decided that film work was too backbreaking, too frustrating, and too boring for us to just sit around and suffer. Some joker knew the fundamental truth about life in general and show business in particular To wit, if you're not having fun, why bother I am absolutely convinced of the existence of this person. Why else would film and TV lighting be so chock-full of goofy terms that could only have come...
II The Face as Magic Mirror
By the eighteenth century the image of the face as a mirror of the soul had been transformed I such a way that all radical aspects of animality were truly contained. This was due largely to the influence of the Swiss pastor John Casper Lavater's popular Essays on Physiognomy 1775-78 vi in which the human face is posited as no less than 'a magic mirror' of the face of God GOD CREATED MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE, IN THE IMAGE OF GOD CREATED HE HIM. How exaltedly, how exclusively honourable to man...
EuropeHollywoodEurope
Two Decades in Another Country Hollywood and the Cinephiles 1975 233 Raoul Ruiz's Hypoth se du Tableau Vol 1984 251 Images for Sale The New British Cinema 1984 255 If You Want a Life The Marathon Man 2003 270 British Television in the 1980s Through The Looking Glass 1990 278 German Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood Looking into a Two-Way Of Rats and Revolution Dusan Makavejev's The Switchboard Defining DEFA's Historical Imaginary The Films of Konrad Wolf 2001 325 Under Western Eyes What Does...
The Double Mirror Construction Of
Although Guido Anselmi is by no means an exact copy of Federico Fellini, there is little doubt that through the creation of Guido, Fellini examines many of the internal conflicts that block his own creativity. It is well known that Fellini suffered a creative block similar to Guido's when he was in the midst of working on the film that later became 8 1I2. As he relates the story, actors had been cast and sets had been constructed, but he no longer wanted to make the film. As he was in the midst...
The Bicycle Thief
Dir. Vittorio De Sica Scr. Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini The most influential movement in film history consisted of about twenty movies produced between 1944 and 1952. Italian neorealism was the original new wave. The inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes, Satyajit Ray and Ousmane Sembene, Andr Bazin and cinema verit , neorealism was understood as a double renaissance both the medium's post-World War II rebirth and a means for representing human experience outside the...
LviStrauss and Binary Oppositions
Though anthropologist Claude L vi-Strauss did not work on or write about film, his studies of myth and meaning-making in a variety of cultures have been widely used in narrative studies. L vi-Strauss proposed that myths and by extension narratives are structured around binary oppositions which are significant for the particular society or culture. While L vi-Strauss studied oppositions such as light and dark, sun and moon and raw and cooked in South American and other cultures, his ideas and...
Aftershock in Heavens Burning The Last Days of Chez Nous and Holy Smoke
Aftershock in contemporary films is the space of everyday life and its fantasised revision of the desert landscape to fit new historical circumstances. This repeated recognition of constellations between past and present states of trauma in landscape films is best understood in terms of what Patrice Petro describes as the 'aftershock' of late modernity rather than the shock of early modernity that Benjamin and other critical theorists grappled with in the 1920s and 1930s.18 In aftershock,...
Montage 1
1 On the close-up and binary structure in Griffith, cf. Jacques Fieschi, 'Griffith le pr curseur', Cin matographe, no. 24, February 1977. On iriffith's close-up and the process of miniaturisation and subjectivation, cf. Yann Lardeau, 'King David', Cahiers du cinema, no. 346, April 1983. 2 S. Eisenstein's brilliant analysis consists in showing that parallel montage, in its practicc as well as its conception, relates to bourgeois society in its conception of itself and in its practice Film Form,...
fundamentals of all good monologues
I'm listing these particular attributes here because I believe that most good monologues contain them. Before you build the bridge, I think it's always a good idea to know where it's going to go. But don't think that these are absolute or unbreakable. The only rules that you must follow for your monologue writing are the ones that you create, that work for you. Good monologue plays, no matter what form they take, should have a well-defined structure, just as a good play would. Even a...
SIDNEY POITIER b Miami Florida February
Sidney Pokier remains the most highly recognized African American actor in the history of American cinema. His triumphs on stage, television, and in film countered the typically demeaning stereotypes of African Americans. The first African American superstar, he entered Quigley's Top Moneymaker's Poll'' in 1967, and ascended to number one the following year, beating the popular icons Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and John Wayne. His dramatic characterizations brought dignity, complexity, and...
How to Talk to Actors
My first one-person show was a play called Reno, with Paul Zimmerman. I directed it at the West Bank Cafe and later on at the Acme Bar and Grill. I was very attracted to the material. It had a dark bite to it, dark, dark humor. One thing I learned working on that show was how to talk to actors. I had been a directing student with Wynn Handman, and was now learning to apply some of my new skills. Prior to this I had been a writer. So what I brought to directing was a writer's eye in terms of...
Julian Petley
In recent years there has been a good deal of discussion of 'mock-documentaries'. These have been described as fictional texts which 'look' like documentaries and 'make a partial or concerted effort to appropriate documentary codes and conventions in order to represent a fictional subject' Roscoe and Hight 2001 2 . In some cases the intention is purely playful and comic, as in This is Spinal Tap 1984 , but in others, such as Bob Roberts 1992 , there is a clear desire to mount a critique of...
Index of Subjects
12-Uhr Blatt 83 1914, Die letzten Tage vor dem Weltbrand 1914 114,126,193,220, 291 8-Uhr Abendblatt 151 Abend, Der 174 Alhambra 46,194 All quiet on the Western Front All quiet 16,18, 23,46, 56,69, 82-83,109,111,128,148,172,181, 206, 215 Alldeutscher Verband 30 Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund ADGB 51 An der sch nen blauen Donau 46 andere Seite, Die 57 andere Seite, Die 55, 57, 88,109, 123-124,128,136-141,144-145, 147,149-150,152,156-157,159, 203, 224, 291 Angriff, Der 30,82-83,85-86,150,...
Alfred Hitchcock
The British director Alfred Hitchcock made some 57 films in a career spanning over 50 years his first film as director was The Pleasure Garden 1925 and his last was Family Plot 1976 , completed at the age of 76. Having established himself as a 'master of suspense' in Britain by 1938, and at a peak in terms of reputation, Hitchcock then gave in to the lure of Hollywood. After some hits and some misses in the 1940s, he then entered his most successful phase working at Warner Brothers, Paramount...
The Process Camera
A simplified, cut-away sketch of a process camera, loaded for bi-pack printing. Duplicating negative raw stock is loaded into chamber A, emulsion-in. A master positive is loaded into chamber B. emulsion-out. The exposed dupe negative is taken up into chamber C, the master positive into chamber D. The two strips pass through the intermittent movement, emulsiotl-to-emulston, with the raw stock to the rear. Figure 4-9 The process camera. Courtesy of Dr. Raymond Fielding. printer, each was...
Werner Schroeter Music and Alterity
Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant. Aestheticism is the product of times without hope, of states that kill hope. Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art. What Nietzsche attempts to resurrect in the remark above is precisely the killed-off hope that Heinrich Mann militates against. In this chapter, I turn to an especially demeaned form of aestheticism kitsch which can offer not just a sense of hope, but new ways for...
Cut Through
If the completion guarantor is not part of a large insurance company, then it will obtain re-insurance from a third party insurance broker such as Lloyds of London. The re-insurance is a way for the completion guarantor to spread its risk on a production. A bank participating in financing of a film will require that they are insured directly with the insurance company rather than the third party broker. In these circumstances, the completion guarantor will arrange a 'cut through letter', which...
Admission Is Restricted To Adults
Jag r Nyfiken - En Film I Gult I Am Curious Yellow 1967 Courtesy of the Tony Nourmand Collection Courtesy of the Tony Nourmand Collection The 70s were the golden era of the soft porn movie. More money was being poured into the industry than ever before and as a result, a more sophisticated product was being created. In 1972, Deep Throatvjas released and for the first time, an X-rated movie was being shown in mainstream cinemas. 1972 alsosawtne release of Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris....
Stephen lacey
There is no doubt that British theatre has been very important to the development of British cinema, and - the input of television in general and Channel 4 in particular notwithstanding - it remains so, as a quick glance at the number of film adaptations from stage plays from the 1980s and early 1990s testifies. This is clearly the case in the 1950s, not least because a great many films have their origins in the theatre. I estimate that of the 1,033 British films of the 1950s listed in David...
Great Expectations
1998. Ethan Hawke, Gywneth Paltrow, Anne Bancroft, Robert De Niro. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Production Designer Tony Burrough. So obvious in its use of the color, this film is jokingly called Green Expectations by many filmmakers. Yet no major critic at the time mentioned the color's significance. Interesting in light of the fact that painter Finnegan Bell Ethan Hawke in the opening voiceover declares color to be a metaphor for subjective memory. There either...
Cultural historians Eksteins Winter and Mosse
The lack of interest in German war films cannot simply be attributed to the limited number of films that have been preserved. True enough, more than half of them are lost, but those that are still there have hardly been examined. I have defined these films as war films because of the fact that the war plays a prominent role in the narrative, in other words, the characters' actions are in large part determined by the war. 'Documentary' films are films that explicitly take the war as their...