Film Sound

Midterm Exam study guide

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Matthias Stork, Chaos Cinema

https://vimeo.com/28016047

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Film Sound

“In motion pictures both image and sound must be treated with special care. In my view, a motion picture stands or falls on the effective combination of these two factors. Truly cinematic sound is neither merely accompanying sound (easy and explanatory) nor the natural sounds captured at the time of simultaneous recording. In other words, cinematic sound is that which does not simply add to, but multiplies, two or three times, the effect of the image” (Akira Kurosawa, The Art of Watching Films, 219).

What Kursoawa has in mind here is explained by Michel Chion’s concept of  “added value”

“By added value I mean the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen and is already contained in the image itself. Added value is what gives the (eminently incorrect) impression that sound is unnecessary, that sound merely duplicates a meaning which in reality it brings about, either all on its own or by discrepancies between it and the image” (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 5)

Chion’s example of added value:

Foley artist (pages 220 and G-3): the film sound technician who is responsible for adding visible/onscreen sounds such as walking, fighting, or falling to enhance a soundtrack after the primary production has been completed.

Onscreen sound (aka visible sound) (pages 224 and G-8): Sound that would naturally and realistically emanate from the images on the screen.

Off-screen sound (aka invisible sound): (pages 224 and G-4): Sound emanating from a source not on the screen.

Ambient sounds (pages 233 and G-1): Off-screen sounds natural to any film scene’s environment, such as telephones ringing in a busy office building or birds chirping in a forest.

M (Fritz Lang, 1931):

Things begin changing in the 1970s (advent of what has come to be called “sound design”)

e.g. this clip from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, USA, 1982)–contrast with the organization of the soundtrack in M:

Another case study: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Posted onJune 6, 2016Leave a commenton Midterm Exam + Intensified Continuity and Chaos Cinema + Film SoundEdit“Midterm Exam + Intensified Continuity and Chaos Cinema + Film Sound”

Intensified Continuity and Chaos Cinema

New vocab:

Jump cut (G-4): The elimination of a strip of insignificant or unnecessary action from a continuous shot. The term also refers to a disconcerting joining of two shots that do not match in action and continuity.

 

 

David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film”

What has changed in the editing styles of mainstream American cinema since the 1960s? Is continuity editing still the norm? Is continuity evolving into a more refined version of itself (intensified continuity), or is it being abandoned for something totally different (post-continuity / chaos cinema)?

Average Shot Length (ASL)

 

Decline of the Establishing Shot

• dropped entirely or postponed until later in the scene

Closer Framings (especially noticeable during conversation scenes)

• from the medium-long shot as the norm, to the  medium shot and medium close-up

“Today, most films are cut more rapidly than at any other time in U.S. studio filmmaking. Indeed, editing rates may soon hit a wall; it’s hard to imagine a feature-length narrative movie averaging less than 1.5 seconds per shot. Has rapid cutting therefore led to a ‘post-classical’ breakdown of spatial continuity? Certainly, some action sequences are cut so fast (and staged so gracelessly) as to be incomprehensible. Nonetheless, many fast-cut sequences do remain spatially coherent…” (Bordwell, 17).

How so?

“When shots are so short, when establishing shots are brief or postponed or nonexistent, the eyelines and angles in a dialogue must be even more unambiguous, and the axis of action must be strictly respected” (Bordwell, 17).

 

So: how do viewers remain oriented despite these rapidly accelerated cutting rates (and a general absence of establishing shots)? Bordwell’s answer is that the axis of action, eyeline match, and match-on-action cut are simply doing more work than before.

Another, alternative answer: the flip side of us having (what appear to be, in relation to previous eras) shortened attention spans is that our brains are wired to process this new, faster style of editing (e.g. the neuroplasticity thesis). This deep shift in the nature of contemporary cognition is, in other words, an example of what philosophy calls a pharmakon, something that is both a poison and a remedy.

This is also a classic trope in media theory:

Marshall McLuhan: technologies extend our cognitive and bodily capacities, but also numb or atrophy our ability to perform those same capacities on our own, without technology coming to our aid (e.g. remembering a phone number)

Bernard Stiegler: new digital technologies usher in “new attentional forms”

Katherine Hayles:

1) “hyper” attention: “switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom”

versus

2) “deep” attention: “characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods–say, a novel by Dickens–ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times”)

A third hypothesis: the image track in contemporary cinema no longer keeps us oriented (i.e. Bordwell is wrong), but the soundtrack does…

Matthias Stork, Chaos Cinema

https://vimeo.com/28016047

Alternatives to Classical Hollywood

Andre Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language”

realism

“…two great opposing trends are visible in film from 1920 to 1940: those filmmakers who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality” (88).

faith in the image:

“By ‘image’ I mean, broadly speaking, everything that the depiction of a thing on the screen can add to the thing itself. This contribution is complex, but it can basically be reduced to two kinds: the plasticity of the image and the resources of editing” (88).

plasicity (excessive control over mise-en-scene) + editing

plasticity: “style of the make-up and decor and even, to a certain extent, of the acting” (88).

“The editing in Kuleshov, Gance and Eisenstein does not show events; it alludes to them” (89).

With editing, “meaning is not in the image; it is the shadow projected, through editing, onto the viewer’s consciousness” (90).

Referring to continuity editing : “Editing can be ‘invisible,’ as is most often the case in the classic pre-war films of the United States [eg. like Stagecoach]. There the chopping up of shots has as its only goal the analysis of events according to the material or dramatic logic of the scene. This logic renders such analysis imperceptible; viewers naturally adopt the point of view offered to them by the  filmmaker because it is justified by the geography of the action or by shifts in dramatic interest” (89).

“To sum up: both the plasticity of the image and the resources of editing have endowed cinema with a broad arsenal of techniques forimposing on viewers an interpretation of the event being depicted” (90).

faith in reality:

For Bazin, realism in film means resisting the urge to impose an interpretation on the viewer. Realism–a filmmaker putting his or her “faith in reality”–means preserving the ambiguity of reality

“…a refusal to break up the event or to analyze the dramatic space in time” (99).

Orson Welles

deep focus, or depth of field

long take (new vocab term! page G-4): A continuous film shot that lasts for several minutes.

Deep focus or depth of field “is not just a formal advance! Well used, depth field is not simply a more economical, simpler and subtler way of depicting an event. It affects not only the structure of film language but also the viewer’s intellectual relationship with the image, thereby modifying the meaning of the work” (100).

“Depth of field creates a relationship between the viewer and the image which is closer to the viewer’s relationship to reality” (101).

Italian Neo-Realism

“Despite their stylistic differences, neo-realist filmmakers, like Welles, endow their films with a sense of the ambiguity of reality” (103)

French New Wave

Breathless (Godard, 1960)

Early Cinema and the Rise of Narrative, Part 2

 D.W. Griffith’s Lonedale Operator (1911)

Continuity Editing (not in textbook): An editing style whose main goal is to smooth over the inherent discontinuity of the editing process and establish a logical coherence between shots. It has been the dominant editing style in mainstream cinema (especially American cinema) since the 1920s.

Here are two quotes from our reading that speak to the goals of continuity editing and its importance to mainstream cinema:

Editing is invisible. Seeing the finished product cannot tell you the value of the editing. … You don’t know whether moments in the movie were created in the editing room or whether they were part of the director’s original conception. But if the picture works, the editing works, and nobody’s going to call special attention to it. (Evan Lottman, film editor, quoted in The Art of Watching Films, page 156)

The rhythm established by editorial cutting is such a natural part of the film medium that we are often unaware of cuts within a scene, yet we respond unconsciously to the tempo they create. (The Art of Watching Films, page 170)

Establishing shot, or master shot (pages 167 and G-2): A beginning shot of a new scene that shows an overall view of the new setting and the relative position of the actors in that setting. Usually a long shot.

Axis of Action, or the 180-Degree Rule (not in textbook): In the continuity editing system, the imaginary line that passes from side to side through the main actors, defining the spatial relations of all the elements of the scene as being to the right or left. The camera is not supposed to cross the axis when cutting between shots, since to do so would reverse those initially spatial relations and potentially confuse the viewer and/or make the viewer notice the presence of the cut.

The establishing shot establishes the axis of action for a scene.

Putting it all together so far (note how, in the following the example, the axis of action is highly mobile, constantly redrawing or reestablishing itself after the initial establishing shot):

Also, to tie this back to what we’ve already learned, note how careful use of an eyeline match is one of the most important ways in which a film will maintain the axis of action, so that the jump between a look of outward regard and an eyeline shot doesn’t disorient the viewer by suddenly flipping left and right:

 

Shot/reverse shot (not in textbook): Two or more shots edited together that alternate characters, typically in a conversation situation. Over-the-shoulder framings are common in shot/reverse shot editing.

 

Match-on-action cut (not in textbook): When an action that begins in one shot is continued or completed in the next shot, thereby distracting the viewer from the cut and making the action seem to continue uninterrupted.

 

We’ll look more at continuity editing next time.

Our last term for today, and the one we’ll be talking about for the entirety of the rest of today’s class session is…

Montage (pages 183 and G-5): A series of images and sounds that derive their meaning from complex internal relationships to form a kind of visual poem in miniature. First developed by Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s.

Modern-day, mainstream example:

 

History of the original, Soviet version

Lev Kuleshov

From D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (played at half speed, for purposes of closer analysis):

 

Example of the “Kuleshov Effect”:

 

Sergei Eisenstein

“Intellectual montage”

From Eisenstein’s Strike (1925):

From Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925):

 

One last pioneer of Soviet montage:

Dziga Vertov

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

–showcases the power of editing to manipulate reality and to create a feeling of mechanical acceleration and speed

–no dialogue; instead, Vertov takes scenes of life in the city and links (and often juxtaposes) them through editing, creating emotional and conceptual associations between them, e.g. between man and machine (similar to Eisenstein’s intellectual montage)

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Stagecoach: continuity editing + Classical Hollywood narrative

Exposition (pages 44 and G-2): The part of a story that introduces the characters, shows some of their interrelationships, and places them within a believable time and place.

Complication (pages 44 and G-2): The section of a story in which a conflict begins and grows in clarity, intensity, and importance.

Climax (pages 44 and G-1): The point at which the complication reaches its maximum tension and the forces in opposition confront each other at a peak of physical or emotional action.

Denouement (pages 44 and G-2): A brief period of calm following the climax, in which a state of relative equilibrium returns.

Early Cinema and the Rise of Narrative

New vocab:

The Composite Shot

Composite shot, or process shot (not in textbook): Any shot involving rephotography to combine two or more images into one or to create a special effect.

Superimposition, or double exposure (not in textbook): The exposure of more than one image on the same film strip or in the same shot. 

Matte shot (page G-5): Any special visual effects technique that uses some type of visual mask to allow more than one image to be photographed on a single film frame.

We’ll look at some of the earliest and crudest examples of this technique later today when we watch Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and several films by George Melies (1898-1901). For now, here’s an example of a more sophisticated matte technique developed slightly later on, in 1918, called the traveling matte (pioneered by cinematographer Frank D. Williams):

Blue-screen process (page G-1): A special visual effects film technique by which actors who are photographed in front of a blue (or green) screen can later be inserted into various movie environments.

From The Thief of Bagdad (1940):

One last very important term for today:

Parallel cuts, parallel editing, intercutting, or cross cutting (page G-6): Shots that quickly alternate back and forth between two actions taking place at separate locations, creating the impression that the two actions are occurring simultaneously and will possibly converge.

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Early Cinema and the Rise of Narrative

Think back to our in-class writing exercise from our first class session. One of the questions I asked you was to define what a movie is in the first place.

Some of you gave technical definitions. For example:

“A movie is a very unique form of art, the only form that combines thousands of pictures played very fast to make it seem like the movie is happening right in front of you”

“A movie is an art medium that is captured by a compiled amount of pictures that, when viewed together, makes the objects in the picture ‘move'”

In other words, a movie is a series of images played back and projected at 24 frames per second, which produces the illusion of continuous movement.

Others of you defined movies in terms of what you saw as their primary purpose: to tell a story. For example, several of you defined movies as “visual stories.” Others wrote similarly that a movie is

“a story told through the visual media of film,”

“a story that you watch on a screen”

“a theatrical representation shown on screen depicting a story that could possibly be taken from other aspects of media”

“a form of artistic media, typically ranging between one and four hours, that tells a story using narrative, scenery/environment, camerawork, and more.”

Probably around 90% of you wrote something along these lines–and you’re not incorrect. Nor do I think you all copied off each other. Rather, it’s just that nowadays, cinema really does function as a storytelling medium, where we’re given characters and plots, conflicts and resolutions, and a narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end.

So, again, this definition of the cinema as a storytelling (or, “narrative”) medium isn’t incorrect. It accurately describes what movies have evolved to be in our contemporary moment.

In today’s class, however,  I want to complicate this modern-day definition of the movies. Or, at least, I want us to put that definition into some historical context—to show that, in the early days of cinema, “telling a story” wasn’t at all what people thought movies should do. When cinematic technologies first burst onto the scene, it wasn’t even immediately clear that they should or could be used to tell a story in the first place. Understanding this fact is important to keep in mind when it comes to understanding movies today, since it keeps us aware of where our present-day assumptions about movies have come from, and shows just how far cinema as an art has evolved over the course of more than a century.

So, if the purpose of early cinema wasn’t to tell a story, what was it? The exact opposite of what The Art of Watching Films thinks the goal of movies should be:

Technique must not become an end in itself; any special technique must have some underlying purpose related to the purpose of the film as a whole. Every time a director or cinematographer employs an unusual camera angle or a new photographic technique, he or she should do so for the purposes of communicating (either sensually or intellectually) in the most effective way possible, not simply to show off or try a new trick. (The Art of Watching Films, 104)

In varying ways, the goal of early cinema was exactly to show off and try new tricks with this (at the time) new technology. Keep this idea in mind during today’s lecture.

Thomas Edison

From Monkeyshines:

Kinetoscope:

Kinetoscope parlor:

 

The Lumière Brothers

Cinématographe:

Georges Méliès

Some of Méliès’s magic trick films (1896-1901):

A Trip to the Moon (1902):

Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903)

What’s different with Porter’s film regarding

1. how special effects (especially the matte shot) are used?
2. how editing is used in relation to narrative structure?

Film Analysis Practice

Vocab review:

Ellipsis

Fabula

Syuzhet

Diegesis, Diegetic, Non-diegetic

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Film Analysis Practice

As you watch today’s screening, take notes. Be prepared to contribute something to our post-screening discussion during our next class session.

In terms of what to look out for, look for any moments in which you see one or more of our vocabulary words (at least the ones we’ve covered so far in our previous class sessions) being put on display. This might include some particularly memorable or important use of cinematography, editing, or mise-en-scene; any memorable use of sound and/or music; or any way in which the film’s syuzhet reorders, deviates from, or otherwise plays with the linear chronological order of events contained in the film’s fabula.

Keep the following quote in mind from The Art of Watching Films (p. 104):

Technique must not become an end in itself; any special technique must have some underlying purpose related to the purpose of the film as a whole. Every time a director or cinematographer employs an unusual camera angle or a new photographic technique, he or she should do so for the purposes of communicating (either sensually or intellectually) in the most effective way possible, not simply to show off or try a new trick.

As you take notes regarding any interesting formal elements in the film, think about what these formal elements might be communicating to the viewer, or what their function and purpose is in the context of the film as a whole. When a filmmaker chooses a particular camera angle, for instance, or a particular piece of non-diegetic music, it’s very rarely “just because.” There’s usually some specific reason for that camera angle or piece of music in terms of how the filmmaker expects the viewer to respond. It’s at this stage–when you’re able to make a competent case for why the film used this camera angle or shot scale instead of a different one, or you’re able to explain how that camera angle or shot scale influences the viewer’s experience of the film’s content–when you’re starting to do full-fledged analysis.

Crash Course in Film Terminology, Part 2

Review from last time:

Foundational terms

Shot 

Cut 

Look of outward regard 

Eye-line shot 

Eye-line match 

Example (look of outward regard + eye-line shot = eye-line match):

Editing 

Mise-en-scene 

Cinematography 

 

Types of camera movement

Panning 

Tilting

Tracking

Types of shot scale and framing

Long shot

Plan américain, American shot, or Medium-long shot

Medium shot

Medium close-up

Close-up

Extreme close-up

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Types of shot angle

Low-angle shot (pages 128 and G-4): A shot made with the camera below eye level, thereby exaggerating the size and importance of the subject.

High-angle shot (pages 128 and G-4): A shot made with the camera above eye level, thereby dwarfing the subject and (sometimes) diminishing its importance.

Lenses and types of focus

Zoom, or zoom lens (page 117-18 and G-8): A complex series of lenses that keep the image constantly in focus and, by magnifying the subject, give the camera the apparent power to vary movement toward or away from the subject without requiring any movement of the camera.

Rack focus (pages 122 and G-6): Changing the focus setting on the camera during a continuous shot so that the audience’s attention is directed deeper and deeper into the frame as viewers follow the plane of clearest focus. The technique can also be reversed so that the plane of clearest focus moves closer and closer to the camera.

Deep focus (pages 122 and G-2): Special lenses allow the camera to focus simultaneously and with equal clarity on objects anywhere from two feet to several hundred feet away. Everything from the foreground to the background is in focus.  

Telephoto lens (pages 131 and G-8): A lens that, like a telescope, draws objects closer but also diminishes the illusion of depth. (Makes the background look closer to the foreground than it actually is in reality.)

Wide-angle lens (pages 131 and G-8): A lens that takes in a broad area and increases the illusion of depth but sometimes distorts the edges of the frame. (Opposite of telephoto lens: makes the background look further away from the foreground than it actually is in reality.)

Fish-eye lens (pages 132 and G-3): A special type of extreme wide-angle lens that bends both horizontal and vertical planes and distorts depth relationships.

Kinds of optical transitions

Fade, or Fade-Out/Fade-In (pages 160 and G-3): A transitional device in which the last image of one scene fades to black as the first image of the next scene is gradually illuminated.

Dissolve (pages 160 and G-2): The gradual merging of the end of one shot with the beginning of the next shot, produced by superimposing a fade-out onto a fade-in of equal length or by imposing one scene over another.

Examples:

Ellipsis (not in textbook): When a stretch of story time gets skipped over during a transition from one scene or sequence to the next.

Other foundational terms:

Fabula (not in textbook): the chronological order of events in a story from beginning to end.

Syuzhet (not in textbook): the particular way in which the film orders the events of the fabula; the way that the film presents the fabula to us.

Examples:

• Syuzhet with ellipses

• Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible runs the syzuhet in reverse order

• Christopher Nolan’s Memento experiments with the syuzhet in an even more complex manner, its goal being to recreate the main character’s subjective experience of anterograde amnesia

Scene (pages 157 and G-7): A series of shots joined so that they communicate a unified action taking place at one time and place.

Sequence (pages 157 and G-7): A series of scenes joined in such a way that they constitute a significant part of a film’s dramatic structure, like an act in a play.

Diegesis (not in textbook): The world inside the film.

Diegetic (not in textbook): The adjectival form of “diegesis,” used to describe anything that exists in the world of the film (e.g. a diegetic sound, such as a radio or car horn that the characters can hear).

Non-diegetic (not in textbook): An adjective used to describe any sonic or visual element that is “in” the film but not part of the film’s internal world (e.g. non-diegetic sound, such as a musical score, which the audience can hear but which the characters inside the film cannot).

 

Blurring the line between diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound:

Crash Course in Film Terminology

Syllabus review

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Short In-class Writing Exercise

1. What’s your favorite movie?
2. Of all the films listed on the Schedule section of the syllabus, which ones have you seen (if any)?
3. Define “movie.” How is a movie different from a book, a stage play, or a painting? We know a movie when we see it, but the task of defining what a movie is gets much more difficult when we’re asked to put that definition into words.

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Form versus Content

These images have the same “content,” but they’re very different on the level of form:

How are they different?

 

 

 

 

In this class, we’ll be devoting most of our attention to the ways that movies work on the level of form rather than just talking about their contents.

Crash Course in Film Terminology

Technique must not become an end in itself; any special technique must have some underlying purpose related to the purpose of the film as a whole. Every time a director or cinematographer employs an unusual camera angle or a new photographic technique, he or she should do so for the purposes of communicating (either sensually or intellectually) in the most effective way possible, not simply to show off or try a new trick. (The Art of Watching Films, 104)

In other words….

 

 

 

 

 

Before we get all deep and analytical–before we’re in a position to say what sensual or intellectual meaning a particular camera angle or cinematic technique is communicating in a given instance–we’ve got to learn what these cinematic techniques are in the first place.

Foundational terms

Shot (pages 111 and G-7): A strip of film produced by a single continuous running of the camera. After the editing and printing processes, a shot becomes the segment of film between cuts or optical transitions.

Cut (not in textbook): An instantaneous change from one shot to another.

Look of outward regard (pages 108 and G-4): A shot that shows a character looking off-screen and thereby cues us to wonder what the character is looking at.

Eye-line shot (pages 108 and G-3): A shot that shows us what a character is looking at, usually after a look of outward regard.  

Eye-line match (not in textbook): The cut that links a look of outward regard to an eye-line shot (refers to the cut itself).

Example (look of outward regard + eye-line shot = eye-line match):

Editing (not in textbook): The total set of techniques for bringing shots in relation to one another, usually  through cuts but sometimes through other kinds of optical transitions.

Mise-en-scene (not in textbook): All of the elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the settings and props, lighting, costumes, makeup, and actor behavior.

Cinematography (not in textbook): The opposite of mise-en-scene, cinematography refers to all artistic decisions pertaining to the camera itself rather than to what’s in front of the camera, such as camera movement, shot scale and framing, shot angle, and lens type.

Types of camera movement

Panning (pages 116 and G-6): Moving the camera’s line of sight in a horizontal plane to the right and left or vice versa.

Tilting (pages 117 and G-8): Moving the camera’s line of sight in a vertical plane, up and down.

Tracking (not in textbook, but see stuff about “The Mobile Camera” on page 119):A mobile framing where the camera travels through space forward, backward, or laterally. *The textbook calls this a “following shot,” but the proper term that most filmmakers and film critics actually use is tracking or tracking shot.

Putting it all together (tracking and panning combined at various points):

 

Types of shot scale and framing

Long shot (pages 120 and G-4): A shot taken from some distance that usually shows the subject as well as its surroundings. (The “furthest away” type of shot; the scale of the object(s) shown is very small.)

Plan américain, American shot, or Medium-long shot (not in textbook): A framing in which the scale of the object shown is moderately small. The human figure appears approximately from the shins or knees up.

Medium shot (not in textbook): A framing in which the scale of the object(s) shown is of moderate size. The human figure appears approximately from the waist up.

Medium close-up (not in textbook): A framing in which the scale of the object(s) shown is fairly large. The human figure appears approximately from the chest up.

Close-up (pages 113 and G-1): A close shot of a person or object; a close-up of a person generally focuses on the face only.

Extreme close-up (not in textbook): A framing in which the scale of the object shown is very large; most commonly, all that is shown is a small object or merely a part of the face or body.

Bringing it all together: