Year 2 Blog Assignment 6

What is "Film Noir"

In this blog, I want to talk about what is film noir and how it influenced contemporary. "Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France to theatres following the war,"(www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html) Film noir film use its unique techniques of light set up, shot angle to express stories about detective, crime, politics and so on. The most important thing people should learn in noir films is what techniques the filmmakers use for creating a dark, mysterious atmosphere."Strictly speaking, film noir is not a genre, but rather the mood, style, point-of-view, or tone of a film."(filmsite.org)

Main techniques:
Chiaroscuro: "in art is characterized by strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition."(wikipedia.org)
Backlighting: "backlighting refers to the process of illuminating the subject from the back.(Low key: only one key light, a low light situation)

"The curious case of Benjamin Button"
The techniques about chiaroscuro and backlighting can be seen from some stills of this movie. The curious case of Benjamin Button" is not a noir film, but director uses a lot of film noir techniques to create atmosphere and mood which are similar to noir film. The conversation scene in Captain Mike Clark's boat is shot through chiaroscure light. In this scene, there is only one beam of light comes from window, so the light is boldly contrasting with the dark space. And it is good to see the only beam of light is on the bare belly of Captain Mike Clark, because this light makes captain a central character in this scene and it makes him the focus of this conversation.

There is a scene about a conversation between Benjamin Button and his flatmate. Benjamin sitting in front of a lamp. With this light setting, Benjamin's portrait is been illustrated from the back. That means the light source and the viewer are facing each other, with character's portrait in between, Viewer can only see the dark side of the subject, this kind picture can create a parting or sad farewell mood and atmosphere.

Year 2 Blog Assignment 5

What is Parody film

Copy and remolding has become a common technique for director to write screenplay and this kind of movies are always presented as comedy. The more formal word about this technique is parody."A parody film is a comedy that satirizes other film genres or films. Although the genre is often overlooked, parody films are commonly profitable at the box office." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody_film)
I can not really agree with the people who make parody movie by copy other movie's characters and genres. For example, a movie showed last year called "Vampires Suck", the idea and genre of this movie are come from vampire series "Twilight-New Moon". In "Vampires Suck", three vampire clowns replaced the three main attractive guys and girls in "Twilight". I don't like this kind of movie because they use low-taste to remold the characters which they are based on. However, if we can parody other people's work in a skillful way, the effect will be totally different.

IN 3D animation"Rango"(2011 American computer-animated Western comedy-drama film), there is a sequence that quite similar to a sequence in film "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End". In Pairates film, Captain Jack is trapped in a white desert. There is nothing in the desert but a ship, the ship can not take jack outside of the desert without water. Suddenly, there are millions of stone crabs come out from inside of desert and transfer Jack and his ship to the people who are looking for him.

The similar thing happened in "Rango", lizard Rango lost his town and goes to a white desert. There is nothing in the desert but a golf car.Rango swayed and fell on white ground cause he thought there is no hope anymore. After that, millions of beetles come out from inside of desert and transfer him to the place where he can get another chance to save his town. It is good to see that the director copy the scene of pirates film and remold it in a new narrative. Especially for the viewers who know the scene in pirates film, this parody sequence will give them another way to understand the genre that consisted of white desert, lost man and hope. And I think it is important for artists to express some concept in different ways.

Year 2 Blog assignment 4

How Film Montage Works In Film

Montage is one of most common filmmaking techniques that has been wildly used as a form of film editing and people can find more than one montage sequence in modern movies. There is a more accurate explanation from Wikipedia:"Montage is a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. It is usually used to suggest the passage of time".

In my opinion, comparing with other film editing techniques, the most unique function of montage is that montage can integrate different time, space and information into one sequence so as to produce more complex meaning or expressing main subject of film. Sergei Eisenstein is a film theorist who said that "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent thoughts" wherein "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other" and Eisenstein also noted that"montage is the nerve of cinema".

In Schindler's List (1993), Steven Spielberg created several montage sequences in this film and the most impressive one which I think is the scene about Schindler's birthday. In this scene, Spielberg made a deranged space but with a rigorous logic. This birthday celebration scene is consisted of three sequences.The first one is Jewish wedding scene, the second sequence is about Herr Kommandant beating up his Jew woman servant and the last one is Schindler's birthday dance ball.The first sound comes out in this sequence is a song of praise in Jewish wedding, then it is converted into the music from a radio, and then it becomes the voice of singer in dance ball. When it comes to scenes, the sequence of Herr Kommandant touching his female servant Helen is keep switching with the sequences of singer touching Schindler's face; the applause in dance ball is switching with sound of beating. These scenes and sound are actually happened in different space and time, but Spielberg consists these whole lot of information organically.

Spielberg just using montage (collision of many different sequences) to describe the characters in the story and bring viewer to different space in one time. I think this is the difference between art movie and documentary.

Year 2 Blog assignment 3

What is film narrative structure

Nowadays, it is actually hard to find a movie that telling a story from beginning straight up to the ending. Each movie has its own narrative structure and the narrative techniques decides how viewers going to read the plot. There are many different forms to construct a story and the key to let viewer understand what the story of a movie is about is how to take from the multiple narrative structures for a plot.

The narrative constructions that frequently appear in modern movies are traditional narrative, Multilinear narrative, flashback narrative, cycle structure and so on. In this blog, I talk about how Quentin Tarantino constructed his Pulp Fiction。 In fact, there are more than one narrative structure in Pulp Fiction, "Pulp Fiction is structured around three distinct but interrelated story lines. Although each storyline focuses on a different series of incidents, they connect and intersect in various ways."（http://en.wikipedia.org）And the most obvious one is repetition and cycle structure.

In Pulp Fiction, there is no traditional narrative centre or a consecutive storyline but split joint of different elements.In terms of narrative structure, Tarantino abandoned traditional single storyline narrative and break the ordinary story telling rule which is based on the order of time and space. The movie starts from a rob in coffee shop but the ending is still the rob in coffee shop, so the beginning is the ending，the ending is the beginning.This hint that the multiple story lines are circularly and endlessly repeating. Tarantino telling these stories through taking them apart and rearranging them. So, viewer can see a man who already dead in front story and comes back to life later on. This makes people feel like Tarantino split the stories in pieces. There is no beginning or ending.To understand the narratives, viewers need to compose multiple narratives through using their own idea.

Anyway, the most critical point of Tarantino's idea is the recombination of fragments and various of narrative structures. There is no point to identify what the entire plot is or what the thematic the movie presents to viewers is."On another level, however, in the case of integrated multiple narratives, I will argue that cues are included within the film's structure that encourage the viewer to construct meanning from thematic or formal parallels between the multiple narratives." (http://www.euronet.nl-Defining multiple narrative structures )

Year2 Blog assignment 2

What is title sequence in a film:

In this week, I did some research about the title sequence in film. Usually, audience do not really care too much about the title sequence in film, people even start leaving cinema once movie is ended and title sequence appearing on screen.However, for film making and film industry,title sequence occupied an important place and it decides the quality of a film at some degree.

Why filmmakers spend a lot of money and time on designing a title sequence? And why is title sequence so important to a movie? I think title sequence is part of the entire plot of film. Because it visually and abstractively express the context of the film.This point can be seen from the movie Se7en. Seven is a psychological thriller directed by David Frncher and the title sequence in this movie influenced the whole film industry. This movie is about how a serial killer called John Doe who preaching seven deadly sins through murder seven victims. Audience can not see the John Doe's face until the end of the movie. In fact, the opening title sequence at the very beginning has already let people in the audience step into John Doe's mind. "You don't see the killer until nearly 40 minutes in, so the titles needed to bridge that gap. You're inside his head straight odd, making the tension that much more intense when he finally does show up."( Kyle Cooper-title designer of Se7en)

Elements in title sequence:
The title is not just about what type filmmaker use for presenting.Film title sequences is a collectives of background music, type design and moving image. That means people can get triple feelings which are listening, reading and watching. In Se7en, the movement of the title sequence is accurately accompanied by the musical prelude.So, the combination of type, music and moving image can let viewers feel much more than any single one of them. Also, the type is designed as hand-written style which I think is quite fit the genre that Se7en presents.

Basically, the elements of title sequence are created through the genre of film. For example, the Green hornet is a movie based on comic books. So, in the type design for the Green hornet, we can see cartoon typefaces, solid colours like yellow, green, red and blue. It is very important for film maker to think about how to connect the plot of movie with title sequence and making both of them to present same context and genre to audience.