Film 1510_Terms3.txt

Film Truth; a type and style of documentary filmmaking developed in France during the early 1960s whose aim was to capture events as they happened. Cinema Verite filmmakers used unobtrusive lightweight equipment to film and to record sound on location. Practitioners include Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrows and The Pity)

A film made by editing together clips from other films. Sometimes used in creating documentary film--as in Point of Order, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, and Decasia--or in making experimental films, as in Bruce Conner's A Movie

A type and style of documentary filmmaking developed in the US during the 1960s in which actions are recorded as they happen, without rehearsal, using a portable 16mm camera with a zoom lens and portable magnetic sound recording equipment.

A film or video representation of actual (not imaginary) subjects. A documentary film may present a story (be a narrative film), or not.

• Can mean to work as an intermediary between two sides or to function as a go-between. The following diagram visualizes how the documentary film mediates between reality and the viewer: reality-->documentary film-->viewer
• The documentary is not reality, it is an intermediary between reality and the viewer.

A film or video representation of an actual (not imaginary) narrative or story. Examples are Hearts of Darkness, Hoop Dreams, and Genghis Blues

A film or video that uses no narrative or story in its representation of mainly actual (not imaginary) subjects. Examples abound, such as Frederick Wiseman's Public Housing, many TV commercials, and any industrial and training films

An experimental film whose subjects are shapes and perhaps sounds that do not represent the real world.

An experimental film whose subjects are recognizable as people and real objects

The process of photography or creating a series of individual images normally with visual variations from one frame to the next so that later a showing of the series of still images can give life to or to fill with life. Styles: claymation, stop-motion cinematography, and time-lapse cinematography.

A film that rejects the conventions of mainstream movies and explores the possibilities of the film medium. Probably the best-known experimental film is "Un Chien Andalou"

• European Avant-Garde
• American Avant-Garde
• American Underground
• Expanded Cinema
• Minimalist-Structuralist

A lens that squeezes an image onto a film frame in the camera. On a projector, another anamorphic lens returns the image to its original wider shape.

The proportion of the width to the height of the image on a TV or movie screen or on individual frames of film

A clear gelatin substance containing a thin layer of the tiny light-sensitive particles (grains) that make up a photographic image

A film that re-creates and dramatizes occurrences from history

A fictional film that convinces viewers that it is a documentary film until they learn from the end credits or another source that it is not. An example: The Blaire Witch Project

A film that is not exclusively fictional, documentary, or experimental but instead shares characteristics of two or all three of the major film categories. An example: "David Holzman's Diary"

An art exhibit or ensemble, which is usually shown in a museum of modern or contemporary art, integrating various objects or art, such as video images, photographs, furniture, and recorded voices.

A fictional film that parodies or amusingly imitates documentary films. Because mock documentaries have characteristics of documentaries--such as interviews, handheld camera shots, and the absence of stars--viewers at first may think they are watching a documentary but soon realize the film is an extended joke.

The process of filming a two- or three-dimensional subject, stopping the camera, making some changes in the subject being filmed, and resuming filming, either in the same laborious manner of by filming continuously. Usually the term refers to the process of filming a subject for one frame or a few frames, stopping the camera, changing something in the mise-en-scene, filming one more frame or perhaps a few frames, and repeating this process many times. Most often used to create animated films.

A movement in the 1920s and 1930s European art, drama, literature, and film in which an attempt was made to portray the workings of the subconscious mid as manifested in dreams. Surrealism is characterized by an irrational, non-contextual arrangement of subjects. The surrealist movement has been especially influential on some experimental filmmakers, such as Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou) and Jean Cocteau (The Blood of A Poet). Directly or through intermediate sources, surrealism has also influenced some music videos and later experimental films.

A U.S. film movement from 1971 to 1975 consisting of low-budget movies usually made by African American filmmakers, with black characters, for black audiences. Example: Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (1971) is regarded as the first blaxploitation film.

Animation that shows three-dimensional subjects moving discontinuously or continuously in ways impossible to show in live action. (may be done with computers too)

A wide-screen process involving the use of three synchronized projectors showing three contiguous images on a wide, curved screen. Cinerama was first used commercially in the 1950s and was available only in selected theatres in large cities.

In films and other texts, a subject or technique that makers of texts and audiences have grown to accept as natural or typical in certain contexts. For example, it is a convention that westerns include showdowns and shoot-outs, and it is a convention that audiences are often allowed to hear both sides of the telephone conversation even if they see only one of the conversationalists. Film Studies Dictionary: conventions function as an implied agreement between makes and consumers to accept certain artificialities.

• Dub: to replace sounds in a film's soundtrack after the film has been shot.
• Dubbed print: would be translating and replacing English language with French.

A person's sexual identity as exhibited by various signals, including clothing, cosmetics, hairstyles, conversational styles, and body language.

(Short for Image Maximization): A Canadian company's system for filming and showing very large screen motion pictures. The system consists of special cameras that can accommodate 70mm film run horizontally through the camera and large theatres with special projectors, huge screens (some as high as an eight story building), multiple speaker clusters behind the porous screens, and a multitrack sound system (now usually digital). With the steeply raked seating and huge screen, typically the image extends beyond the viewer's peripheral vision, and viewers feel a greater sense of presence and involvement that they do at any other type of showing.

• (1) An informal groups that meets periodically often monthly, to show short film shots and edited digitally.
• (2) A short film shot and edited digitally, often in a short time, which is later shown at a gathering of other amateur digital filmmakers and other audience members. Similar to microcinema

A style in which occasional wildly improbable or impossible events occur in an otherwise realistic story

A program of untraditional short videos that may be shown on the Internet or in a casual atmosphere such as a coffee house or that may be purchased on DVD.

An opulent type of movie theatre built in the US and EU between the mid 1910s and the 1930s and seating at least 1000 and as many as 6200 patrons. Movie palaces were usually ornately decorated in both the lobbies and the auditoria, spacious, and extremely comfortable, in part because their lengthy programs included more than a feature film. With the steep decline in movie attendance beginning in the 1950s, most movie palaces were divided into smaller auditoria, torn down, or converted to other uses, such as churches.

Literally, "five-cents theatre." A small, modest storefront converted in to a theater for showing a brief program of short films. Nickelodeons were popular in the US from 1905 to roughly 1915 and were the successors to one-person peephole machines and the forerunners of larger and more comfortable movie theatres, the largest and most elaborate of which were sometimes called movie palaces.

A likeness of a subject created in a text. A representation of an event (action or happening) is not the event itself but someone's manufactured likeness, or re-presentation (a presentation again or anew) of it in a text. As different people create texts, they unavoidably make different decisions (and have different skills), and different representations results. For example, each remake of Tarzan has a different representation of the character based on the directors's decisions.

A Soviet doctrine and style in force from the mid 1930s to the 1980s that decred that Soviet texts, including films, must promote communism and the working class and must be "realistic" (actually, an idealized representation of the working class) so that they would be understandable to working people. After WWII, socialist realism was also enforced in the East European countries under Soviet rule.

A type of live U.S. theatrical show that consisted of various short acts and was the most popular form of entertainment in the US early in the 20th century.

An aspect of a text (such as a character's motivations for doing something) that is open to two or more plausible interpretations. Ambiguity can result because of the makeup of the text itself, perhaps because the writer deliberately withheld certain clarifying information or because viewers experience a confusing, truncated version of the original text. In fictional films and other imaginative texts, ambiguity is usually seen as a strength. In texts, that primarily convey information or ideas, such as a documentary film or a college student's essay, ambiguity is usually seen as a distracting flaw.

The belief that some filmmakers--usually directors though sometimes producers, writers and actors--function as the dominant creators of films and that the auteur's films embody recurrent subjects, techniques, and meanings.

Related ideas about how to interpret texts. The ideas constituting a critical approach are sometimes only loosely connected and by no means agreed on by all those professing to use that approach. Examples are Marxist criticism, cultural studies, auteur theory, feminist criticism, viewer-response criticism, reception theory, and genre criticism.

A script that describes a finished film. Often contains detailed technical information, such as shot and scene division, descriptions of settings and events, dialogue, camera angles and distances, sometimes even the duration of shots and transitions between them. Similar to screenplay and shooting script.

A general observation included in a text about one or more of its subjects. In films, explicit meanings may be revealed by a narrator, a character's monologue or dialogue, a title card, a subtitle, a sign, a newspaper headline, or some other means.

A person who formulates a film theory or a general explanation of the film medium or part of the medium.

In film studies, ideology usually means the fundamental beliefs and values of a society or social group. Often, these beliefs and values are unexamined by the group's members and are assumed to be true and not the product of the group's way of thinking. For example, part of the ideology of most citizens of the US is the belief that individuals can influence major events in significant ways and that individualism is a positive value. This aspect of American ideology is often conveyed by popular American movies.

A generalization that a viewer or reader makes about a text (such as a film) or a subject in a text. An implicit meaning, for example, may be a viewer's generalization about the implications of a narrative's events (such as crime doesn't pay, or a person's motives may be complicated or even unknowable).

A group of people with common interests and a broadly shared outlook who tend to generate broadly similar meanings from a text. Examples of two interpretive communities are film scholars and college students who see a lot of movies. Meanings that one interpretive community formulates tend to be similar yet differ in general from the meanings formulated by a different interpretive community.

• (1) A tryout in which the applicant reads aloud from a script.
• (2) The amount of light or sound as measured by a light meter or sound meter.
• (3) In film studies, an interpretation of a text or part of one, as in "her reading of Citizen Kane stresses the contexts in which the film was made."

Anything perceptible that has meaning beyond its usual meaning or function. Depending on the contexts, a sound object, person, word (including a name), color, action, or something else perceived by the senses may function as a symbol.

A meaning in a text that is the same as a belied of a society or social group. For example, one meaning ffrom the classic 1954 Japanese film The Seven Samurai is that in unity (not individuality) there is strength, and that meaning is also a deeply held belief in traditional Japanese society. When a meaning is the same as part of a group's ideology, it can be called a symptomatic meaning.

A brief compilation film shown in movie theatres, before some videotaped movies, on DVDs, on TV, and on the Web to advertise a movie or video release. Trailers are so named because they appeared at the end of a reel film, not, as now, before a film showing.

An explicit or implicit meaning that could be found in the texts of many societies. For example, many texts from different societies state or imply that "crime does not pay."