Realism and the Cinema
Edited by Christopher Williams
Realist Positions
The realist film has the 'world' as its living object, not telling of a story. What it has to say is not fixed in advance, because it arises of its own accord.
Visual and Other Pleasures
By Laura Mulvey
Fetishistic images pervade mass media. Mulvey argues that fetishism concerns the narcissism of man, who views the naked female form as his castrated self.
Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan... But were afraid to ask Hitchcock.
Edited by Slavoj Zizek
'Suspense is thus indeed achieved through editing, but Hitchcock, in contrast to the Griffithian acceleration of parallel actions, employs an editing of onvergent actions in a homogeneous space, which presupposes slow motion and is sustained by the gaze, itself evoked by a third element, a perverse object or stain.'
Unheard Melodies. Narrative, Film, Music.
By Claudia Gorbman
'Music removes barriers to belief; it bonds spectator to spectacle, it envelops spectator and spectacle in a harmonious space. Like hypnosis, it silences the spectator's censor. It is suggestive; if it's working right, it makes us a little less critical and a little more prone to dream.'
A Mathematician's Apology
By G.H. Hardy
'A mathematician, on the other hand, is working with his own mathematical reality.'
By Clive James
'By that stage, television was a houseold experience, the first frame of reference in everybody's mind. So I could spend my whole time being as allusive as I liked.'
If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling.
By Patti Bellantoni
' ... the paler a color is, the more powerless it is.'
'Max Beckmann in Amsterdam, 1937-1947'
Van Gogh Museum', Amsterdam
6 April 2007 - 19 August 2007'
'The advantage of triptychs is that the artist can place different scenes side by side. These works are never linear stories; instead, they show events that take place simultaneously and refer to one another. This narrative form is in many ways comparable to simultaneously staging, a medieval technique that had been brought back to life in Berlin in the 1920's.'
'Instant Light. Tarkovsky Polaroids'
Edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrey Tarkovsky
'An instantaneous mirror of memory, every photograph leaves a motionless trace of what has been, a fixed imprint of something that is no longer what it was before, a silent simulacrum of someone who has disappeared forever from our field of vision.'
by Andrey Tarkovsky
'Directing starts not when the script is being discussed with the writer, nor during work with the actor, or with the composer, but at the time when, before the interior gaze of the person making the film and known as the director, there emerges an image of the film: this might be a series of episodes worked out in detail, or perhaps the consciousness of an aesthetic texture and emotional atmosphere, to be materialised on the screen.'
'The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media'
Edited by Peter Lunenfeld
'As Terence Harpold has pointed out, most writers on hypertext concentrate on the link, but all links simultaneously both bridge and maintain separation. This double effect of linking appears in the way it evitably produces produces juxtaposition, concatenation, and assemblage.'
The Economics of Intellectual Property and New Media conference.
Universidade Lusófona Lisbon, Portugal 26th & 27th October 2006.
Paper: 'Protection of Intellectual Property in the Film Industry: The Irish Case.'
By Kelly McErlean'Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov'
Edited by Annette Michelson
'Kino-eye uses every possible means in montage, comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order, breaking, when necessary, all the laws and conventions of film construction.'
'On Film-making'
by Alexander Mackendrick
' ... characterisation in film is not nearly so concerned
with appearances and physique as it is with motives and temperament. It
matters not one bit what your character looks like if he or she cannot
be characterised through his or her actions as laid down by the story
beats.'
'Composing for the Films'
by Theodor Adorno & Hanns Eisler
''Musical illustration should either be hyperexplicit
itself - over-illuminating, so to speak, and thereby interpretative -
or should be omitted.'
'Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace'
by Janet H. Murray
'In electronic narrative
the procedural author is like a choreographer who supplies the rhythms,
the context, and the set of steps that will be performed. The interactor,
whether as navigator, protagonist, explorer, or builder, makes use of
this repertoire of possible steps and rhythms to improvise a particular
dance among the many, many possible dances the author has enabled. We
could perhaps say that the interactor is the author of a particular performance
within an electronic story system, or the architect of a particular part
of the virtual world, but we must distinguish this derivative authorship
from the originating authorship of the system itself.'
by Italo Calvino
'What are you like Other Reader? It is time for
this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general
male you ... but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter
as the Third Person necesary for the novel to be a novel...'
by Anthony Storr
'... unfamiliar music may induce different intellectual
and emotional reactions on a first hearing from those experienced subsequently.'
by Azar Nafisi
She asks her students to tell her what they see
as she moves a chair into different positions. She tells them that despite
their different positions in the classroom and thus different perspectives,
they are still seeing the same chair. But they now realise that there
is more than one way of seeing the chair.
Big Bangs. The Story of Five Discoveries that Changed Musical History.
By Howard Goodall
Opera singing. '... there's no doubt that you can
express much stronger, more daring thoughts through the 'filtered' medium
of singing than you can through the raw candour of speech.'
By Henry Hitchings.
An anecdote of Johnson's childhood, presented by
Hester Thrale tells how he intensely read Hamlet and at the Ghost scene
he ran to be near other people. 'His communion with the text was so
complete that he took it for reality, and in those words 'got
the play ... in his father's kitchen' there is a nice suggestion
of the accidental unpurposed nature of his reading.'
Image Music Text.
By Roland Barthes
'The filmic is that in the film which cannot be described,
the representation which cannot be represented. The filmic begins only
where language and metalanguage end.'
Windows of the Soul
New Scientist. 24/31 December 2005
Liz Else interviewing Jim Coan.
It was a darkened room with slots about the size of letter
boxes randomly arranged on the walls. Behind the slots were actors making
facial expressions reflecting anger, sadness, happiness and so on. People
who went into the room could only see the actors' eyes.'
Flogging a Dead Horse
New Scientist. 24/31 December 2005
By Richard Fisher
Jane Raymond has conducted research into how people's
attention can be easily distracted - '...a quirk in the brain's attentional
system. She showed people a stream of letters and numbers on a screen
and asked them to look out for a white letter or an X. When she asked
her volunteers afterwards what they had seen, she found that if the X
appeared up to half a second or so after the white letter, or vice versa,
people failed to see it.'
New Media: A Critical Introduction.
By Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, Kieran Kelly.
'The producer of an interactive text or navigable
database never knows for certain which of the many versions of the text
their reader will encounter. For critics this raises the essential question
of how to evaluate or even conceptualise a 'text' that never reads the
same way twice.'
Subtitles. On the Foreignness of Film
Edited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour
'.. his camera frames and fabulates peripheral movement
as the object of fascination, ignoring its contemporary audience's naturalized
quest for the forward push of the narrative ..'
Like the audiences of primitive cinema, his audience is
less immersed in the story and is more of a curious spectator whose interest
has been piqued.
Pause and Effect. The Art of Interactive Narrative.
By Mark Stephen Meadows
' .. the invention of linear perspective gave
humanity an appropriate point-of-view where everything could be seen at
once.'
Narrative Comprehension & Film.
By Edward Branigan.
'In general, the spectator knows and anticipates
much more than the information available on the screen at any point in
time.'
Adventures in the Screen Trade.
By William Goldman
'.. the reality of a movie has almost nothing to do
with the reality of the world that we, as humans, inhabit.'
Narratology.
By Mieke Bal
'Foucault's alternative is a
radical proliferation of meaning, where the author / work becomes a fluctuating
function always interacting with other functions in the larger discursive
field.'
Music in Film. Soundtracks and Synergy.
By Pauline Reay
Edmund Meisel worked closely with Eisenstein on
the score for 'Battleship Potemkin'. They were trying to prove 'that
there was a formal correlation between the montage of a film and music.'
Time Passing. Modernity and Nostalgia.
By Sylviane Agacinski
'There are different systems of temporality
(responding to the tempos of various events).' Time does not have
a 'single measure'. This is important in creating an immersive environment
in the film to encourage audience 'interaction' with the text. By using
ambient music and scenes reminiscent of Tarkovsky, we are creating the
right atmosphere for an interactive film to work. The intensity of scenes
can 'speed up' and 'slow down' the perception of time passing. If time
is perceived by the audience to be passing slowly they are more likely
to interact.
Contemporary Problems in Perception.
Edited by A.T. Welford and L. Houssiadas
People can learn to work with '.. up-down dimension
and bilateral right-left symmetry..' shifts not just due to 'learning'
but due to '.. an intrinsic organisation of human motion..'
Poetics.
By Aristotle.
Introduction by Malcolm Heath
' .. so for Aristotle the crucial
point is not, as it is with Plato, to suppress your emotions; it is rather
to feel the right degree of emotion in the right circumstances.'
The Technique of Film Editing.
By Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar
Short consecutive shots of Kane and his wife at breakfast (each shot takes place several years apart) show how the couple's relationship deteriorated over the years. The scene plays distorted because it actually is the reminiscences of the character Leyland, 'a cynical, strongly biased account.' This sets the tone of the film and how it will play out. The film is a series of memories and opinions of the past.
Morphology of the Folktale.
By Vladimir Propp
'The entire store of fairy tales ought to be examined
as a chain of variants. Were we able to unfold the picture of transformations,
it would be possible that all of the tales given can be morphologically
deduced from the tales about kidnapping of a princess by a dragon - from
that form we are inclined to consider as basic.'
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing.
By Michael Ondaajte
When editing a film, Murch observes that people tend to
blink when they are saying nonvocalised consonants - 's', 'f', 'th' but
not 'd' (uh). Murch uses this blink of the eye to 'cut'. He edits when
the actor blinks. '.. the same thing that makes a person blink...
is also making the audience 'blink' - the audience is more receptive to
a shift of attention at that moment.'
In the Blink of an Eye. A Perspective on Film Editing.
By Walter Murch
'The Rule of Six.' The list of six criteria for
what makes a good cut. The ideal cut will satisfy all criteria at once.
But the decision to make a cut should be based on this weighting system,
ie finding the right emotion is most important, three-dimensional space
is the least important.
Narrative as Virtual Reality.
By Marie-Laure Ryan
This is the key objective of the narrative is immersion.
The immersion of the reader / viewer into the text / film so that they
believe they are existing within the reality created by the fabula.
'New Philosophy for New Media'
by Mark B.N. Hansen
Hansen argues against many of Manovich's theories on cinematic
metaphor and presents several examples of contemporary reworkings of traditional
films.
'Behind the Scene. How Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain using Apple's Final Cut Pro and what this means for Cinema.'
By Charles Koppelman
Walter Murch used Final Cut Pro to edit the film Cold
Mountain. This was his first time using the system. Murch experienced
many problems while working on location in Romania.
The Language of New Media.
By Lev Manovich
The word ‘interactive’ is overused
in new media discourse. What is often referred to as interactive is seldom
anything more than user choice i.e. pick a, b or c. While this choice
affects the resulting navigation of the story it is difficult to argue
that the viewer has actually interacted with the narrative.
Metadata.
Vizard
This project proposes the manual creation of high-level metadata that will be applied to audiovisual clips. The metadata allows the director to create a work based on narrative association. Associated clips are presented in varying spatial arrangements dependent on the user’s previous choices.
New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative
Edited by Martin Rieser/Andrea Zapp
Perspective
By manipulating perspective in interactive stories the
author enables the viewer to observe a narrative from multiple viewpoints.
While these viewpoints are created by the author, their order of presentation
is ‘edited’ by the viewer. Perspective in storytelling
has a long history. Perspective enhances the interactive elements of the
story by presenting alternate viewpoints both spatially and temporally
‘The Film Sense’
by Sergei Eisenstein
Eisenstein’s book deals with the theory of ‘montage’, ‘the juxtaposition of two separate shots by splicing them together
resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another shot –
as it does a creation …. in every such juxtaposition the result
is qualitatively distinguishable from each component’. Therefore
each shot has its own content and meaning, yet it is the ‘montage’ of shots that creates meaning to the viewer. Shots in a film are viewed
as a combined sequence not as a series of individual elements.
Progress report.
Kelly McErlean
PhD History of Art/Design
Title- Interactive Film
I began my research by looking into methods of broadcasting audiovisual materials online. The film industry has started using the internet as a major distribution tool. Many archives have been digitised and made available on the web.
Work on the interactive film ‘The Last Hurrah’ is ongoing.
April 2005
The following tasks have been completed in recent months.
PhD Research Proposal:
Faculty: Faculty of History of Art and Design and Complementary Studies.
Title: The Impact of New Technologies on Traditional Media Production. (working title)
'The Virtual Film Game'
Paper examining the impact of the new media production sector on the traditional film industry, and documenting the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the two. This file is in PDF format.
