FILM STUDIES

UNIT I UNDERSTANDING FILM

1. What is a film?

A film, also called a movie or a motion picture, is a series of still photographs on film
projected onto a screen using light in rapid succession. The optical phenomenon known as
persistence of vision gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement. Films can
be classified as documentaries, experimental films, animated films, and fictional genres such as
westerns, comedies, thrillers, and musicals, among many others.

Some of the world‘s major film festivals are the Berlin International Film Festival, the
Cannes Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Karlovy Vary International
Film Festival (Czech Republic), the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou,
the Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, the Telluride Film Festival,
the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival.

Some of the major awards given for films are the Academy Awards, the British Academy
of Film and Television Awards, and the Césars. Film, also called motion picture or movie, series
of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light.
Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of
actual, smooth, and continuous movement.

Film is a remarkably effective medium in conveying drama and especially in the

evocation of emotion. The art of motion pictures is exceedingly complex, requiring contributions
from nearly all the other arts as well as countless technical skills (for example, in sound
recording, photography, and optics). Emerging at the end of the 19th century, this new art form
became one of the most popular and influential media of the 20th century and beyond.

As a commercial venture, offering fictional narratives to large audiences in theatres, film

was quickly recognized as perhaps the first truly mass form of entertainment. Without losing its
broad appeal, the medium also developed as a means of artistic expression in such areas as
acting, directing, screenwriting, cinematography, costume and set design, and music.
 In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that
seemed fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound. It exists today in
styles that differ significantly from country to country and in forms as diverse as the
documentary created by one person with a handheld camera and the multimillion-dollar epic
involving hundreds of performers and technicians.

A number of factors immediately come to mind in connection with the film experience.
For one thing, there is something mildly hypnotic about the illusion of movement that holds the
attention and may even lower critical resistance. The accuracy of the film image is compelling
because it is made by a nonhuman, scientific process. In addition, the motion picture gives what
has been called a strong sense of being present; the film image always appears to be in the
present tense. There is also the concrete nature of film; it appears to show actual people and
things.

No less important than any of the above are the conditions under which the motion
picture ideally is seen, where everything helps to dominate the spectators. They are taken from
their everyday environment, partially isolated from others, and comfortably seated in a dark
auditorium. The darkness concentrates their attention and prevents comparison of the image on
the screen with surrounding objects or people. For a while, spectators live in the world the
motion picture unfolds before them.

Still, the escape into the world of the film is not complete. Only rarely does the audience
react as if the events on the screen are real—for instance, by ducking before an onrushing
locomotive in a special three-dimensional effect. Moreover, such effects are considered to be a
relatively low form of the art of motion pictures. Much more often, viewers expect a film to be
truer to certain unwritten conventions than to the real world. Although spectators may sometimes
expect exact realism in details of dress or locale, just as often they expect the film to escape from
the real world and make them exercise their imagination, a demand made by great works of art in
all forms.

The sense of reality most films strive for results from a set of codes, or rules, that are
implicitly accepted by viewers and confirmed through habitual filmgoing. The use of brownish
lighting, filters, and props, for example, has come to signify the past in films about American life
in the early 20th century (as in The Godfather [1972] and Days of Heaven [1978]). The brownish
tinge that is associated with such films is a visual code intended to evoke a viewer‘s perceptions
of an earlier era, when photographs were printed in sepia, or brown, tones. Storytelling codes are
even more conspicuous in their manipulation of actual reality to achieve an effect of reality.
Audiences are prepared to skip over huge expanses of time in order to reach the dramatic
moments of a story. La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers), for example, begins in a
torture chamber where a captured Algerian rebel has just given away the location of his cohorts.
In a matter of seconds that location is attacked, and the drive of the search-and-destroy mission
pushes the audience to believe in the fantastic speed and precision of the operation. Furthermore,
the audience readily accepts shots from impossible points of view if other aspects of the film
signal the shot as real. For example, the rebels in The Battle of Algiers are shown inside a
walled-up hiding place, yet this unrealistic view seems authentic because the film‘s grainy
photography plays on the spectator‘s unconscious association of poor black-and-white images
with newsreels.

Fidelity in the reproduction of details is much less important than the appeal made by the
story to an emotional response, an appeal based on innate characteristics of the motion-picture
medium. These essential characteristics can be divided into those that pertain primarily to the
motion-picture image, those that pertain to motion pictures as a unique medium for works of art,
and those that derive from the experience of viewing motion pictures.

2. Hybrid nature of the Film

Perhaps as expected many of my early memories are obscured by a hazy patina. Some of
them I recall not as dynamic or even sensational, and they exist rather as a simple static image.
One: a gauzy light veils a summer picnic; I‘m still in diapers. It was not until I became somewhat
older and was leafing through a family photo album that I understood, to my bafflement, that
many of those oldest memories weren‘t at all my recollection of the events themselves. Instead,
these were memories I had constructed posthoc, ones that were informed by and built around
photographs. In my mind‘s recollected version, that picnic had adapted to include the photo‘s
slight overexposure. I had even reframed my perspective of the image as though I was seeing
from behind the camera lens, so that in my own memory I was looking at myself,impossibly,in
third-person.
 This kind of derived reality did not render the original event less or more true as such.
Quite the opposite, I think. In this case, the mnemonics I used to recall and develop my memory
probably amplified my interpretation of the experience. Outside of its externally fabricated
version, the infant memory of a family outing I stowed from looking at that photo might not exist
for me at all.

(Un-) defining hybrid documentary film

In the same way one might contend with this concept of mediated memory, hybrid
documentary film acts simultaneously as a problematic and deeply effective tool for presenting
reality. Hybrid film draws on the stylistic and narrative traditions of both documentary and
fiction film to varying degrees, at one time distancing its audience from objective truth while
illuminating a kind of concentrated reality. It is problematic in that, by incorporating traditional
elements of narrative fiction film,staging, framing, and even scripting,it shakes our
understanding of truth and objectivity that the documentary genre generally strives to preserve.

Beyond the surface-level description above, hybrid film is difficult to define because it
exists in many varying forms. There is no objective marker that signals when a hybrid film is
bending the documentary genre ‗rules,‘ and it mostly defies categorisation. Despite hybrid film‘s
undefined nature, we are familiar with its component elements from diverse places. The grainy,
black-and-white dramatisations peppered amongst the talking heads of true-crime TV could
conceivably fall under this label. Conversely, many reality television programmes employ doc-
style visuals to lend credibility to staged scenarios. In these popular forms, hybrids of fiction and
reality can seem asinine since they often don‘t use their staged elements to represent reality
successfully. It may be that we have been exposed to hybrid storytelling in such an unconvincing
form that we are suspicious of it.

There is a resisting reception associated with this form. Some people like truth to be
upfront and as unaltered as possible. This point of view is reasonable, but to undermine the
validity of a mediated reality is unfair. Creative product is inherently subjective. Amplifying that
subjectivity within the documentary genre, which elevates the values of truthfulness and
reliability, does not necessarily decrease the form‘s legitimacy or degrade the product. In the
case of photographs informing my memory, those recollections aren‘t false, despite the fact that
they are mediated. I imagine a kind of chemical process in which, through dilution and
distillation, a supersaturated version of an event is born. When you insert additional or highlight
particular elements of a scenario, and distance yourself from cold-cut reality, can you arrive at a
more vibrant understanding of truth? Hybrid film becomes a sort of reverse-Dogme style
wherein, rather than inundating a fictional narrative with a measure of reality, the real is
invigorated by an element of fiction.

It may also be its element of hard-to-pin-down-ness that makes people squeamish about
the genre. We are afraid, I‘ve been told, of what we don‘t know. Since it is difficult to define or
categorize, it may be helpful to map its development. This filmic language is by no means novel.
Because films told through this hybrid voice are varied and generally defy any absolute
categorization, it would be difficult to trace a clear path for its development. It could be argued
that Robert J. Flaherty‘s seminal 1922 film Nanook of the North, considered by many as the
earliest example of a feature-length documentary, might be categorized as a form of hybrid film.
Notoriously, vital elements of Flaherty‘s feature,its personages‘ names, relationships to one
another, their hunting tools,are contrived by the filmmaker.

France‘s Chris Marker regularly challenged the concept of reality in his films by
incorporating still photography and montage techniques and focusing on themes of memory and
recollection. Marker‘s 1983 film Sans Soleil (Sunless) is a sprawling, simultaneously epic and
minute-in-scale interpretation of personal memory and universal history-making. Sans
Soleil’s narrator is a disembodied voice, a woman whose existence is only off-screen and thereby
functions much like a subconscious. She relays to us the meandering musings of a fictional
cameraman named Sandor Krasna whose thoughts, experiences, and associations we follow
visually. They take us through local instances of humanity in different areas of the world: Japan,
Iceland, the US, and Guinea-Bissau, among others. Sans Soleil plays with perceptions of fact and
fiction. While it is documentary per se,it uses real-life footage,it controls reality to create a
narrative that is unreal and yet familiar to us. The fictional Krasna‘s (made-up) thoughts,
dispatched second-hand through the narrator, are already a mediated memory. And in all the
faces we encounter through his travels we recognise that there is ―beneath each of these faces a
memory‖ that on a wide scale builds our collective, global history but simultaneously (and
counter-intuitively) deconstructs it too, since one widely-recorded interpretation does not replace
thousands of individuals‘ remembered realities.

Krasna‘s narrative includes the memorable observation that ―I will have spent my life
trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but
rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.‖ Sans
Soleil plays like a W.G. Sebald book, or how I imagine the circuitry of memories in my brain
exist as an infinite space of filing cabinets storing the disparate images that create my perception
of reality. In the same way a daydream can roll languidly or switch frenetically between
seemingly unrelated topics, this film links unrelated pictures. The images that Marker chooses to
include, or the stories that history highlights, are not the only ones that exist, but they generate a
narrative as real as any other. Hybrid film like this uses elements of the real and of imagination
to make that point.

More recently, the hybrid film genre garnered attention through Joshua Oppenheimer‘s
widely acclaimed 2012 film The Act of Killing that shows war criminals from Indonesia‘s mid-
1960s genocide reenact murders they committed, partly as an observation of collective
remembrance. Just as in Marker‘s Sans Soleil, Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing starkly
examines the act of memory and its fluidity. Particularly from a vantage point as this one, where
the perpetrators dramatise horrific acts with an offhandedness that borders on the absurd, it is
apparent how fickle the act of memory-making can be.

The label is not rigid as a category (a single hybrid film might be classified under several
genre types) and this murkiness raises questions in reference to its artistic placement, from those
more ethically nebulous ones (does a deliberately fictionalised or idealised version of reality
make for ‗impure‘ documentary?) to very concrete demands (can you show hybrid films at a
documentary screening?). While the response to the former is contestable, the answer to the latter
is, expectedly: Yes, you can.
Looking closer at two hybrid films

Ulrich Seidl‘s hybrid film Im Keller (In the Basement) was released last year and
screened at the IDFA (International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam) 2014. Im
Keller looks at the physical and emotional abysses of Seidl‘s Austrian compatriots by observing
the habits, hobbies, and fantasies they practice in their basements. The touchy symbolism of
underground spaces is particularly resonant for a nation that experienced the notorious rapist
Josef Fritzl and others of his ilk who have occupied terrifying past basements.

Seidl unabashedly edges up to those most uncomfortable, underground, dark corners and
shines a light at them, viscerally (but comically and at times absurdly) exposing their tabooed
goings-on. One such inhabitant is a disillusioned woman who regularly tends to a troupe of
fantastically lifelike baby dolls, first feeding and singing to them before dispassionately stowing
them in the corrugated paper boxes she keeps in her apartment building‘s storage cellar. There
are others, so many others, that you might instinctively start to think twice about a late-night
light burning in your neighbours basement panes. There are opera singers, gun slingers, and a
fourpiece Nazi-sympathising oom-pah-pah band.

In Im Keller, Seidl‘s camera is pointed head-on to a stylised, often symmetrical scene,

creating the sensation of a grade-school shoebox diorama (albeit more intricate than most
construction paper and plasticine versions I‘ve seen). In doing this, Seidl invites the audience to
recognize how fully constructed these scenes are,even in a so-called documentary. They are a
stark visual cue designed to signal to a critical audience that the reality and the objectivity of the
action they contain must be questioned. These tableaux, like dioramas or traditional oil portraits,
attend to authenticity and veracity but make use of an ‗unreal‘ medium. They accentuate and
highlight their subjects‘ uniqueness, their very weirdness, by laying it out plainly.

It is precisely the inclusion of these kinds of implicit visual innuendos that gives the film
its credibility and ranks Seidl among those filmmakers capable of successfully delivering films
of the hybrid genre. His unapologetic attitude cements his intention. Seidl had a heavy hand in
directing the figures that feature in Im Keller, though the film itself gives no explicit reference to
this. He has admitted that some of the subjects and their actions were real. (The band that hung
out drinking in a Nazi-memorabilia decorated basement was so real that, upon the film‘s release,
its members were hounded by press.) Another of the storylines featuring a dominatrix and her
sex slave is real but for the basement space the pair inhabited, which was constructed for the
film. And as a kicker, Seidl has revealed that the story of a woman with baby fantasies was
completely fabricated but took place in her basement and incorporated true elements of her life.
―There were also stories that were invented [entirely],‖ teased Seidl at IDFA, without divulging
which ones.

The point here is that when fabrication is blended with and represented as reality it is
possible that all of the stories in Im Keller could be real. Seidl considers that the truths inherent
to humankind which he is documenting are simply a jumping point. ―Documentary film is
created or constructed from reality. You can think it through beyond what‘s there,‖ explained
Seidl. For Im Keller’s topic, hybrid film works particularly well. Within structured frames of
reality, fantasy runs wild.

Tracing backward chronologically through the makeshift catalogue of hybrid film, Jon
Bang Carlsen‘s Hotel of the Stars (1981) spirals even more intricately into a corkscrew of
reality/imagined reality. Its narrative plays within a version of realism as infinite as two mirrors
facing one another, presenting a multitude of layers of presentation and exhibition. Hotel of the
Stars has real-life aspiring actors living in a Hollywood hotel act and re-enact themselves and
other imagined scenarios. Though the unscripted or unmediated elements are effectively
indecipherable from the staged ones, the film is occasionally framed (like Im Keller) using
visual-stylistic cues that alert the audience to the presence of a semi-fictional narrative. For
example, two obviously engineered scenes wherein a couple of the actors wait for an elevator
that will never come but press on the button restlessly, bookend the film, drawing the audience
into and back out of its narration. The film is guided in particular by one charismatic but
decidedly bizarre protagonist, who sweetly but tragicomically delivers what might possibly be
the most convincingly real line of the film: ―I love to see myself in Technicolor.‖ This is exactly
the reality Carlsen‘s film creates for him. And this, in a sense, is precisely the acme of hybrid
film, that it can deliver a kind of dayglo doc with supersaturated elements that are the truth,
spruced and hung up to be looked at clearly.
Blurring categories

To dichotomize is human. We rely on categorization to make sense of the world. It

follows, then, that a genre like hybrid film that either falls somewhere between categories or
blends them to create a new genre entirely can deliver a powerful, yet jarring, message. To
purists of either film genre,strict fiction or documentary,the idea of hybrid film might be
disturbing. But fiction and documentary are not, in themselves, opposed to one another. Pedro
González-Rubio‘s critically acclaimed 2010 art-house film Alamar (To the Sea) is billed as a
fictional drama. The film‘s main protagonists are a real-life father and his young son who play a
semi-scripted version of themselves. The story documents a dreamy fishing trip to Mexico that,
although planned by González-Rubio for the film, plays out so naturally it could be mistaken for
documentary. More recently, Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood (2014) tells a fictional narrative, but
one that envelops real-life elements. When the actor Ellar Coltrane (portraying the protagonist
Mason) developed an interest in photography, this was absorbed into the film and Mason‘s
character. Both films are instances in which reality informed fiction, effectively to the same
degree that documentary as hybrid film uses fiction to tell its story.

Ultimately, as Seidl pointed out at IDFA, hybrid film can only be successful as a form of
documentary if it serves to illuminate a truth. It can restructure that truth, but if it isn‘t exposing
something real to begin with, the audience will lose its sense of trust in the film. These hybrid
films exist less as a form of precise documentation, and more as content that focuses on nuanced
realities. Hybrid film stirs the waters, often raising questions beyond solely answering them. The
films listed here are exemplary as narratives that implore us to examine the unconditional
expressions of humankind. In Seidl‘s Im Keller, these are the taboo, the faux-pas, the don‘t-tell-
the-neighbours, the human nature to conceal and protect what lies close to our hearts. In
Carlsen‘s Hotel of the Stars, these are glimmers of hope and vanity cradled in the social psyche,
the complex equations of self-identification and self-representation. They are the things we know
to exist without coming face to face with them. In the case of Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing,
in which war criminals are publicly celebrated, these are the unchecked elements of human
nature so disagreeable that it even becomes difficult to face them directly. These films do not
avoid mediation; they employ mediation for clarity‘s sake.
 As many of these examples illustrate, hybrid film often deals with the act of memory. In
his text ―Autobiography as Authenticity,‖ (in A Comics Studies Reader), Bart Beaty states
―autobiography is an attempt to reconcile one‘s life with one‘s self and that therefore the core of
autobiography is not historical accuracy but metaphorical truth.‖ Hybrid film then, much like
autobiography and my own early recollections, offers us exactly this kind of metaphorical truth,
one that resonates without relying solely on empirical representation.
3. Film Language: Film Form and Meaning

Film analysis requires a clear understanding of film form and film content. One needs to
know some of the basic concepts of film medium like the structure- both at micro and macro
levels, relationship of structure, meaning, emotive aspect and value, image construction, and the
design in film composition etc.

However, before moving further into the realm of these, we need to understand the story
of a film, its plot, theme, conflict, characters play crucial roles in completing the film maker‘s
intentions. A viewer, like a discerning reader of a work of literature, has to pay careful attention
to all these elements. We have already discussed these elements in our discourse related to
literature. Since they are applicable to films as well, we are not repeating the discussion. The
focus in this chapter will be entirely on those aspects that make the language of cinema unique. It
goes unsaid that cinema is a popular medium and we all understand films even without being
initiated into the nuances of the film medium. We all respond to both visual and aural stimuli. As
already stated, we understand film‘s story, its plot, its characters and their motivation. They are
immediately perceived and easily articulable and. mostly one does not go beyond these initial
impressions. However, for an enriching experience, one should be able to go beyond these and
uncover the coded messages that are subtly conveyed through various elements. Knowing the
aesthetics of film language helps one to go beyond the ‗denoted‘ meaning and decipher the
‗connoted‘ meaning- what is beneath the surface and what might be inarticulable. So, what we
are attempting at is a richer experience and more comprehensive analysis of a film.

For this, we need to focus on the following three areas:

  Form/ Structure: film form or structure at both micro and macro levels- from
composition of individual shots, fragments of picture and sound to the arrangement of
these fragments into scenes, sequences and finally the entire film.
 Film language: elements of the film ‗language‘ like visuals, sound, editing, acting,
lighting etc.
 Meaning: the meaning of the film is its essence; the theme, story, plot, characters, the
various elements of film language as used in the film, and its composition etc. add up to
provide that ‗meaning‘.

Careful attention to these aspects would allow us to go beyond the surface level meaning of any
film. These considerations along with our initial response to the film hold key to any film
analysis.

Film Form
Film form or film structure is the total system that the viewer perceives in the film. It is
the overall system of relations that we can perceive among the various elements in the whole
film. When we watch a film we perceive it as a complete whole though it is created by joining
many fragments of various elements. If we pay attention to the structure of the film, we would be
able to look at the individual parts and try to explain why they are in the film and how in a
uniquely cinematic way the entire film functions and has its effect on the viewer. Hence, the
concept of film form is important in film appreciation. Let me explain this in greater detail.
While making a film, the filmmaker creates an image of an event so that the spectator perceives
it. The event on the screen is not a real event, but a created one. Each real event has an inner
structure of significance which has to be understood by the film maker. Then, he has to select
visual fragments and sound fragments that are expressive of that significance and arrange them
into a single whole so that the spectator perceives that inner structure of significance. From a
well composed screen image of an event, one can experience the fullness or richness of the real
event. Structures, in general, have various elements that serve different purposes. In works of art
too they have a functional role to play though that is not its entire significance. The pattern in
which various elements in a work of art are woven together to make a complete whole in itself
has aesthetic appeal of its own. This aesthetic quality enriches and enhances the created
‗content‘. Hence, ‗what‘ is said (meaning) in a work of art is intrinsically linked to ‗how‘ it is
said. A good film, like any work of art, draws its principles of composition from the principles of
human experience. Otherwise, the film would not make sense to the spectator. In this context,
understanding the structure of the film helps.

Let us conceive a film as a design or a system in which various elements have been
intertwined where each individual fragment, be it visual or aural, has a relationship with the
complete film. Here we have to think of two levels of structure: the microstructure and the
macrostructure. The microstructure is related to the composition of images, individual shots,
sound fragments and the concept of editing with which these fragments are joined. The
composition of these have an impact on what these images convey to the viewer and hence how
the complete film is experienced. Further, when we consider an individual visual shot, there are
many elements like camera placement, lighting, lenses, relationship of frame outlines with
elements contained within the frame outlines, duration of the shot etc. that go into its
composition. In a well-designed film, much attention is paid to the composition of such
individual shots and aural fragments- be it a fragment of music or that of a dialogue or an
incidental sound. When we move from this basic level into higher levels, a design of the entire
film emerges. We can perceive that these individual fragments are composed to make various
segments; a careful attention to the way in which scenes, sequences and finally the entire film
have been put together makes us perceive the inner structure of the entire film. This composition
of scripting is referred to as the macrostructure of the film. Various narrative and stylistic
elements play important role in shaping the macrostructure of a film.

Having said that the film form or structure is done through careful selection of elements,
we now discuss some guiding principles that we can perceive in the structuring of a film:
Function, Similarity and Repetition, Difference and Variation, Development, Unity and Disunity.

 Function: Each element chosen in a film, as in any work of art, should have a purpose to
be there and this purpose is its function. We can notice the function of an element by
considering its motivation, or justification for being there.
 Repetition and Similarity: A film‘s pattern emerges due to elements which are repeated.
Repetition is basic to our understanding of any film. Elements such as characters and
settings, music, camera positions, story actions or even certain lines of dialogue repeat at
 various points in the film. Here we need to introduce the concept of a motif which is going be
very useful in analyzing films. Any significant repeated element in a film is called a motif;
it may be an object, a color, a place, a person, a sound, a song, a charactertrait, a pattern of
lighting, or a certain type of shot.
 Difference and Variation: The form of a film cannot be composed only of repetitions
because it would be very boring to have too many repetitions. Thus difference is another
fundamental principle of film form. Variety, contrast and change in characters,
environments, times or activities, differences in tonality within an image, texture,
direction and speed of movement, etc. are required to make an interesting film.
 Development: A film often follows a pattern of a development which may compared to a
journey. From the beginning to the end there is a progression of events or a development
of story that happens. Similarity and difference, repetition and variation work together to
create development. A film‘s pattern of development can be understood by segmentation
of the film. By segmentation we mean breaking the film into major and minor parts and
assign them with consecutive numbers. By segmenting a film into various scenes and
sequences, we can perceive similarities, dissimilarities, and overall progression within
the film.

It is conventional to divide a film into three dramatic units in order of increasing

complexity- shot, scene and sequence. A shot is the basic unit of film construction; it is a single
piece of film without breaks in the continuity of action. Next to a shot is a scene; it is a series of
shots joined together by means of ‗cuts‘ so that it has unity of time and action. Though in the
earliest days of cinema, a scene was defined as a series of shots with the same setting, unity of
place is not a criterion any more to call a particular segment a scene. A series of shots usually
make up a scene and a series of scenes put together make up a sequence. A sequence is next to a
scene in the hierarchy of structural units and forms a distinct narrative unit, usually connected by
unity of location or unity of time. Also, a sequence may have sub sequences. It may be noted that
a single shot can become a scene and a single scene can become a sequence. We may recall that
the first film by Lumierre brothers is a single shot film! It helps one to segment a film into
various sections as we can the progression of the film and locate important events in the film at
various points. We can thus understand the narrative structure, the development of the ‗action‘ of
the film in a better way.
Unity
A film is considered to have unity when all the elements of the film have certain
functions of their own and also when they all are economically interwoven into a beautiful
whole. When there are no gaps in the formal relationships and has unity in it, we refer it to be
―tight‖, If there is any unrelated element whose presence cannot be justified in the film, then, the
film does not have unity in it. because. Thus a film is said to have unity when every element
present in has a specific set of functions, similarities and differences are determinable, the form
develops logically, and no element is unneeded. Thus film form/structure is not about just plot
structure. So far we have discussed what we mean by micro and macro structure of the film,
basic units of structure, some of the guiding principles behind structuring of a film etc.
Sensensitising ourselves to these aspects of film structure enriches our experience and
understanding of any film. A careful viewing of Satyajit Ray‘s much celebrated masterpiece
Pather Panchali would make one understand how important it is to pay attention to structural
elements at both micro and macro levels. Now, we shall move on to discuss various aspects of
film language. As you proceed, try to relate the discussion to your experiences while watching a
film. You may go back and ‗revisit‘ a film which held great appeal to you, even if you found it
difficult to comprehend completely.

Film Language

Cinema, being a medium that has a rich language of its own, needs one to pay attention to
the elements of image and sound. Deciphering various aural and visual cues provided through
the text and subtext is crucial to understand the film. While it is important for the filmmaker to
handle this language skillfully, it is equally important for the spectator to be sensitised to this
unique language. In a film, every image carries a meaning of its own; also sound plays an
important role as it may complement/support/exaggerate visual image. Proper use of both
‗sound‘ and ‗silence‘, as abstract as they are, lend a beauty to the whole film.

A film‘s cinematography- colour, contrast, deep/shallow focus, depth of field, exposure,

rate, framing, aspect ratio, movement of the camera, lighting etc- is one aspect of film‘s
language. These elements contribute in designing the ‗visual‘ part of a film. In any film, image is
not just a picture; it is a moving image with a meaning of its own. The object that has been shot,
how the shot is composed, from what angle or distance it is shot, what lighting/ colour is used,
etc play important role in creating the meaning of the image. In other words, it is important for us
to perceive what is ‘in the picture‘ and how the action has been ‗staged‘- known as mise-en-
scene.

Mise-en–scene

Mise-en-scene analysis, a well-established approach to film analysis, focuses on what can

be seen ‗in the picture.‘ The term mise-en-scene in French literally translates to ‗staging an
action‘ or ‗putting on the stage‘. It was originally used with reference to theatre and it included
elements of set design, lighting, costume, figure expression and movement. Film scholars,
extended the term to film direction; they use the term to signify the director‘s control over what
appears in the film frame. In controlling the misc-en-scene, a film director stages the event for
the camera. In film analysis, mise-en-scene is one of the most frequently used but variously
interpreted terms. Film scholars David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson (1979) in their book Film
Art state that mise-en-scene consists of setting, lighting, costume, figure expression and
movement. They do not consider camera placement as a part of mise-en-scene. But, Bruce
Kawin in his book How Movies Work (1992) includes ―Choice of filmstock (black-and-white or
color, fine-grain or grainy) . . . aspect ratio (the proportion of the screen) . . . framing (how much
of the set or cast will be shown at a time) . . . camera placement and movement, and . . . sound
environment‖ as part of mise-en-scene.

Generally, mise-en-scene study includes studying the following elements:

 production design: setting and props
 costumes
 colour (present both in production during and lighting)
 lighting
 actor‘s performance (including casting and make-up) and movement (blocking)
 framing including position of the camera, aspect ratio, depth of field, height and angle
 diegetic sound

 Setting and props: Setting plays a more active role in cinema than in most theatrical
styles where human being is all-important. Theorist Andre Bazin stresses the importance
of setting in films when he says ―The drama on the screen can exist without actors. A
banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves beating on the shore can heighten the dramatic
effect. Some film masterpieces use man as an accessory, like an extra, or in counterpoint
to nature, which is the true leading character‖. The important point to note here is that
cinema setting need not be a passive element; it can dynamically enter the action of the
film narrative. The filmmaker may control setting in different ways. One may select an
already existing locale to shoot the film. On location shooting has a long history as the
first films ever made by Lumiere brothers Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, The Squirter
and the Squirted etc. were shot on location. Italian neorealist films too are known for
their on location shooting. Indian ace filmmaker Satyajit Ray‘s selection of locations for
shooting has a remarkable quality about them. Viewing of any one of the films from Apu
Trilogy is enough to understand what I mean by the above statement. While on location
shooting is a favourite of many film makers till day, a filmmaker may choose to construct
the setting where most controlled pre-filmic events are fabricated in a studio. George
Milies, the pioneer of trick films (what we now refer to as films with special effects),
understood the increased control yielded by using a studio setting for shooting. Most of
the early Indian films were shot in studio setting. One look at the early films by Damle or
V. Shantaram, and one would understand that they were shot in studio setting. Swedish
filmmaker Ingmar Bergman is famous for opting studio settings against the use of on
location shoots. While creating a shot‘s setting, the filmmaker may create a prop- an
object in the setting that operates actively in the ongoing action. One good example of
prop is the little girl‘s balloon in Ftitz Lang‘s film M. It is worthwhile to point out that a
prop may further gain significance by working as a motif. When we watch Ray‘s Pather
Panchali, we see Pishi‘s (Indir) water pot gaining such significance. Initially it is the
container of life giving water; but when she dies the same pot falls into a water pond,
suggestive of Pishi‘s death.

 Costume and make-up: Costume simply refers to the clothes and the accessories that a
character in the film wears. Costume in narrative cinema is used to signify character, or
advertise particular fashions, or to make clear distinctions between characters. A film‘s
costume speaks about the characters; costumes can be iconographic. The importance of
costumes can be seen in the period films where characters of the past come alive donned
in the attire similar to that of the people during that period. eg: costumes used in period films
like Cleopatra, Gladiator, Troy, Elizabeth etc. have a distinct character of theirs own as is
seen in the following shot from the film Cleopatra in which Elizabeth Taylor is donned in
the costume for coronation. Sometimes costumes become the identity of certain
characters and symbolize their power. Costumes of superheroes like Spiderman and
Superman are some examples. Costumes also reflect the lifestyle and attitude of the
society. We find a stark contrast between the costumes donned by the lead actors in the
films today and in the earlier films. Bollywood cinema has seen phenomenal change in
the way in which costume is used in films. Costume too may work as a prop in a film.
Film genres make extensive use of costume props. The gangster‘s automatic pistol, guns,
cowboy hats are some examples of costumes that work as props. The actor‘s make-up is a
closely related area of mise-en-scene and all the points discussed with respect to costume
apply to make-up as well. Make-up mostly aims at realism; but it is possible to use it in
nonrealistic ways as in horror, fantasy and science fiction films.

 Colour: Colour is present in the setting, props, costume of a film. The type of lighting
used affects the colour seen in a film. Early films were shot in black and white but the
cinema soon included color images. These images were initially painted or stenciled onto
the film but by the 1930s filmmakers were able to include color sequences in their films.
Apart from the added realism or glamour that a color image could provide, color is also
used to create aesthetic patterns and to establish character or emotion in narrative cinema.
For example, use of black and white film stock when colour is available is interesting to
study. Directors sometimes use black and white or sepia in a colour film to either show
flash backs or dream-like state. It is often used in Tarkovsky‘s film oeuvre. There is a
nostalgic feel to the sepia toning and this is best manipulated in his film ‗Nostalghia‘.
Indian film maker Aparna Sen also artistically uses this technique to show the dream
sequence in her film ‘36 Chowringhee Lane‘. Black-and-white or sepia can also be used
to suggest sophistication. The type of lighting affects the colour seen. Light and shade is
important in the mise-en-scene of ‗black and white‘ cinema. The use of bright colours
works as a denotation for cheerful and happy times. Often melodramatic and sad moods
are brought out by using dull colours. Cold or bluish lighting can convey a sense of cold,
alienation or technology, while warm or yellowish lighting can be used to convey
comfort, sunset and so on. If colours are very rich and intense they are described as saturated.
However one has to keep in mind that colors do not necessarily carry meanings that
can be read easily. For eg., the use of red in Ingmar Bergman's 1972 film Cries and
Whispers (Viskingar Och Rop) does not carry meanings that can be read easily.

 Lighting: In films, much of the impact of an image is due to the manipulation of lighting.
The intensity, direction, and quality of lighting have a profound effect on the way an
image is perceived. Light affects the way colors are rendered and can focus attention on
particular elements of the composition. Lighter and darker areas within a frame help
create the overall composition of a shot. A brightly illuminated part of a shot may draw
our attention to certain objects or gestures while a shadow may conceal a detail or build
up suspense. The famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock‘s ―Psycho‖ is a brilliant
example of powerful use of back light to conceal the face of the murderer and highlight
the horror on the victim‘s face. Fig. …shows basic arrangements of these lights. Most
mainstream films rely on the three-point lighting style, referred to as tripartite lighting
scheme, and its genre variations. Other films, for example documentaries and realist
cinema, rely on natural light to create a sense of authenticity. Films of Indian directors
like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and Aparna Sen make full use of the
natural lighting in their cinema. Aparna Sen‘s 36 Chowringhee Lane is one such film
where the filmmaker makes extensive use of natural lighting to complement the moods in
the protagonist‘s life. The darkness of Miss Stoneheim‘s apartment reflcts the misery of
lonely life is in complete contrast with the well-lit outdoor sequences in the company of
Nanditha and Somesh. In the song sequence ‗itsy bitsy teeny veeni‘, Miss Stoneheim‘s
child-like simple happiness is complimented by the energy of an out-door shoot on a
pleasant day. Four major features of film lighting are its quality, direction, source, and
colour. By quality we mean the intensity of illumination. While ‗hard‘ lighting creates
clearly defined shadows, ‗soft‘ lighting creates a diffused illumination. (take examples
from Ray). Hard lighting creates edges, crisp texture and softer lighting blurs contours
and textures. There is gentler between light and shade when the lighting is soft.
According to the direction from which a shot is lit, we can recognize whether the
lighting is frontal lighting, side-lighting, backlighting, under-lighting or top lighting.
Frontal lighting eliminates shadows and creates a flat looking image. Use of sidelighting
creates as in Psycho when Norman Bates is seen watching the drowning car has a tendency
to sculpt the characters features. Backlighting comes from behind the subject that is shot.
If it is used with no other point of illumination, backlighting creates a silhouette, as in
‗Psycho‘‘s murder scene. Under-lighting has light coming from below the subject. As it
has a tendency to distort features, underlighting is often used to create dramatic horror
effects. If the light is coming from above the subject, then it is toplighting.

Lighting can be characterized by its source as well. It could be natural light, light
coming from the objects within the frame (visible sources of light) or extra light sources.
But most fictional films use extra light sources. It is a common assumption that any
subject normally requires two light sources: a key light and a fill light. The key light is
the primary source and provides the dominant illumination. The key lighting source may
be aimed at the subject from any angle. A fill light is less intense and it ‗fills in‘- i.e, it
softens or removes the shadows created by the key light. In Classical Hollywood films, it
was customary to use three light sources for every shot: key light, fill light and
backlight. Three-point lighting is generally used to render a brightly lit situation like that
of a ballroom dance or a birthday party. But its use can suggest different lighting
conditions or times of the day.

The following illustration shows the position of theses lights and how they work.

 Key Light: This is the main light. It is usually the strongest and has the most influence
on the look of the scene. It is placed to one side of the camera/subject so that this side is
well lit and the other side has some shadow.

 Fill Light: This is the secondary light and is placed on the opposite side of the key
light. It is used to fill the shadows created by the key. The fill will usually be softer and
less bright than the key.

 Back Light: The back light is placed behind the subject and lights it from the rear.
Rather than providing direct lighting (like the key and fill), its purpose is to provide
definition and subtle highlights around the subject's outlines. This helps separate the
subject from the background and provide a three-dimensional look. Another aspect of lighting
which most of us ignore is the colour in on-screen illumination. While the white of
sunlight and the soft yellow of interior lamps are the two colours of film lighting that are
commonly used, use of different colour filters placed in front of the light source colours
the onscreen illumination. Also there may be a realistic source in the scene to choose a
particular colour of light. Kubrik‘s films ‗Clockwork Orange‘ and ‗Barry Lyndon‘ are two
examples in which use of colour in lighting is prominent.

 Performance: Performance, an integral part of mise-en-scene, consists of visual as well

as sound elements like acting, appearance, gestures, facial expressions, voice- tone,
accent, and type of language, body posture and movement etc. Performances could be
melodramatic or realistic. There are different acting styles and we can classify them in
the following ways: Classical style, Method acting, Natural style Classical style is
more obviously mannered. Consider the acting styles in period films like Cleopatra,
Gladiator, or the Mughal E Azam of yester years and you would understand what we
mean by classical style of acting. Method acting is intense and psychologically driven;
we may give examples of films like Kagaz ke Phool, Pyaasa etc. by Gurudatt for method
acting. In natural style of acting, there is less affectation and it is more natural. When we
watch Ray‘s films, say, Pather Panchali, we are struck by the natural style of acting of
each actor in the film. Films by Deepa Mehta, Mrinal Sen, Meera Nair, Aparna Sen
distinctly follow natural style of acting. While we evaluate an actor‘s performance, we
have to see whether the function and motivation for the actor to perform in a particular
way is fulfilled. A good acting style would make the actor look and behave in a manner
appropriate to his/her character in the context of the film. Also, we need to see how an
actor‘s performance cooperates with other film techniques such as camera technique or
editing. Facial expression, gestures, body posture and movement also are a part of
performance. Both staging of the action and the camera‘s distance from it decides what
we get to see of the actor‘s performance. A scene may either focus on the facial
expression or on postures, gestures and movement. Thus performance in films or our
perception of the actor‘s performance in films is very different from that in theatre. In
theatre, we are at a considerable distance from the actor on the stage. We cannot get as
close to the theatre actor as the camera can put us in a film. The actor can be seen from a
long distance or can be filmed from very close. Also, while watching a film, our perceptions
depend on what we get to see on screen which is not just what is being enacted, but, what
is carefully chosen by the filmmaker. Apart from these we need to be careful to perceive
tone of voice, accent and type of language that actors use while assessing their
performance. Particular actors have their own recognizable style or type. Consider the
stylized acting of Rajnikanth or unmistakably recognizable style of Amitabh Bachchan-
the name of the ‗star‘ itself brings expectations and filmmakers cash in on this.

 Framing: Framing of a still shot is derived from Renaissance painting the Quattro cento
system the system places spectators in the position of the central perspective. A frame is
the border that contains the image. The edges of the image create a frame that includes or
excludes aspects of what occurs in front of the camera. By focusing on a part of reality,
framing determines both what is seen and what is excluded. Thus, framing is a means of
control. A frame can be ‗open‘ with characters moving in and out of frame or a frame can
be ‗moving‘. A moving frame is achieved using focus, tracking and panning. A frame can
be ‗canted‘ with unbalanced shot composition and at odd angles. In a canted frame,
objects in the scene appear slanted. Often they are associated with the frantic rhythms of
action films. Canted frames are also used in music videos and animation. The expressive
qualities of framing include the angle of the camera to the object, the aspect ratio of the
projected image, the relationship between camera and object, and the association of
camera with character.

a. Angle of Framing: Many films are shot with a camera that appears to be at
approximately the same height as its subject. However, it is possible to film from an
angle that is significantly lower or higher than the subject being shot. In a low angle
shot, the camera is below the subject and the viewer gets the perception that he is
‗looking up‘ at the subject. The subject gains stature and is made more impressive; it often
suggests power. For a high angle shot, the camera is placed above the subject and the
viewer feels that he is looking down on the subject. In a high angle shot, the character
appears diminished and subdued within the frame. A high angle shot suggests
vulnerability and gives an impression of the character as a submissive one.
 Thus, angle of framing can be used to indicate the relation between a character and
the camera's point of view. Or it can simply be used to create striking visual
compositions as in the last scene in the following shot from the film The Cranes are
Flying by Kalatzov. Not only the camera angle but the height of placement of the
camera also may become a significant element in a film. A low-level camera is placed
close to the ground whereas a high-level camera would be placed above the typical
perspective shown in the cinema. Camera level is used to signify sympathy for
characters who occupy particular levels in the image, or just to create pleasurable
compositions.

b. Aspect Ratio: Aspect ratio is the ratio of the width and height of the frame. This ratio
for the conventional format, called the academy frame, is 1.33: 1. It utilises the ‗rule
of thirds‘, which breaks the frame into three- both horizontally and vertically. For
wide-screen formats, aspect ratio varies from 1.85:1 to 2.55:1. Cinemascope frame
has wider screen format.

c. Framing Scales: There are seven basic shots with different framing scales and they
are discussed here:

I. Extreme close-up usually is a face shot. It captures from mid-fore-head to just above
the chin, or even closer. It is used to show details, emphasise expressions or to make
the subject appear threatening.
II. A close-up (face) face, just above the shoulder, cuts just below the neck. Used to show
emotions, enabling us to see facial expressions and what the subject is
thinking/feeling; details are magnified.
III. Medium close-up has (head and shoulders). It is similar to a passport-size photograph.
Cuts the body at the lower chest just below the armpit. Used to show reactions and
indicate what the subject is feeling. Details are not as magnified as in a close-up.
IV. Medium shot is a shot from the waist to the head. It cuts the body just above/below
the waist. Viewers can easily recognize the subject in the frame.
V. Medium long shot from head to below the knees or just above the ankle. It is used to
clearly show gestures, especially the arms. Framing is such than an object four or five
feet high would fill most of the screen vertically.
VI. A long shot is a head to toe shot. It shows the entire body and a very short distance
above and below. It is used to establish the location and enable viewers to follow
action within the frame. Even 2/3 people‘s whole bodies may be seen in the frame.
VII. Extreme long shot has a framing in which the scale of the object shown is very small;
a building, landscape, or crowd of people will fill the screen. In case of a single
character, the background would be dominating the individual. An extreme long shot
may be used as an establishing shot.

d. Depth of field (DOF): Depth of field is the distance through which elements in an image
are in sharp focus. Bright light and a narrow lens aperture tend to produce a larger depth
of field. A restricted depth of field keeps only one plane in sharp focus. A shallow depth
of field is often used as a technique to focus audience attention on the most significant
aspect of a scene. One more related aspect is focus. Deep focus involves staging an event
on film such that significant elements occupy widely separated planes in the image. It
requires that elements at very different depths of the image are in focus and it allows both
foreground and background to be in focus at the same time. For deep-focus
cinematography, a wide-angle lens is required as well as an increase in light and/or light
sensitive film stock. Shallow focus, on the other hand, keeps only one frame in sharp
focus. It is used to direct the viewer‘s attention to one particular object/element in a
scene.

e. Camera movement: Apart from these aspects of framing, camera movement may
become crucial in keeping a moving object in the frame. To keep a moving figure
onscreen, i.e. within the frame, the shot may require any of the following camera
movements: panning, tracking, tilting or craning. The specific function of such
framing is to direct our attention to a character or object as he/she/it moves inside the
frame. A pan is the horizontal movement of the camera as the pedestal, say, the tripod,
stays stationary. A vertical movement of the camera, even as the pedestal remains
stationary, is known as a tilt. A tilt is used to give a view of objects lying above and
below the field of view. Both a pan and a tilt are used to follow action, to show spatial
relationships, to shift attention or to give a panoramic view. A track, also known as a
dolly, is the combined physical movement of the camera along with the pedestal; the
 movement may be forward, backward or lateral. To achieve this, both the camera and the
pedestal are mounted on a track and trolley. Tracking in or out from the subject alters the
size relationship between objects in the foreground and background. Craning is when a
change in framing is rendered by having the camera above the ground and moving it
through the air in any direction. It is accomplished by placing the camera on a crane or a
similar device. Craning lends the camera a sense of mobility and smooth movement
through space; it often gives the viewer a feeling of omniscience over the characters.
Craning is often used to have establishing shots. The following shot from Shawshank
Redemption is one such example. When a handheld camera is used, film frames have an
unstable and jerky feel to them; it also allows for a greater degree of movement and
flexibility than bulkier standard cameras for a much lower cost.

Camera is a powerful director‘s tool and it can capture an actor‘s emotions; a

filmmaker‘s judicious choice of camera placement and camera angle would result in
evoking the intended responses in the viewer. Emotions are conveyed through the actor's
eyes and expressions. A close-up will fill the screen with emotion, and pulling away to a
wide angle shot will dissipate that emotion. For eg., a sudden cut from a long shot to a
closeup will give the audience a sudden surprise. Sometimes a strange angle above an
actor may heighten the dramatic meaning. When you watch films in our watching
sessions pay careful attention to the way in which the filmmaker manipulates the power
of camera to get varied results.

d. Sound Environment: Sound is an important component of a film as without it, a film

watching experience feels incomplete. The fact that live-music was played during the
shows of a film even in the days of silent films is an indication of the importance of aural
elements in a film. Though sound can be used in various ways, in mise-en-scene analysis,
the focus is on the film‘s diegetic sound.

There are two types of sound used in films: Diegetic and Non-diegetic. Diegetic sound is sound
whose origin is located within the story/narrative world, i.e. it is heard within the film's diegesis.
The voice of the characters, sound from objects that are in the story world. For example, film
dialogues, a shot from a gun on screen, music that is being played within the diegesis, incidental
sounds are all part of mise-en-scene. Diegetic sound may be on-screen or off-screen. Off-screen
sound appears within the film's diegesis but not within the frame. Its origin is to be found in the
off-screen space. Non-diegetic sound is heard outside of the film's world or its diegesis. The
music soundtrack, voice-overs, film scores etc. are a part of non-diegetic sound. It is interesting
to note that a soundtrack can be used as both diegetic and non-diegetic sound. One basic
principle for the use of sound in films is its relationship to the visuals. There are many examples
of films with brilliant use of sound/music within their diegesis. Consider how Tarkovsky has
used sounds of natural elements like flowing water, blowing wind to give a musical and lyrical
quality to the film Nostalghia. Examine the brilliant music which is in the entire diegetic world
of Bergman‘s film of Autumn Sonata. Use of songs in Satyajit Ray‘s films lends richness to his
films and appeal to our aesthetic sense. Use of music and other sound tracks, even when they are
not a part of diegetic world and hence of mise-en-scene, needs a special mention as they have
become extremely important in films. Apart from being aesthetically pleasing, music may be
used to underline the unspoken feelings or psychological states of characters, to convey a
convincing atmosphere of time and place, to accentuate the theatrical build-up of a scene. It may
even serve as a kind of neutral background fill to the action. Sound tracks, music in particular,
can be used to bridge two scenes. Such music or sound track that continues through the visual
transition is referred to as sound bridge. The music score- the background music used
throughout a film, can be very powerful and yet sublime. Listen to the score of Requiem for a
Dream, for instance. It captivates the audience and connects them with the drama within the
frame. So far we have discussed all the elements of mise-en-scene, including diegetic sound.
While discussing the language of film, we have covered many aspects of cinematography.
However, it is appropriate to discuss two more important concepts in cinematography- exposure
and contrast.
4. A brief history Beginning and Growth of Cinema
Learn about the history and development of cinema, from the Kinetoscope in 1891 to
today’s 3D revival.

Cinematography is the illusion of movement by the recording and subsequent rapid

projection of many still photographic pictures on a screen. Originally a product of 19th-century
scientific endeavour, cinema has become a medium of mass entertainment and communication,
and today it is a multi-billion-pound industry.
WHO INVENTED CINEMA?

No one person invented cinema. However, in 1891 the Edison Company successfully
demonstrated a prototype of the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view
moving pictures. The first public Kinetoscope demonstration took place in 1893. By 1894 the
Kinetoscope was a commercial success, with public parlours established around the world. The
first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in
December 1895 in Paris, France. They used a device of their own making, the Cinématographe,
which was a camera, a projector and a film printer all in one.

WHAT WERE EARLY FILMS LIKE?

At first, films were very short, sometimes only a few minutes or less. They were shown at
fairgrounds, music halls, or anywhere a screen could be set up and a room darkened. Subjects
included local scenes and activities, views of foreign lands, short comedies and newsworthy
events. The films were accompanied by lectures, music and a lot of audience participation.
Although they did not have synchronised dialogue, they were not ‗silent‘ as they are sometimes
described.

THE RISE OF THE FILM INDUSTRY

By 1914, several national film industries were established. At this time, Europe, Russia
and Scandinavia were the dominant industries; America was much less important. Films became
longer and storytelling, or narrative, became the dominant form. As more people paid to see
movies, the industry which grew around them was prepared to invest more money in their
production, distribution and exhibition, so large studios were established and dedicated cinemas
built. The First World War greatly affected the film industry in Europe, and the American
industry grew in relative importance. The first 30 years of cinema were characterised by the
growth and consolidation of an industrial base, the establishment of the narrative form, and
refinement of technology.

ADDING COLOUR

Colour was first added to black-and-white movies through hand colouring, tinting, toning
and stencilling.By 1906, the principles of colour separation were used to produce so-called
‗natural colour‘ moving images with the British Kinemacolor process, first presented to the
public in 1909.Kinemacolor was primarily used for documentary (or ‗actuality‘) films, such as
the epic With Our King and Queen Through India (also known as The Delhi Durbar) of 1912,
which ran for over 2 hours in total. The early Technicolor processes from 1915 onwards were
cumbersome and expensive, and colour was not used more widely until the introduction of its
three-colour process in 1932. It was used for films such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard
of Oz (both 1939) in Hollywood and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) in the UK.

ADDING SOUND

The first attempts to add synchronised sound to projected pictures used phonographic
cylinders or discs. The first feature-length movie incorporating synchronised dialogue, The Jazz
Singer (USA, 1927), used the Warner Brothers‘ Vitaphone system, which employed a separate
record disc with each reel of film for the sound. This system proved unreliable and was soon
replaced by an optical, variable density soundtrack recorded photographically along the edge of
the film, developed originally for newsreels such as Movietone.

CINEMA’S GOLDEN AGE

By the early 1930s, nearly all feature-length movies were presented with synchronised
sound and, by the mid-1930s, some were in full colour too. The advent of sound secured the
dominant role of the American industry and gave rise to the so-called ‗Golden Age of
Hollywood‘. During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema was the principal form of popular
entertainment, with people often attending cinemas twice a week. Ornate ‘super‘ cinemas or
‗picture palaces‘, offering extra facilities such as cafés and ballrooms, came to towns and cities;
many of them could hold over 3,000 people in a single auditorium. In Britain, the highest
attendances occurred in 1946, with over 31 million visits to the cinema each week.

WHAT IS THE ASPECT RATIO?

Thomas Edison had used perforated 35mm film in the Kinetoscope, and in 1909 this was
adopted as the worldwide industry standard. The picture had a width-to-height relationship—
known as the aspect ratio—of 4:3 or 1.33:1. The first number refers to the width of the screen,
and the second to the height. So for example, for every 4 centimetres in width, there will be 3 in
height. With the advent of optical sound, the aspect ratio was adjusted to 1.37:1. This is known
as the ‗Academy ratio‘, as it was officially approved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences (the Oscars people) in 1932. Although there were many experiments with other
formats, there were no major changes in screen ratios until the 1950s.

HOW DID CINEMA COMPETE WITH TELEVISION?

The introduction of television in America prompted a number of technical experiments

designed to maintain public interest in cinema. In 1952, the Cinerama process, using three
projectors and a wide, deeply curved screen together with multi-track surround sound, was
premiered. It had a very large aspect ratio of 2.59:1, giving audiences a greater sense of
immersion, and proved extremely popular.

However, Cinerama was technically complex and therefore expensive to produce and
show. Widescreen cinema was not widely adopted by the industry until the invention of
CinemaScope in 1953 and Todd-AO in 1955. Both processes used single projectors in their
presentation. CinemaScope ‗squeezed‘ images on 35mm film; when projected, they were
expanded laterally by the projector lens to fit the screen. Todd-AO used film with a width of
70mm. By the end of the 1950s, these innovations had effectively changed the shape of the
cinema screen, with aspect ratios of either 2.35:1 or 1.66:1 becoming standard. Stereo sound,
which had been experimented with in the 1940s, also became part of the new widescreen
experience.

Specialist large-screen systems using 70mm film were also developed. The most
successful of these has been IMAX, which as of 2020 has over 1,500 screens around the world.
For many years IMAX cinemas have shown films specially made in its unique 2D or 3D formats
but more recently they have shown popular mainstream feature films which have been digitally
re-mastered in the IMAX format, often with additional scenes or 3D effects.

UNIT II BASIC TERMINOLOGY OF FILM MAKING

Animation. In its most common form animation consists of photographing a sequence of still
drawings, each slightly different from the previous one. When the entire sequence is viewed in
rapid succession, an illusion of motion is produced. This is the means by which the popular
animated cartoons are created. It is also possible to use puppets or other solid objects instead of
drawings, in which case the object is moved or rearranged slightly between successive exposures
to produce the desired movement in the film. Animated films can also be computer generated.

Camera. The camera is the basic tool of the film maker. It is, essentially, a light-tight box
equipped with a shutter to admit light through the aperture of the lens for a precisely controlled
length of time. A motion picture camera also houses a mechanism to move the film one [frame at
a time into a position where it can be exposed.

Camera angle. The point of view from which the camera photographs its subject. A "high"
angle means that the camera is looking down at the subject; a "medium" or "flat" angle means
that the camera is in the same plane as the subject, i.e. looking straight on at the subject; and a
"low" angle means that the camera is looking up at the subject.

Close-up. A shot taken with the camera close to the subject so that only the subject, which is
often the actor's face, fills the field of vision on the screen. Abbreviated: CU, or CS (for close
shot).

Continuity. The impression that the action on the screen flows smoothly without interruption
requires continuity with respect to both time and space. Continuous time and space may be
conveyed by continuity of action, direction, and setting. For example, if from a medium shot of
an actor lighting a cigarette we cut to a close-up, his hands and facial expression must be the
same in both shots or the flow of action is interrupted. If the cavalry is chasing Indians from the
left to the right on the screen and suddenly we are shown a shot of the Indians going from right
to left, it will seem that they have turned and are rushing to attack. If a medium shot shows a side
view of a hurdler jumping with his left foot forward, the next shot from the front should show his
left foot forward. In documentaries continuity of action is often sacrificed, though continuity of
direction is maintained for the sake of clarity by manipulation of the original footage. Thus a
BBC program on World War II showed the Allies advancing from left to right to meet the
Germans, who first advanced from right to left and later retreated from left to right. This
continuity, felt to be necessary to clarify the story, was achieved by printing certain pictures
backwards.

Credits. The list of names and the functions of those involved in the production of a film. It
usually appears at the beginning of the film.

Cut. An editing effect in which the instantaneous change from one shot to another is
accomplished by joining the two shots together, so that one image replaces another instantly on
the screen.

Depth of field. The extent of the scene in front of the lens that is in sharp focus is defined by two
distances along the axis of the lens; the space between these two distances is the depth of field.
For example, assume an object to be photographed is twenty feet from the lens when the lens is
focused on it, then, other objects from fifteen to fifty feet away may also be in acceptably sharp
focus; the depth of field extends from fifteen to fifty feet. Depth of field is inversely proportional
to the lens opening (aperture) and the focal length. That is, the smaller the aperture and the
shorter the focal length of the lens, the greater the depth of field.

Dissolve. If one image is faded out while another is faded in, this transitional device is called a
dissolve. As the old image disappears, the new image appears, and for a short time, the two
images are superimposed on the screen.

Documentary. Usually a documentary film depicts events that (1) actually took place; (2) would
presumably have taken place had the camera not been present; (3) were not rehearsed, and
involved no paid actors. It is a record of real-life events involving real people. It differs from
news film in that the film maker is less concerned with a totally objective record of events than
with the influence of certain events even the most commonplace ones on the behavior and
emotions of people. For that reason, documentary films almost always reflect a journalistic
"angle." Although there are many exceptions, documentaries are usually made by small crews
numbering two or three, are frequently less than an hour in length, and are almost always shot
with simple, portable 16mm equipment.
Dolly or Dolly shot. A dolly is a small, wheeled cart on which the camera is mounted for
portability and for making a dolly shot. Also called a tracking shot or trucking shot, a dolly shot
results when the dolly is moved while filming is taking place. The dolly may be fitted with an
apparatus for raising and lowering the camera, called, suitably, a craneú A crane shot results
from the elevation or descent of the camera while it is runningú

Double exposure. Two images occurring on the screen at the same time, one image
superimposed on the other.

Editing. Film editing (or "cutting") is the process of selecting and arranging shots to form a
cohesive wholeú By assembling shots in a particular order, trimming or extending them, the film
editor composes a scene, contracts or expands time, creates or interrupts motion, and establishes
connections in the mind of the audience. His is a synergistic act: by his work the whole film
becomes more than the sum of its component partsú Note that editing is not the same as
censorshipú

Establishing shot. Usually a medium or long shot (see below) that sets the time and place for a
film sequence, or that introduces an important element or character in the story.

Exposure. Process of subjecting a photo-sensitive surface to light. An increase in the intensity of

illumination or in the length of time during which the light strikes the photo-sensitive surface
yields a greater exposure. Control of exposure and of subsequent processing gives control to the
cinematographer of the tonal values of the picture, and hence control of the visual texture of the
film.

Extreme close-up. Abbreviated ECU or ECS, this is an extreme example of the close-up shot.
Such a shot may contain only the eyes or mouth of the actor.

Fade-out/Fade-in. The gradual disappearance of an image into darkness on the screen is termed
a fade-out. The converse effect of an image gradually emerging from darkness onto the screen is
a fade-in. These effects may be accomplished by manipulating the exposure in the camera, or
during the printing of the film in the laboratory.
Fast motion. If an event occupying, say, ten seconds is filmed at 24 frames per second (normal
sound speed) and later projected at the same rate, it will appear on the screen at normal speed. If
it is filmed at half the normal speed (i.e. 12 frames per second) and projected at normal speed, it
will occupy only five seconds of screen time. Thus, the action filmed appears speeded up. This
effect is termed fast motion.

Film. Motion picture film is a thin flexible ribbon of transparent material having perforations at
regular intervals along one or both edges and bearing a sensitized coating capable of producing
photographic images. International standards for motion picture film define several sets of
dimensions, ranging from 8mm width to 65mm and 70mm width, with different configurations
of picture area and perforations.

Filter. A transparent or translucent device placed in front of the lens to pass light having only
specified characteristics. With color film, for example, a red filter passes only red light, giving
the appearance in the final picture of an unnatural redness.

Frame. A single picture on a strip of film.

Grain. A photographic image does not exist as infinitely divisible shadings of dark and light; the
picture, on close inspection, can be seen to consist of dots. Because there are so many of these
dots called grain the picture, viewed from a normal distance, appears to be composed of
continuous shadings. When the grain becomes sufficiently large to be visible under normal
circumstances, the picture is said to be "grainy." This condition may be due either to excessive
enlargement of a small area of picture (in which case each particle of "grain" becomes
correspondingly enlarged) or to the excessively grainy characteristic of the film used.

Lens. A lens is an assembly of transparent elements, usually glass, so configured that light
entering the front of the lens is focused on a plane behind the rearmost element. When mounted
on a camera, the light passing through the lens records the picture, as seen on the screen, on the
surface of the film. The lens may accept light that enters it from a variety of angles. The angle of
acceptance can be either wide or narrow. A wide-angle lens admits light from a relatively wide
angle 35 degrees or more. The film, then, records a broad field of view. A telephoto lens accepts
light from only a narrow field of view. As recorded on the film, distant objects appear near. A
"normal" lens falls somewhere between the two extremes of wide-angle and telephoto lensesú
The focal length of the normal lens is usually chosen to provide a pictorial perspective similar to
that seen with the unaided eye. It must be remembered that the focal length necessary to achieve
this varies with the film size used.

Long shot. The opposite of the close-up. Here the object of main interest is, or appears to be, far
removed from the camera. This shot can also be one that covers a landscape or large interior.
Abbreviated: LS.

Medium shot. Between the extremes of the long shot and the close-up, the medium shot usually
shows a person or persons from the knees up, or views a scene at a "normal" viewing distance.
Abbreviated: MS.

Montage. The French word montage means editing. The word is sometimes used to describe a
style of films made by Eisenstein and other Russians in the 1920s and '30s. Their philosophy
held that editing was the essential ingredient of film, and they practiced it often very
intellectually and abstractly cutting from a vain politician to a strutting peacock, or from troops
shooting crowds to a bull being butchered. The juxtaposition or conflict of such images was
intended to give rise to a new idea (however obvious) in the mind of the viewer. The practice
resulted in films that are visually and emotionally stunning. Only rarely did they descend to the
crude level of the examples given. Hollywood also uses montage or montage sequence to refer to
a portion of a film in which the editing is rapid (though the effect may be slowed by repeated
dissolves) and the action elliptical. Sometimes such sequences are used to bridge long time spans
or a rapid succession of events; more recently they have been used for decorative or emotional
effect.

Motion. It is useful to recognize that there are only three possible kinds of motion in a moving
picture: 1. Motion of the subject. 2. Motion of the camera. 3. Motion conveyed by the cut. The
cut is fundamental to motion in film. It carries with it a sensation of motion and can give a film
rhythm, lyricism, suspense, or shock, solely from the editing. The same footage poorly edited
could be dull, boring, or lifeless. Some of the finest editing makes use of elaborate and elegant
relationships of all three kinds of motion.
Negative. For technical reasons it is common for the film used in the camera to be negative; that
is, for black objects to appear white, and vice versa. Shadows become bright areas and well lit
areas become shadows. If a negative is rephotographed with another negative film, the result is a
positive, which restores normalcy to the picture. Some movies include sequences in negative
(either black and white or color) as a special effect.

Pan. Pivoting of the camera from left to right (or vice versa) while shooting.

Scene. A term used imprecisely in film. Few shooting scripts are divided into "scenes." Scene
can refer to a tableau (e.g. a sunset), a place, or an action; preferred terms are shot and sequence,
though one still speaks of a "love scene."

Screenplay. The content of a film written in detail and separated into numbered sequences by
the screenwriter. A screenplay may be original or adapted from a novel, play, or short story.

Sequence. In the completed film a number of shots which together present some unified action
such as a conversation, a fight, a chase, a journey are usually referred to as a sequence.

Shot. The basic division of a film. Generally, composed of a single run of the camera as it
appears in the finished film. A shot can vary in length anywhere from one frame upwards.

Slow motion. If an event is filmed at a rate faster than normal and later projected at normal
speed, the event will take longer to occur on the screen than it did in reality. This phenomenon is
slow motion.

Sound track.

Splice. The joint between two strips of film; also the act of joining two pieces of film.

Take. A single run of the camera during shooting. (Not necessarily what appears in the finished
[edited] film as a shot. )

Tilt. Result of a camera pivoting vertically while shooting, causing the horizon in the picture to
rise or fall.
Wipe. An editing effect between two shots. The first shot is gradually edged off the screen by
the second shot along a visible line, which may run from top to bottom, from side to side, or in
almost any other pattern.

Zoom lens. A zoom lens is continually adjustable between "wide-angle" and "telephoto,'' with a
"normal" characteristic about midway in its adjustment. A zoom lens can replace a number of
lenses of fixed characteristic, and so is more versatile, although more expensive. In addition,
"zooming" the lens (that is, adjusting its focal length from telephoto to wide angle or vice versa)
can provide an impression somewhat similar to that achieved by moving a camera with a fixed
lens closer to and further from the subject. These operations are termed "zooming out" and
"zooming in."

SHOT

In filmmaking and video production, a shot is a series of frames that runs for an
uninterrupted period of time. Film shots are an essential aspect of
a movie where angles, transitions and cuts are used to further express emotion, ideas and
movement. The term "shot" can refer to two different parts of the filmmaking process:

1. In production, a shot is the moment that the camera starts rolling until the moment it
stops.
2. In film editing, a shot is the continuous footage or sequence between two edits or cuts.

The term "shot" is derived from the early days of film production when cameras were hand-
cranked, and operated similarly to the hand-cranked machine guns of the time. That is, a
cameraman would "shoot" film the way someone would "shoot" bullets from a machine gun.

There are four basic categories of editing, that is, for arranging long strings of cuts:
chronological editing editing that follows the logic of a chronological narrative, one event
follows subsequently from another, and time and space are logically and unproblematically
represented. crosscutting or parallel editing the linkingup of two sets of action that run
concurrently and are interdependent within the narrative. crosscutting or parallel editing the
linkingup of two sets of action that run concurrently and are interdependent within the narrative.
deep focus less cutting within a sequence is necessary so the spectator is less manipulated.
montage based on the theory that conflict must be inherent in all visual aspects in film, the
principles of which include a rapid alteration between sets of shots whose signification occurs at
the point of their collision, fast editing and unusual camera angles; also used for spectacular
effect. In most Hollywood movies, editing for continuity is very important. Continuity editing
aims to avoid drawing any attention to the way in which the story gets told. Such editing wants
to be invisible, and tries to offer a seamlessly coherent narrative, which is only disrupted by
flashbacks. Sometimes continuity is ensured by what is called eyeline matching. When a
character looks into offscreen space the spectator is led to expect to see what he or she is looking
at. Then a cut shows what is being looked at.

Color in Cinema

Although color entered the realm of cinema before sound, one wants to bring forward
the various color effects that had been used in film since the invention of the medium. In the
beginning, black-and-white were used to photograph and project two or more component
images through different color filters. Later, subtractive color processes were introduced.
These also used black-and-white film to photograph multiple color-filtered source images,
but the final product was a multicolored print that did not require special projection
equipment.

Color reproduction in the two-color ―Technicolor‖ process was sufficient at first, but,
because only two of the three primary colors were used, it was still not completely lifelike.
Soon, Technicolor replaced it with a three-color system that employed the same basic
principles but included all three primary colors.

Slowly and surely almost every color film made was produced by using
Technicolor‘s three color system. In the beginning, films were colored frame by frame. The
filmmaker Georges Méliès made many of his colored films using the same technique. His
most famous film, A trip to the moon was released both in black and white and in color,
printed in hand.

In 1913, the black and white version survived Georges Méliès‘ act of folly, when he
attempted to burn his collection of film negatives. The color version was considered
definitively damaged. In 1990s following a film exchange with the Filmoteca de Catalunya,
Lobster Films received the damaged color print and began the tedious task of peeling off
and unrolling the nitrate prints to be able to digitize them. It took two years to extract the
images fragments. Now, the colored print is also the part of my collection, and is available
on YouTube for film enthusiasts.

In the mid-1900s, as films began to approach a single reel length, and more prints of
each film were sold, mechanized stenciling processes were introduced. A stencil was cut for
each color and aligned with the print; color was then applied through the stencil frame by
frame at high speeds.

During the 1910s, frame-by-frame stenciling was replaced by mechanized tinting and
toning. Tinting colored all the light areas of a picture and was achieved by immersing a
black-and-white print in dye or by using colored film base for printing. The toning process
involved chemically treating film emulsion to color the dark areas of the print. Each process
produced monochrome images, the color of which was usually chosen to correspond to the
mood or setting of the scene. Occasionally, the two processes were combined to produce
elaborate two-color effects. The Kodak introduced its own system of pre-tinted black-and-
white film stocks called Sonochrome in 1929. The Sonochrome line featured films tinted in
seventeen different colors.

Photographic color can be produced in films by using either an additive process or a

subtractive one. The first systems to be developed and used were all additive ones, such as
Charles Urban‘s Kinemacolor (c. 1906) and Gaumont‘s Chronochrome (c. 1912). They
achieved varying degrees of popularity, but none was entirely successful, largely because al l
additive systems involve the use of both special cameras and projectors, which ultimately
made them too complicated and costly for widespread industrial use.
 One of the first successful subtractive processes was a two-color one introduced by
Herbert Kalmus‘s Technicolor Corporation in 1922. It used a special camera and a complex
procedure to produce two separate positive prints that were then cemented together into a
single print. The final print needed careful handling but could be projected by means of
ordinary equipment. This ―cemented positive‖ process was used successfully in such
features as Toll of the Sea (1922) and Fairbanks‘s The Black Pirate (1926). In 1928
Technicolor introduced an improved process in which two gelatin positives were used as
relief matrices to ―print‖ colour onto a single strip of film.

Sound in Cinema

As we know, first there was silent film and then there was sound. But that is not the
whole story. Before films had spoken dialogue they still made themselves heard through
inter titles and musical accompaniment. The key obstacle of audience perception of silent
movies, however, was the technological difficulty of matching sound and visuals in such a
way that everyone in the audience could hear. In other words, the problems were
synchronization and amplification.

A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled
to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound
films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures were
made commercially practical. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the
early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate.
Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures
using the technology, which took place in 1923. It was made possible with the efforts of
Thomas Edison‘s device kinetophone through bringing together both kinetoscope and
gramophone.
The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema started in the mid-to-late
1920s. At first, the sound films included synchronized dialogue, known as ―talking
pictures‖, or ―talkies‖. They were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies
with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally
presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, which premiered in October, 1927. Sound-on-
film soon become the standard for talking pictures. In India, Alam Ara released in 1931 was
India‘s first full length sound film. The first Iranian talkie was the Dokhtare Lor (The Lor
Girl) which was released in 1933. It was directed by Ardeshir Irani and interestingly
enough, it was made in Mumbai, then known as Bombay.

FILM SOUND AND MUSIC Sound, voice and music are integral to most films and/or film
viewing experiences. Even the earliest silent films were often shown with live musical
accompaniment. Sound enhances the imaginary world, it can provide depth, establish character
and environment, introduce a new scene or cue the viewer to important information. We have
organized the page according to the following categories: sound source, sound editing and film
music. SOUND SOURCE DIEGETIC VS. NON-DIEGETIC SOUND Diegetic sound is any
sound that the character or characters on screen can hear. So for example the sound of one
character talking to another would be diegetic. Non-diegetic sound is any sound that the audience
can hear but the characters on screen cannot. Any appearance of background music is a prime
example of non-diegetic sound. This clip from Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Deadsimultaneously
depicts both diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The sounds of the characters speaking, the records
flying, and the zombies are all diegetic; the characters can hear them. Meanwhile, the beats and
riffs of the background music serves as an example of non-diegetic sound that goes unheard by
Shaun, Pete, and the menacing zombies. -David Pokorny

NONSIMULTANEOUS SOUND By EMILY JOHNSON Nonsimultaneous sound is

essentially sound that takes place earlier in the story than the current image. This type of sound
can give us information about the story without us actually seeing these events taking place. In
this example from Rent, Roger goes out in search of Mimi. The viewer sees him running around
New York, but all they hear is earlier answering machine messages regarding previous events.
The messages all describe parts of the story that have already happened, however, the viewer has
not seen them happen.
DIRECT SOUND Direct sound is all of the sound that is recorded at the time of filming. In this
scene from Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the only sounds are those that
occurred when the scene was filmed. The main sound in the scene is the characters‘ dialogue, but
some subtle direct background noises, such as popping gum, can be heard as well. No
postsynchronous sounds or music occur in the scene, which places emphasis on the characters‘
dialogue and creates a more realistic, believable ambiance. -Katie Avery SYNCHRONOUS
SOUND Synchronous sound is sound that is matched with the action and movements being
viewed. An oft-used example portrays a character playing the piano, and the viewer hears the
sounds of the piano simultaneously. In this clip from The Pianist, Adrien Brody finishes up a
piece in front of a German guard. -Brad Anglum

POSTSYNCHRONIZATION DUBBING Postsynchronization dubbing describes the process

of adding sound to a scene after it is filmed. This sequence from Star Wars Episode IV: A New
Hope illustrates many different forms of postsynchronous sound. In fact, hardly any of the sound
in this scene is synchronous. The space battle scenes contain laser and explosion sounds that are
artificial and added to the scene after it was filmed. These sounds increase the intensity and
authenticity of the scene. Later in the scene, many of the sounds inside the Rebel spaceship,
including the sirens, explosions, and the droids‘ voices, are all dubbed postsynchronously. The
nondiegetic, postsynchronous music in the scene contributes to the suspense of the sequence.
Postsynchronous sound is a staple of the Star Wars films and many other action-adventure films.
-Katie Avery

OFFSCREEN SOUND Offscreen sound describes sound assumed to be in the space of a scene
yet remains offscreen while the action takes place simultaneously. In this scene from The
Boondock Saints the director uses offscreen sound to undermine the ideas of a detective who
gives his thoughts on a recent murder. He uses this dialogue as background noise to introduce the
all-star FBI agent who will be working the case. -Brad Anglum SOUND PERSPECTIVE Sound
perspective refers to the apparent distance of a sound source, evidenced by its volume, timbre,
and pitch. This type of editing is most common in how the audience hears film characters‘
speech. While the scene may cut from a long shot of a conversation to a medium shot of the two
characters to close-up shot/ reserve-shot pairing, the soundtrack does not reproduce these relative
distances and the change in volume that would naturally occur. Actors in these situations are
―miked‖ so that the volume of their voices remains constant and audible to the audience. Sound
perspective can also give us clues as to who and where is present in a scene and their relative
importance to the film‘s narrative.

The following clip from Moulin Rouge! provides an example of the lack of sound perspective
because as the camera tracks out from a medium-long to an extreme long shot of Satine, the
sound quality and volume of the singer‘s voice does not change as it realistically would as the
viewer increases their distance from the subject. Editing devices such as this are especially
important in musical films such as Moulin Rouge!, where the songs are what drive the narrative
and thus maintaining the sound quality over realistic expectations becomes integral to the film.
In contrast to this, below is a clip from the opening sequence of Orson Welles‘ Touch of Evil
(1958) that shows a more realistic use of sound perspective. The sound‘s distance is made
obvious by the fading and increasing volume of the car‘s music and people‘s voices as they
move toward or away from the camera. In this example sound contributes to point of view; we
hear what the characters hear as they navigate the streets of a border town on foot. Sarah
Kingsley

SOUND EDITING Sound Bridge A sound bridge is a type of sound editing that occurs when
sound carries over a visual transition in a film. This type of editing provides a common transition
in the continuity editing style because of the way in which it connects the mood, as suggested by
the music, throughout multiple scenes. For example, music might continue through a scene
change or throughout and montage sequence to tie the scenes together in a creative and thematic
way.

Another form of a sound bridge can help lead in or out of a scene, such as when dialogue or
music occurs before or after the speaking character is scene by the audience. Sarah Kingsley
Voice Over A voice over is a sound device wherein one hears the voice of a character and/or
narrator speaking but the character in question is not speaking those words on screen. This is
often used to reveal the thoughts of a character through first person narration. Third person
narration is also a common use of voice over used to provide background of characters/events or
to enhance the development of the plot. As we see below in Wes Anderson‘s The Royal
Tenenbaums, a third person narrator voiced by Alec Baldwin provides background on key
characters in the beginning of the film. -David Pokorny
Sonic Flashback Emily Johnson A sonic flashback describes the technique of using sound from
earlier in the film during a later scene. One character may be present on the screen, but they are
hearing a voice or action from a previous time in their head. At the end of The Sixth Sense,
Malcolm begins to piece together that he is actually dead. He hears earlier conversations of him
in Cole in his head. As in this movie, the sonic flashback usually contributes to the character‘s
thought process, including emotional or psychological.

FILM MUSIC The following sequence, from Woody Allen‘s Match Point, illustrates the
director‘s rather unique use of character theme music. It also provides an example of the sound
bridge. As Chris Wilton wanders around his new friends‘ estate, he is associated with an aria
from Donizetti‘s L‘elisir d‘amore, sung by Enrico Caruso. The recording exposes the early sound
technology used to make it, giving it an unearthly quality. Throughout the film whenever Chris
ambles, he is accompanied by Caruso‘s voice, perhaps signaling to his own ―operatic‖
circumstance. The spectral quality of the recording complements the many allusions to tragic
tradition in the film, including an appearance by the ghosts of Chris‘s victims. In a second place,
sound initiates a transition in the form of a ―bridge‖. Toward the end of the sequence, we begin
to hear a ping pong game it grows louder as the opera music fades until Chris enters the new
scene.

The Importance of Music on Film & Emotion

If you took a second to close your eyes and think about Star Wars, what comes to mind?
What are you hearing? Laser blasters, lightsabers, possibly a dramatic score by John Williams?
For the major films in pop culture, music in film plays a major role in developing the themes and
tone of the production. For scores of a more subtle nature or even in commercial work, music
still shapes how we perceive the visual imagery on screen.

For example, imagine a scene where our main actor is running through a field. The brush
is tall and they are running at a fast pace with no clear emotion on their face. In the background
you hear a brooding horror soundtrack with shrill violins and low end rumbles. How are you
feeling for our actor? Scared or concerned?
 Now imagine the same scene, our actor running through the field, but this time an
inspiring action soundtrack emerges. Triumphant brass and orchestra take charge and sound just
like your favourite super hero flick. What are you feeling now? Probably something different
than our last example.

Though the change of soundtrack for our scene was subtle, the interpretation of the scene
changed dramatically. The same principle applies to all of film — whether it‘s a toothpaste
commercial or blockbuster hit. If you‘re looking for great commercial music, stock
music subscription or library sites may be a good bet. If you‘re making the next Avengers movie,
better hire a professional composer.

Here is my favourite video on how music impacts all types of filmmaking:

But what about removing music all-together? Now that we know that changing a
soundtrack can change the scene, will removing it do the same? In short, the answer is yes.
While there are plenty of wonderful silent films out there, most films need a score. Don‘t believe
me? Let‘s bring this full circle and look at an iconic scene from Star Wars at the end of The
Force Awakens where Rey climbs to the top of the island to meet Luke Skywalker for the first
time.

Music plays into emotions more than you may realise and when it comes to filmmaking it
is one of those essential things that can really make or break a production. The next time you are
looking for production music, take your time and think about how your viewer may interpret
your scene based on the supporting music.

Additive color

The first color systems that appeared in motion pictures were additive color systems.
Additive color was practical because no special color stock was necessary. Black-and-white film
could be processed and used in both filming and projection. The various additive systems
entailed the use of color filters on both the movie camera and projector. Additive color adds
lights of the primary colors in various proportions to the projected image. Because of the limited
amount of space to record images on film, and later because the lack of a camera that could
record more than two strips of film at once, most early motion-picture color systems consisted of
two colors, often red and green or red and blue.

A pioneering three-color additive system was patented in England by Edward Raymond

Turner in 1899. It used a rotating set of red, green and blue filters to photograph the three color
components one after the other on three successive frames of panchromatic black-and-white
film. The finished film was projected through similar filters to reconstitute the color. In 1902,
Turner shot test footage to demonstrate his system, but projecting it proved problematic because
of the accurate registration (alignment) of the three separate color elements required for
acceptable results. Turner died a year later without having satisfactorily projected the footage. In
2012, curators at the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK, had the original custom-
format nitrate film copied to black-and-white 35 mm film, which was then scanned into a digital
video format by telecine. Finally, digital image processing was used to align and combine each
group of three frames into one color image. As a result, these films from 1902 became viewable
in full color.

Practical color in the motion picture business began with Kinemacolor, first demonstrated
in 1906. This was a two-color system created in England by George Albert Smith, and promoted
by film pioneer Charles Urban's The Charles Urban Trading Company in 1908. It was used for a
series of films including the documentary With Our King and Queen Through India, depicting
the Delhi Durbar (also known as The Durbar at Delhi, 1912), which was filmed in December
1911. The Kinemacolor process consisted of alternating frames of specially sensitized black-and-
white film exposed at 32 frames per second through a rotating filter with alternating red and
green areas. The printed film was projected through similar alternating red and green filters at the
same speed. A perceived range of colors resulted from the blending of the separate red and green
alternating images by the viewer's persistence of vision.

Technicolor

Technicolor is a series of color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to
1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades.

Definitive Technicolor movies using three black and white films running through a
special camera (3-strip Technicolor or Process 4) started in the early 1930s and continued
through to the mid-1950s when the 3-strip camera was replaced by a standard camera loaded
with color negative film. Technicolor Laboratories were still able produce Technicolor prints by
creating three black and white matrices from the Eastmancolor negative (Process 5).

Process 4 was the second major color process, after Britain's Kinemacolor (used between
1908 and 1914), and the most widely used color process in Hollywood during the Golden Age of
Hollywood. Technicolor's three-color process became known and celebrated for its highly
saturated color, and was initially most commonly used for filming musicals such as The Wizard
of Oz (1939) and Down Argentine Way (1940), costume pictures such as The Adventures of
Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), the film Blue Lagoon (1949),
and animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Gulliver's Travels (1939),
and Fantasia (1940). As the technology matured it was also used for less spectacular dramas and
comedies. Occasionally, even a film noir, such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
or Niagara (1953),was filmed in Technicolor.

The "Tech" in the company's name was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock received their undergraduate
degrees in 1904 and were later instructors.

Two-color Technicolor

Process 1

Technicolor originally existed in a two-color (red and green) system. In Process 1 (1916),
a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of
black-and-white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green
filter. Because two frames were being exposed at the same time, the film had to be photographed
and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with
two apertures (one with a red filter and the other with a green filter), two lenses, and an
adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen.

The results were first demonstrated to members of the American Institute of Mining
Engineers in New York on February 21, 1917. Technicolor itself produced the only movie made
in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, beginning with
Boston and New York on September 13, 1917, primarily to interest motion picture producers and
exhibitors in color. The near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment
doomed this additive color process. Only a few frames of The Gulf Between, showing star Grace
Darmond, are known to exist today

Process 2

Convinced that there was no future in additive color processes, Comstock, Wescott, and
Kalmus focused their attention on subtractive color processes. This culminated in what would
eventually be known as Process 2 (1922) (often referred to today by the misnomer "two-strip
Technicolor"). As before, the special Technicolor camera used a beam-splitter that
simultaneously exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white film, one
behind a green filter and one behind a red filter.

The difference was that the two-component negative was now used to produce
a subtractive color print. Because the colors were physically present in the print, no special
projection equipment was required and the correct registration of the two images did not depend
on the skill of the projectionist.

The frames exposed behind the green filter were printed on one strip of black-and-white
film, and the frames exposed behind the red filter were printed on another strip. After
development, each print was toned to a color nearly complementary to that of the filter: orange-
red for the green-filtered images, cyan-green for the red-filtered ones. Unlike tinting, which adds
a uniform veil of color to the entire image, toning chemically replaces the black-and-white silver
image with transparent coloring matter, so that the highlights remain clear (or nearly so), dark
areas are strongly colored, and intermediate tones are colored proportionally.

The two prints, made on film stock half the thickness of regular film, were then cemented
together back to back to create a projection print. The Toll of the Sea, which debuted on
November 26, 1922, used Process 2 and was the first general-release film in Technicolor.

The second all-color feature in Process 2 Technicolor, Wanderer of the Wasteland, was released
in 1924. Process 2 was also used for color sequences in such major motion pictures as The Ten
Commandments (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and Ben-Hur (1925). Douglas
Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926) was the third all-color Process 2 feature.
 Although successful commercially, Process 2 was plagued with technical problems.
Because the images on the two sides of the print were not in the same plane, both could not be
perfectly in focus at the same time. The significance of this depended on the depth of focus of
the projection optics. Much more serious was a problem with cupping. Films in general tended to
become somewhat cupped after repeated use: every time a film was projected, each frame in turn
was heated by the intense light in the projection gate, causing it to bulge slightly; after it had
passed through the gate, it cooled and the bulge subsided, but not quite completely.

It was found that the cemented prints were not only very prone to cupping, but that the
direction of cupping would suddenly and randomly change from back to front or vice versa, so
that even the most attentive projectionist could not prevent the image from temporarily popping
out of focus whenever the cupping direction changed. Technicolor had to supply new prints so
the cupped ones could be shipped to their Boston laboratory for flattening, after which they could
be put back into service, at least for a while.

The presence of image layers on both surfaces made the prints especially vulnerable to
scratching, and because the scratches were vividly colored they were very noticeable. Splicing a
Process to print without special attention to its unusual laminated construction was apt to result
in a weak splice that would fail as it passed through the projector. Even before these problems
became apparent, Technicolor regarded this cemented print approach as a stopgap and was
already at work developing an improved process.

Eastmancolor
Eastmancolor is a trade name used by Eastman Kodak for a number of related film and
processing technologies associated with color motion picture production.
Eastmancolor, introduced in 1950, was one of the first widely successful "single-strip colour"
processes, and eventually displaced the more cumbersome Technicolor. Eastmancolor was
known by a variety of names such as DeLuxe Color, Warnercolor, Metrocolor, Pathécolor,
Columbiacolor, and others.

Examples of films that use Eastmancolor

The 1959 British satirical comedy film The Mouse That Roared was filmed using the
Eastmancolor process.
Eastmancolor became very popular in the South Indian film industry during early '60s.

 Carson City - (Warnercolor) 1952  Thene Manasulu - Telugu - 1965

 Jigokumon - (Japan) 1953  Chemmeen - Malayalam - 1965
 The High and the Mighty -  Thiruvilaiyadal - Tamil - 1965
(Warnercolor) 1954
 Aayirathil Oruvan - Tamil - 1965
 Oklahoma! - 1955
 Enga Veetu Pillai - Tamil - 1965
 Rebel Without a
 Idhaya kamalam - Tamil - 1965
Cause (Warnercolor) - 1955
 Le Bonheur - French, 1965
 Foreign Intrigue 1956
 Help! - British, 1965
 The Bolshoi Ballet - 1957
 Anbe Vaa - Tamil 1966
 Bayanihan - Filipino - 1959
 Teorema - Italian, 1968
 Peeping Tom - British - 1960
 2001: A Space Odyssey -
 Kandam Becha Kottu - Malayalam -
American/British, 1968 (Color
1961
credited as "Metrocolor")
 The Human Pyramid - France/Ivory
 Macunaíma - Brazilian, 1969
Coast 1961
 A Clockwork Orange -
 Mere Mehboob - -Urdu (India) -
British/American, 1971 (Color
1963
credited as "Warnercolor")
 Amara Shilpi Jakkanna - Telugu -
 Piya Ka Ghar - Hindi, 1971
1964
 To Fly! - United States, 1976
 Kathalikka Neramillai - Tamil -
(Eastman Color Negative)
1964
 The NeverEnding Story -
 Karnan - Tamil 1964
German/American, 1984
 Padagotti - Tamil - 1964
 Women on the Verge of a Nervous
 Amarashilpi Jakanachari - Breakdown - Spanish, 1988
Kannada - 1964
 Jurassic Park - American, 1993
 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg -
 Lapitch the Little Shoemaker -
French, 1964
Croatian, 1997
 8. CENSORSHIP OF FILMS IN INDIA
Introduction
We have often heard the word censorship regarding films. From popular movies like Udta Punjab to
Haider to Lipstick Under My Burkha have faced censorship issues. All the rules and regulations
regarding the censorships are answered in the Cinematography Act, 1952. As the world is
changing the films are becoming more and more innovative to suit the style of people. The
world is appreciating the new type of content which is being shown in the films. The Indian
media and entertainment industry has recently undergone a tremendous change in terms of both
the volume and demand for diverse content as well as the mediums used by viewers to access it.

Due to the rise of digitalization in India, Over-the-top ("OTT") platforms that provide affordable
entertainment to people of various ages have made people divert their attention from television to
the all-in-one package in their cell phones. Even programs on OTT platforms face censorship
issues.
The Cinematograph Act of 1952 enforces certain guidelines that pacify filmmakers' public
expression of ideas, opinions, and creativeness through films. Cinema has given birth to new
opportunities and contentious issues in the socio-economic and cultural spheres. With the
advancement of technology, it is easy to abuse the wonders of technology and portray themes
that are harmful to social conformities.
In this article we are going to learn more about censorship and how it is affecting various
filmmakers in India, the current regulatory framework for film certification, television program
compliance, and regulatory trends for OTT media platforms.

Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC)

Section 3 of The Cinematography Act, 1952 states that the CBFC is a statutory body under the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India to approve films for public
viewing.
The Central Board of Film Censors on 1st June 1983 was named as Central Board of Film
Certification (CBFC). The CBFC consists of a Chairman and other members (whose number
shall not be less than 12 but not more than 25) and they are appointed by the central
Government.
The Chairman of the board receives salary and allowances which are determined by the Central
Government whereas the other members-only receive allowances and fees for attending the
meetings held by the board.
Members' tenure is also very flexible, with no set maximum or minimum tenure. In reality, the
tenure is subject to the pleasure of the Central Government. The Central Government has the
authority to terminate tenure on legitimate grounds whenever possible. The chairman, on the
other hand, is only in office for three years. The chairman, with one exception, remains in office
until his successor is appointed.

Regional Offices of CBFC

The nine Regional Offices have a particular regional officer who supervises them. They are
situated in Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Guwahati, Cuttack, Mumbai, Hyderabad, New Delhi,
and Thiruvananthapuram.

Examination of Films (Section 4)

Under Section 4 of The Cinematography Act, 1952 if a person desires to display any film, they
shall do it in the prescribed manner stated under this act.
The person has to make an application to the board for a certificate and the board after
examining or having the film examined in the prescribed manner.
The board has the right to:
i) Sanction the film for unrestricted public exhibition:
Concerning any material in the film, if the Board believes that it is necessary to caution that the
question of whether any child under the age of twelve years should be considered by the parents
or guardians of such child, the Board may sanction the film for unrestricted public exhibition
with an endorsement to that effect.
(ii) Sanction the film for public exhibition restricted to adults; or
[ii(a)] Sanction the film to be shown in public only to members of any profession or class of people,
taking into account the film's nature, content, and theme; or
(iii) direct the applicant to make such cuts or changes to the film as it deems necessary before
sanctioning the film for public exhibition under any of the preceding clauses or
(iv) refuse to sanction the film for public exhibition.

Advisory panels (Section 5)

(1) To enable the Board to efficiently discharge its functions under this Act, the Central
Government may establish advisory panels at such regional centers as it deems appropriate, each
of which shall consist of the such number of persons, being persons qualified in the Central
Government's opinion to judge the effect of films on the public, as the Central Government
deems appropriate to appoint.
(2) At each regional center, the Central Government may appoint as many regional officers as it
sees fit, and rules enacted in this regard may provide for the association of regional officers in
film examination.
(3) The Board may consult in such manner as may be prescribed, any advisory panel in respect
of any film for which an application for a certificate has been made.
(4) It shall be the duty of every such advisory panel whether acting as a body or in committees as
may be provided in the rules made on this behalf to examine the film and to make such
recommendations to the Board as it thinks fit.
(5) The members of the advisory panel shall not be entitled to any salary but shall receive fees or
allowances as may be prescribed.

Types of Certifications (Section 5A)

There are mainly four kinds of certifications given by the Central Board of Film Certification:
1. Universal (U)
This type of certification is known as Unrestricted Public Exhibition, and it has no age
restrictions on who can watch it. They could be about family, education, or social issues. This
category contains fantasy violence with only minor foul language. When a film is certified U by
the Board, it must ensure that it is appropriate for a family to watch together, including children.
Example: Frozen, Tangled, etc.

2. Parental Guidance (U/A)

This type of certification shows that the film is suitable for all ages. But to be accompanied by
their parents is in the interests of children younger than 12. The reason could be that without the
supervision of their parents the concept of the movie may not be appropriate for the child.
Example: Force, Ghajini, Kabali, etc.
3. Adults Only (A)
This type of film is intended for adults only, as the certification indicates. Adults are defined as
people over the age of 18 in the context of this certification. The theme may contain negatively
affecting, intense, drug abuse, and other related scenes that are not suitable for viewing by
children who may be significantly affected by the same. Films that meet the above criteria but
are not suitable for showing to children or those under the age of 18 will be certified A.
Example: Grand Masti, Delhi Belly, etc.
4. Restricted to Special Class of Persons (S)
This is the final type of certification under the board, and it explains that films rated S are only
intended for a specific group of people. Doctors, for example. If the Board determines that the
film's content, nature, and theme should be restricted to members of a specific group or
profession, the above certification shall be granted to the film.
Objectives of film certification [Section 5B (2)]
The main objectives of the Board for the above are as follows:
1. To ensure that the film medium is held accountable. Furthermore, to protect the sensitivity of
standards and societal values.
2. To ensure that creative freedom and expression are not inadvertently restricted.
3. To ensure to make adjustments according to the current changes in society.
4. To ensure that the film's concept provides healthy and clean entertainment.
 5. To ensure that the film is of an appropriate cinematographic standard and artistic value.
6. To ensure that the film is judged in its entirety and not from a one-tracked biased perspective.
Appeals (Section 5C)
(1) Any person applying for a certificate in respect of a film who is aggrieved by
any order of the Board—
(a) refusing to grant a certificate; or
(b) granting only an ―A‖ certificate; or
(c) granting only an ―S‖ certificate; or
(d) granting only a ―UA‖ certificate; or
(e) directing the applicant to carry out any excisions or modifications,
may, within thirty days from the date of such order, prefer an appeal to the Tribunal: Provided
that the Tribunal may, if it is satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from
filing the appeal within the aforesaid period of thirty days, allow such appeal to be admitted
within a
a further period of thirty days.
(2) Every appeal under this section shall be made by a petition in writing and shall be
accompanied by a brief statement of the reasons for the order appealed against where such
statement has been furnished to the appellant and by such fees, not exceeding rupees one
thousand, as may be prescribed.

Judicial Pronouncements
1. Raj Kapoor vs. Laxman (14.12.1979 - SC)
Subject Matter: Certification of films
Issue: Whether certificate issued would amount to a justification for the public
exhibition? The complainant claimed that the film Satyam Shivam Sundaram was misleadingly
foul and deceived the unwary into degeneracy due to its intriguing title and that vulgarity,
indecent exposure, and vice were writ large on the film, constituting an offense. Following the
examination of some witnesses, the Magistrate took cognizance of the offense and issued a
notice to the appellant-producer of the film.
 The appellant then petitioned the High Court, claiming that the criminal proceeding was
an abuse of the judicial process and that no prosecution could be legally sustained because the
film had been duly certified for public viewing by the Central Board of Film Censors. However,
the petition was denied by the High Court, and thus an appeal was filed.
The Supreme Court ruled that a certificate issued under Section 5A of the Cinematograph Act
constitutes a legal justification for a film's public exhibition and that the initiation of criminal
processes for obscenity is not sustainable if the film has been approved by the censor board. The
court did, however, state that the bar is not absolute, and that the filmmaker must participate in
the legal proceedings to claim the safeguard.

2. S. Ranga Raan v. P. Jagjivan Ram [(1989) 2 SCC 574]

The issue in S. Ranga Raan v. P. Jagjivan Ram was whether the Tamil film "Ore Oru
Gramathile" should be granted the "U" certificate. The film appears to condemn the exploitation
of people based on their caste.
The Supreme Court ruled that as long as there is no proclamation in the film that threatens to
take over the government through unlawful means and no indication of impairment in the
country's integration, the U certificate can be granted.

Conclusion
To conclude this article, I would like to say that Article 19(1) (a) of the Indian
Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression, but it is also limited by Article 19(2),
which allows the government to impose ―reasonable restrictions‖ on this right ―in the interests
of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign
States, public order, decency or morality, or concerning contempt‖. This gives the government a
wide net to censor almost anything that is not in their favor.
Censorship, in many ways, not only silences speech but also produces authorized forms of truth.
This is relevant not only to the cinema but also to the broader issues of all human creativity. It is
argued that its conflicts over free speech are increasing.
There have been a few statements leveled at the CBFC, with corruption and nepotism
limiting the fairness of this industry, and the CBFC itself being accused of being irrational. The
censorship guidelines are reviewed regularly in the best interests of the viewing public, changing
society, and public suitability. The CBFC must be restructured, as well as the Cinematograph
Act of 1952 should be amended.
UNIT – III – FILM GENRES
DOCUMENTARY AND SHORT FILMS

WHAT‘S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DOCUMENTARY AND FEATURE FILM?

Whether or not a film is a feature film depends on its runtime. Whether or not a film is a
documentary film depends on its content.

A feature film is a film with a runtime of 40 minutes or longer, according to the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Films that run for less than 40 minutes are called
shorts.
A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect
of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical
record.
A documentary film that runs 40 minutes or longer would be a documentary feature film.
A documentary film that runs for less than 40 minutes would be a documentary short.

1. Escape vs. Reality

In general, the main reason feature films get made is to entertain the audience; to give
people an escape. Documentaries are meant to inform; to confront people with reality: and
sometimes to promote a point of view.

Documentary makers certainly want to engage and captivate their audience, and some
feature films can be very informative, but a key difference between the documentary and feature
film is in the filmmaker‘s motivation.

2. Fact or Fiction

Feature films are mostly fiction, sometimes total fantasy. Some may be based on real
events or people, but the director and screenwriter will be adding drama and impact with their
creative license. Genres include comedy and musical, action and western, romance, crime, horror
and science fiction, among others.
 Documentaries are non-fiction films. Directors and writers help structure the film, rather
than creating characters or taking liberties with the facts of the story. Documentaries can take on
social, political and economic issues, or profile a person, place or thing.

3. Format

Feature films take care in introducing complex characters and spinning an intricate
storyline over a running time up to three hours. There‘s an ebb and flow to the action, with
carefully timed and structured mini-climaxes and dramatic highlights. The scripted story,
characters and actions all are pointed in the same direction, leading the viewer through events
with a sense of beginning, middle, dramatic climax and end.

In documentaries, often the action leads the way. People don‘t have scripted words to say
or scenes to enact; handheld cameras might be the only way to follow the story. Even the director
doesn‘t always know what happens next. Documentary makers often say that discovery and
surprise is a big part of their job.

4. Production Costs

Documentaries are usually less expensive to make than feature films, with less elaborate
production frills. Documentaries can cost only a few thousand dollars, with small crews, single
camera set-ups and few if any paid talent. The result is often raw, unpolished but effective
nevertheless.

Feature films can cost millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars, thanks to top stars
with top salaries, directors and scriptwriters, music scores, exotic locations and costumes. A top
feature film often has its ―money on the screen‖ with lush cinematography, gorgeous actors and
actresses, big bang special effects with large and talented production teams in the background.

Of course, big-name actors sometimes do participate in documentary-making, often with

a reduced fee and a strong belief in the project. And some low budget or ―indie‖ feature films
turn out to be huge successes.
 In fact, documentaries have become big box office, with serious Academy Award weight
sitting with them. Often very entertaining, they can be as controversial nowadays as the subjects
they cover.

And some feature films today are taking on very serious topics, with some post-911 war-
themed movies seeming more real than the stories they relate. The difference between
documentary and feature film can be obvious or subtle.

What is Horror?

Horror is a genre of storytelling intended to scare, shock, and thrill its audience. Horror
can be interpreted in many different ways, but there is often a central villain, monster, or threat
that is often a reflection of the fears being experienced by society at the time. This person or
creature is called the ―other,‖ a term that refers to someone that is feared because they are
different or misunderstood. This is also why the horror genre has changed so much over the
years. As culture and fears change, so does horror.

What are some defining elements of the horror genre?

Themes: The horror genre is often a reflection of the culture and what it fears at the time
(invasion, disease, nuclear testing, etc.).

Character Types: Besides the killer, monster, or threat, the various sub-genres contain certain
hero archetypes (e.g., the Final Girl in Slasher movies).

Setting: Horror can have many settings, such as: a gothic castle, small town, outer space, or
haunted house. It can take place in the past, present or future.

Music: This is an important facet in the horror genre. It can be used with great effect to build
atmosphere and suspense.

Some of the themes in Horror fiction

Found Footage
The point-of-view takes place from the perspective of a camera. Famous titles include The Blair
Witch Project and Rec.
Lovecraftian
Focuses on cosmic horror. Monsters are beings beyond our comprehension. Often incorporates
science fiction, including horror classics like Alien and The Thing.

Psychological
This sub-genre focuses on the horror of the mind. What is real? What is madness? Two great
psychological horror movies are Silence of the Lambs and Jacob’s Ladder.

Science Fiction
Focuses on the horror and consequences of technology. Monsters are often aliens or machines.
Two great sci-fi horror movies are The Blob and War of the Worlds.

Slasher
The monster is a psychopath with a penchant for bloody murder. Often focuses on the
punishment of promiscuous teenagers. Popular movies include Halloween and A Nightmare on
Elm Street.

Supernatural
Focuses on the afterlife. Primary creatures include ghosts and demons. Great titles
include Poltergeist and The Exorcist.

Torture
Similar to slasher; focuses on the punishment of people. The villain takes pleasure in the physical
and psychological torment of victims. Famous movies include Hostel and Saw.

Vampire
One of the oldest horror sub-genres in which icons like Dracula feed on human blood. Some of
the best vampire movies include Nosferatu and Interview with the Vampire.

Werewolf
When a full moon is out, beware of these beastly shape-shifters. The best werewolf movies
include An American Werewolf in London and The Wolf Man.
Zombie
A group of survivors is usually attacked by a horde of flesh-eating undead. Night of the Living
Dead is considered one of the best zombie movies along with 28 Days Later... and Shaun of the
Dead.

Animation

Animation is a method in which figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In

traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be
photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated
imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer
animation (which may have the look of traditional animation) can be used for stylistic reasons,
low bandwidth, or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop
motion technique to two- and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets, or clay
figures.

The word "animation" stems from the Latin "animātiōn", stem of "animātiō", meaning "a
bestowing of life". The primary meaning of the English word is "liveliness" and has been in use
much longer than the meaning of "moving image medium".

A cartoon is an animated film, usually a short film, featuring an exaggerated visual style. The
style takes inspiration from comic strips, often featuring anthropomorphic animals, superheroes,
or the adventures of human protagonists. Especially with animals that form a natural
predator/prey relationship (e.g. cats and mice, coyotes and birds), the action often centers around
violent pratfalls such as falls, collisions, and explosions that would be lethal in real life.

The illusion of animation as in motion pictures in general has traditionally been attributed to
persistence of vision and later to the phi phenomenon and/or beta movement, but the exact
neurological causes are still uncertain. The illusion of motion caused by a rapid succession of
images that minimally differ from each other, with unnoticeable interruptions, is a stroboscopic
effect. While animators traditionally used to draw each part of the movements and changes of
figures on transparent cels that could be moved over a separate background, computer animation
is usually based on programming paths between key frames to maneuver digitally created figures
throughout a digitally created environment.

Analog mechanical animation media that rely on the rapid display of sequential images include
the phenakisticope, zoetrope, flip book, praxinoscope, and film. Television and video are popular
electronic animation media that originally were analog and now operate digitally. For display on
computers, technology such as the animated GIF and Flash animation were developed.

In addition to short films, feature films, television series, animated GIFs, and other media
dedicated to the display of moving images, animation is also prevalent in video games, motion
graphics, user interfaces, and visual effects.

The physical movement of image parts through simple mechanics for instance moving images in
magic lantern shows can also be considered animation. The mechanical manipulation of three-
dimensional puppets and objects to emulate living beings has a very long history in automata.
Electronic automata were popularized by Disney as animatronics.

The History of Animation

The history of animation began much earlier, this article is concerned with the development of
the medium after the emergence of celluloid film in 1888, as produced for theatrical screenings,
television and (non-interactive) home entertainment.

Between 1895 and 1920, during the rise of the cinematic industry, several different animation
techniques were re-invented or newly developed, including stop-motion with objects, puppets,
clay or cutouts, and drawn or painted animation. Hand-drawn animation, mostly animation
painted on cels, was the dominant technique throughout most of the 20th century and became
known as traditional animation.

Around the turn of the millennium, computer animation became the dominant animation
technique in most regions (while Japanese anime and European hand-drawn productions
continue to be very popular). Computer animation is mostly associated with a three-dimensional
appearance with detailed shading, although many different animation styles have been generated
or simulated with computers. Some productions may be recognized as Flash animation, but in
practice, computer animation with a relatively two-dimensional appearance, stark outlines and
little shading, will generally be considered "traditional animation". For instance, the first feature
movie made on computers, without a camera, is The Rescuers Down Under (1990), but its style
can hardly be distinguished from celluloid animation.

5 Forms of Animation

 Traditional Animation

 2D Animation

 3D Animation

 Motion Graphics

 Stop Motion

There are many different types of animation but most of them fall into five major categories.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each of them depending on how the artist prefers to
create. Knowing the different kinds of animation can help artists to choose their careers in
animation.

Featured Programs

1. Traditional Animation

Traditional animation can also be referred to as cell animation. This type of animation
requires the animator to draw every single frame by hand to create an animated scene. This is
usually done on a light table that allows the artists to see the previous drawing through the top
layer of paper. Well-known companies like Disney are known for using this type of animation.
Traditional animation is still done today on computers with special tablets.

2. 2D Animation

2D animation refers to vector-based animations similar to the ones used in Flash. This
style of animation has been growing in popularity because the technology is so accessible.
Although artists have the option of editing frame by frame, vector-based animation gives the
artist the option to create rigs for the characters and move single body parts at a time rather than
constantly redrawing the characters. It gives more flexibility to beginners in animation because
they don‘t have to rely so heavily on drawing skills.

3. 3D Animation

3D animation is also known as computer animation and it is currently the most

commonly used form of animation. The process of 3D animation is very different from the
traditional style but they both require the artist to share the same principles of movement and
composition in animation. 3D animation has less to do with drawing and more to do with moving
a character in a program. The National Science Foundation emphasizes how heavily 3D
animators must rely on physics to create realistic animations. The animator creates keyframes or
specific movements and lets the computer fill in the rest.

4. Motion Graphics

Unlike the previously mentioned types of animation, motion graphics are not driven by
characters or storylines. This art form focuses on the ability to move graphic elements, shapes,
and text. This process is commonly used for things like television promotions, explainer videos,
and animated logos. The skillset necessary for the other types of animation doesn‘t apply to
motion graphics because there‘s no need to mimic body movement or facial expressions.
Advertisements rely heavily on motion graphics and present plenty of career opportunities.

5. Stop Motion

Stop motion animation is very similar to traditional animation because it combines a

series of still images that are slightly different to show movement. The largest difference is that
stop motion uses photography and captures real objects. With stop motion, the artist takes a
photo of an object or scene and slightly moves the objects before taking another photo. The artist
repeats this process until the scene is completed and uses each photo as a frame in the animation.
It‘s similar to a flipbook with photos.
 Stop motion animation is organic and naturally appealing but it‘s labor-intensive and can
take a very long time and skill to execute. Traditional animation can be a great option for artists
that want to have complete creative freedom but it also requires a very high skill level and it‘s
quickly being replaced by 3D animation. No matter which type of animation, the artist must
consider the advantages and disadvantages of each to choose the one that best suits them.

What Does Digital Film Mean?

Digital film is any medium which is used for storage of images in digital cameras. Most
digital cameras use digital film based on flash memory cards or other removable types of media.
It all depends on the compatibility of the storage medium with the different types of digital
cameras. Digital film has numerous benefits such as faster writing speeds and larger capacities.

Types of digital film are undergoing changes with the rapidly changing digital camera
market. Many digital camera manufacturers produce their own proprietary digital film for their
cameras. In almost all cases, a USB cable is provided with digital cameras for transferring the
stored images from the digital film to a computer. In some cases, the data can be moved from the
camera to the computer by manually inserting the medium into the appropriate drive of the
computer. There are different types of digital film available on the market with popular ones
being Secure Digital, CompactFlash and SmartMedia.

There are many benefits associated with digital film, such as lower prices per storage
capacity compared to other alternatives. They also have faster write speeds and can
accommodate higher resolution images and shooting in RAW camera mode.

The main drawback associated with digital film is that they are not all compatible with
different cameras, card readers or other devices.

UNIT – IV – INDIAN CINEMA

Dadasaheb Phalke
Dadasaheb Phalke, byname of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, (born April 30, 1870,
Trimbak, British India, now in Maharashtra, India died February 16, 1944, Nashik,
Maharashtra), motion picture director who is considered the father of the Indian cinema. Phalke
was credited with making India‘s first indigenous feature film and spawning the burgeoning
Indian film industry today chiefly known through Bollywood productions.

As a child, Phalke displayed great interest in the creative arts. Determined to pursue his
dreams, he joined the Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay (now Mumbai), in 1885. While there he
pursued a variety of interests, including photography, lithography, architecture, and
amateur dramatics, and he became adept even at magic. He briefly worked as a painter, a
theatrical set designer, and a photographer. While working at the lithography press of celebrated
painter Ravi Varma, Phalke was significantly influenced by a series of Varma‘s paintings of
the Hindu gods, an impression that was evident in Phalke‘s own portrayal of various gods and
goddesses in the mythological films he later made.

In 1908 Phalke and a partner established Phalke‘s Art Printing and Engraving Works, but
the business failed because of differences between them. It was Phalke‘s chance viewing of the
silent film The Life of Christ (1910) that marked a turning point in his career. Deeply moved by
the film, Phalke saw it as his mission to bring all that was Indian to the moving picture screen.
He went to London in 1912 to learn the craft from British pioneer filmmaker Cecil Hepworth. In
1913 he released India‘s first silent film, Raja Harishchandra, a work based on Hindu
mythology. The film, scripted, produced, directed, and distributed by Phalke, was a huge success
and an important milestone in Indian cinematic history. Likewise important, he introduced a
female actor in the leading role in his film Bhasmasur Mohini (1913) at a time when professional
acting was taboo for women.

Phalke, with the help of several partners, established the Hindustan Film Company in
1917 and went on to produce several films. A talented film technician, Phalke experimented with
a variety of special effects. His employment of mythological themes and trick photography
delighted his audience. Among his other successful films were Lanka dahan (1917), Shri
Krishna janma (1918), Sairandari (1920), and Shakuntala (1920).

With the introduction of sound in cinema and the expansion of the film industry, Phalke‘s
work lost popularity. He left filmmaking in the 1930s and died lonely, embittered, and sick. In
recognition of Phalke‘s contribution to the Indian cinema, the India government instituted the
Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1969, an award presented annually by the president of India for
lifetime contribution to Indian cinema.

Cinema in 1930s & 1940s

In the midst of the Great Depression, the entire country and world alike experienced the woes
of a failed economy and general decline of living conditions. During this same time, in the late
1920s and into the 1940s, the American film industry experienced a boom that would later be
regarded as Hollywood‘s Golden Era. While the country was consumed in a sullen attempt to
rebuild society, films offered an accessible escape for restless minds in tough times. During the
1930s, the entire film industry transformed and ―Hollywood‖ became synonymous with big
studio pictures and became the standard for movies around the world. Films became cheaper to
produce as studios vertically integrated the production process, which allowed the price of film
attendance to go down. When synchronized sound replaced silent films, it made films more
accessible and desirable to the illiterate. As films reached new and wider audiences, actors
increasingly became idolized as stars, further intensifying the hype of the industry.

However, it wasn‘t just film prints that reached new audiences during the 1930s. The success
of the Hollywood film industry allowed it to expand beyond the Southern California movie sets
to film in increasingly more authentic and spectacular locations. This had a great effect on the
nation‘s imagination and film culture that impacted individual states, cities, and local
communities in specific ways. Movie-making in Washington State during the 1930s provides a
window into this process. It created a mutually beneficial relationship in which film production
brought Washington establishments, cities, and towns exposure while Hollywood used the scenic
beauty of the state as a pragmatic alternative to filming farther abroad or in a studio. Examining
films shot in and depicting Washington throughout Hollywood‘s Golden Era shows that
Hollywood used the state mainly for its scenic beauty and outdoor images, while Washington
residents used Hollywood‘s stars and production presence both to promote the state‘s
recreational culture of arts and outdoor activities, and to stimulate economic development in the
midst of the Depression. And despite occasional tensions between local residents and state
governments about usage of the state‘s outdoors, or differences between Hollywood‘s portrayal
of Washington and Washington‘s promotion of its region, both sides seemed to gain
economically and culturally.
 There were six big box office Hollywood films and three documentaries shot in Washington
during the Depression. The six box office films are MGM‘s Tugboat Annie (1933), Warner
Bros.‘ Here Comes the Navy (1934), 21st Century Pictures‘ The Call of the Wild (1935), and
Paramount Pictures‘ The Barrier (1937), Warner Bros. God’s Country and the Woman (1937),
and 20th Century-Fox Pictures‘ Thin Ice (1937). Another film, Paramount Pictures‘ Ruggles of
Red Gap (1935), was filmed in California but depicts a fictional rural Eastern Washington town.
The mutually beneficial Hollywood-Washington film relationship is shown both in the film
genre made possible by using this new scenery and in their production aspects as revealed
through articles in the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Times. Four shorter documentary-style
movies were also shot in the state and included Warner Bros.‘ Believe it or Not (1932),
Vitaphone‘s Can You Imagine (1936), and MGM‘s Seattle: Gateway to the
Northwest and Glimpses of Washington State (1940). These films generated far less media
coverage, so the evidence surrounding their connection to Washington lies primarily in their
content. In addition, historian Colin Shindler‘s Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American
Society 1929-1939 provides great insight into the birth of Hollywood as a major industry in both
the business world and as a creative force for a new art form, and is used throughout the paper
for context of Hollywood on the national scene.
Washington‘s relationship with Hollywood began long before the Golden Era, as many
independent and short films had been shot in the state. Shindler describes the beginnings of the
Golden Era by stating that after WWI there was a surge in consumer spending, with Hollywood
one of the most fortunate recipients, leading to a great growth within the industry. Thus the
booming 1920s economy in part fueled Hollywood‘s rise. But it was another invention that
allowed the success of film to carry into the Depression: Shindler notes that by 1929, the sound
revolution had led studios to consolidate, and that Los Angeles grew from a few hundred
thousand residents just a few decades earlier to over a million. Fewer studios meant more power
for the ones that survived, which allowed for the expansion of Hollywood movie houses and
films on the national level.
Shindler explains that there came to be five major studios in Hollywood: Fox (later Twentieth
Century-Fox Pictures), Metro Goldwyn Meyer (MGM), Paramount Pictures, Radio-Keith-
Orpheum (RKO), and Warner Brothers (Warner Bros.). Each studio vertically integrated their
companies to include every aspect of production and consumption under one roof, from stables
of writers and actors to equipment, studios, and movie houses. It was this great concurrent
expansion and consolidation of the film industry that would give new meaning to films produced
in and featuring Washington. Without the consolidation and mounted power of the big film
studios, it is unlikely that American film would have expanded to the degree that it did during the
Great Depression, limiting both its audience, its ability to shoot outside California, and the kinds
of films it could produce.
The first major Hollywood filming in Washington during the Golden Era was similar to earlier
productions in the state. Ripley‘s Believe it or Not series produced by Warner Bros. brought
strange and ―abnormal‖ stories from around the world to the big screen for movie patrons at
Warner Bros. theaters, and among the stops in Ripley‘s 1932 circuit was Tacoma, Washington.
Actual footage could not be located, as Warner Bros. likely has the film stashed deep in their
archives. However, a clipping from a 1954 Seattle Times ad posted by the Evangel Temple reads,
―Fred Henry, famous blind pianist playing and singing. Hear the man who was once featured in
Ripley‘s ‗Believe It or Not‘, all ages welcome.‖ It seems, whether or not Henry was the same
person featured in the 1932 episode of Ripley‘s, that being filmed in a Hollywood feature carried
prestige well over twenty years after the fact. This short publicity ad gives only a glimpse of
Hollywood‘s lasting influence on Washingtonians, as full feature films would soon hit Seattle
and enthrall thousands. Ripley‘s show was important as it marked the introduction of big film in
Washington during Hollywood‘s Golden Era, but it did not necessarily affect the state‘s
economy or exploit any of its natural beauty like most other films of the time.
The next big film to hit Washington was MGM‘s Tugboat Annie in 1933. Originally written
by Norman Raine as a series of short stories, the film draws from Raine‘s writings to chronicle
the struggles of a Socoma, Washington family on a Puget Sound tugboat. In 1932, the Seattle
Times interviewed Raine to learn about his inspiration for writing the short stories that would
subsequently bring Hollywood to Washington. According to the interview, Raine had been
visiting the University of Washington in 1930 at the request of professor Vernon McKenzie from
the Journalism School, and while in Seattle wrote a short story about the tugboat industry along
Seattle‘s waterfront. But how did Hollywood producers pick up the short stories for the silver
screen? Raine briefly explains in a 1932 Los Angeles Times interview, ―The Saturday Evening
Post bought the story and my agent asked for a copy of it to submit to Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer.‖ While the story was set in Puget Sound, MGM would have found it more financially
viable to shoot the film on a Los Angeles set.
Luckily for Washington, MGM made a compromise and decided that both Seattle and Los
Angeles would be used to film Tugboat Annie. A Los Angeles Times article from 1932 stated,
―Part of Seattle waterfront was reconstructed on Hollywood studio lot to give proper
background to play.‖ Thus Hollywood had found a way to cut the costs of shooting the film
entirely in Seattle, which would require hotel rentals, equipment shipping, and various other
expensive costs. However, portions of the film shot in Seattle seemed integral to the story‘s
success and
visual attraction, as scenes of Seattle‘s waterfront and surrounding neighborhoods serve as the
capstone of the film‘s dramatic ending. In fact, a 1933 Seattle Times article claims that the movie
―has its locale in Seattle and all the outdoor pictures were made here by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
this Spring… pictures of Lake Union, Queen Anne Hill, the Eastlake district, the Port of Seattle‘s
great terminal, and a great ‗shot‘ of the Olympic Mountains.‖
A Seattleite in 1933 would find much excitement in seeing their local neighborhoods used in
Hollywood films, which perhaps explains one of the reasons MGM producers decided to film in
Seattle. While the scenes would be familiar, Hollywood had the ability to make them
extraordinary by featuring the city through special camera techniques, views otherwise unseen,
and cuts to multiple shots on the big screen of a movie theater. People wanted to be part of the
excitement. Another 1933 Seattle Times article notes that over 5,000 people, prompted by the
City of Seattle, showed up to be extras in the finale scene of Tugboat Annie without pay or
recognition. Seattle officials are said to have felt that the film would bring good publicity to the
city. Surely though, the prospect of being in a major Hollywood film screened across the nation
was a personal incentive for Seattleites who battled crowds to be in the picture. Thus Seattle‘s
popular culture was becoming increasingly geared toward film, accentuated by Hollywood‘s
decision to shoot on location in the city. Box office results would soon show that MGM‘s efforts
had paid off.
The release and reviews of Tugboat Annie show how Washington State boosters used
Hollywood films to bring business and cultural recognition to their state. Typically big film
studios premiered their films in Hollywood and invited actors and the press to draw publicity, but
the Evergreen State Theatre‘s president Frank Newman fought to bring the premier of Tugboat
Annie to Seattle. According to a 1933 Seattle Times article, ―Mr. Newman was forced to enter
into some lively bidding with Sid Grauman, owner of the Hollywood Chinese Theatre, for the
right to stage the world premiere of ―Tugboat Annie‘ it isn‘t too often that Seattle gets a world
premier.‖ Perhaps Mr. Newman simply felt the film would sell well to Seattle audiences and
draw healthy box officer numbers, but as the hordes of people gathered to be part of the film
there was a definite sense of pride in the film‘s local production. Indeed, reviews of the film
reveal that it was a hit at the box office not just in Seattle but across the nation. Thus Washington
had a huge success with its first big Hollywood-backed production and premiere, and its scenery
became shown to eager theatergoers across the nation.
In 1934, Warner Bros.‘ came back to Washington with their romantic comedy Here Comes the
Navy, which featured scenes filmed aboard the USS Arizona at the Bremerton Naval Yard. The
plot of the movie features a young man who joins the Navy to get even with a Naval officer,
whose sister he ironically eventually falls for. The movie also centers on the might of the Navy,
as romantic views of battleships and men in uniform constantly fill the screen. However, while a
Washington waterfront was again being used by Hollywood, this time the specific location
appeared to be less important. A Seattle Times reviewer merely wrote that James Cagney, star of
the film, suffered rope burns and boasted that ―The entire US Pacific Fleet also plays a part in
the film.‖ Whether it was just a lack of media coverage or interest in general, there seems to have
been little attention to the specificity of the film‘s Washington production compared to that
of Tugboat Annie. One explanation is that because the film was shot at a Naval base instead of a
public area, it was too far from the public eye and less accessible, or that the storyline rendered
the specific location less important to the plot of the movie.
Another explanation of the comparative disinterest in Here Comes the Navy is given in Philip
Scheuer‘s Los Angeles Times review of James Cagney‘s pictures. In his mostly negative review,
Scheur wrote that Here Comes the Navy was both pretentious and too complex. Thus it seems
that neither Washington nor Hollywood benefited much from the film. However, the film would
later take on a new meaning for historians, as the USS Arizona was sunk in the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941, which eventually led the country into war that brought the end of the
Depression.
Just a year later Hollywood would return to put Washington back into the top ranks of film. In
1935, Twentieth Century Pictures‘ released The Call of the Wild, an adaptation of Jack London‘s
popular 1909 novel depicting sled dogs and the hunt for gold in the Alaskan Yukon. The film
was by far the greatest success of the films shot in Washington during the Golden Era for both
Washington and Hollywood. There had already been several versions of the novel adapted for
film but none since the advent of sound technology and none with energy and financial might of
Hollywood‘s Golden Era studios. Hollywood producers decided to shoot scenes for the film at
the Mt. Baker Lodge just outside of Bellingham, Washington. The result was economic stimulus
for the otherwise isolated area and increased efforts by local boosters to use the allure of film
stars and filming crews in shaping the area‘s recreational culture.
Ed Ainsworth‘s 1935 article for the Los Angeles Times details the circumstances of London
writing The Call of the Wild, stating that London was in the warmth and comfort of Southern
California after having failed to make riches on an expedition in the Yukon. Ainsworth visited
the home where London wrote the famous novel and talked to the owner, Felix Peano, who
walked around the house showing off trinkets and memorabilia associated with London. Clearly
there was much interest in the film even before it was released. Indeed, a 1934 article from
the Los Angeles Times reveals that the National Board of Review issued a survey to
schoolchildren asking them what books they wanted made into movies, and Jack London‘s The
Call of the Wild was a popular pick. Hollywood was doing their research to ensure that their
films would be a success. With the addition of Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and Jack Oakie in
the cast, who were all already popular Hollywood stars, it seems that Twentieth Century Fox
would definitely have a hit at the box office with their new film.
During the production of The Call of the Wild, the movie made press all along the West Coast.
The film is an excellent example of the mutally beneficial relationship between Hollywood and
the set location: Hollywood used Washington‘s scenic beauty to depict the grandeur and
ruggedness of the London‘s Yukon, while the state benefited from Hollywood‘s cultural
presence. But why was Mt. Baker chosen over other locations? A Seattle Times article from 1935
explained that Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Mt. Rainier, Washington were also considered for
shooting locations to depict the Alaskan Yukon: "There were three sites considered for the
production and Mt. Baker, they understand there, gets the full production, not just the outdoor
shots Jackson Hole had been filmed before. Mt. Rainier was felt suitable but with too many
skiers swarming around. Baker was sufficiently remote to give fair guaranty that some skier
wouldn‘t come zipping over an unexpected hummock, sprang into a $5,000 scene, to ruin it."
 The site was thus chosen for its remoteness, but ironically the choice to film there facilitated
the area‘s transformation into a bustling site of wilderness tourism. The Mount Baker
Development Company received a sum of $5,000 for shooting scenes as mentioned in the article,
showing that local businesses were definitely benefiting from the Hollywood presence.
One Seattle Times writer even projected the cost of filming at Mt. Baker to be $15,000 a
day. Furthermore, the Seattle Times estimated ―The Filming will take two months at least; and
it won‘t do Mount Baker any harm. In fact it may assist in its world-wide development.‖
Although Mt. Baker was the perfect setting for the film, the difficulties of shooting in the
freezing climate are documented in scores of articles in both Seattle and Los Angeles
newspapers. The state highway department decided to keep the roads plowed in order to assist
production of the film, which then led to easier access for the public to Mt. Baker‘s recreational
activities. Some of the issues film crews dealt with included poor weather conditions, sickness
amongst the stars, and even a power outage. Thus the difficulties of filming had an unpredictable
effect of expanding the opportunity for winter recreation in the area, and fans from as far as
Seattle would also use this opportunity to see their favorite stars on the set.
Local eagerness to see Hollywood in action in their own backyard produced a wave of
excitement amongst state residents, and in some cases allowed residents to feel that the stories
being filmed were partly their own. A 1935 Seattle Times article titled ―Auto Caravan Bucks
Blizzard to Mount Baker‖ details the trip of three cars trekking up to the lodge with hopes of
seeing some Hollywood stars and the film‘s production. The fervor created by Tugboat
Annie years earlier had returned to Washington, although this time people were willing to drive
for over two hours in the snow just to watch the filmmakers without the chance of being part of
the film. Some however, were lucky enough to be in the film. A 1935 Los Angeles Times article
noted that ―More than 200 former ‗Klondikers,‘ veterans of the gold rush of ‘98, took part in
the scenes.‖ With movie stars coming from Hollywood and miners from Alaska, it seems
Washington worked as a perfect location between the two, and could even draw positive
publicity to the towns passed through on the way to the filming site.A 1935 Seattle Times article
announced to the city that the cast of The Call of the Wild would be passing through Seattle‘s
King Street station downtown. ―The largest motion-picture company ever to be brought to the
Northwest was due to arrive tomorrow afternoon.‖ As Tugboat Annie had already been filmed in
the city, people clearly felt The Call of the Wild was on another level, and reporters were quick to
follow the stars‘ every move.
When The Call of the Wild was finally released to the public in 1935, critics and fans were
quite delighted with the results of filming in Washington. A Los Angeles Times article captured
the excitement of the release, stating: ―In Seattle, at the Orpheum Theater, ‗The Call of the
Wild‘ bought forth such crowds that the management was compelled to hold the picture over a
second week,‖ and went on to report that this was a feat never before accomplished by the theater.
Thus aside from the press and popularity the movie acquired during its filming, at the box office
people were equally enthusiastic about viewing the film. Washingtonians were likely interested
in having the landscape of their state presented to audiences across the country, and film critics
abroad were also pleased with the scenery. Schindler discusses what he calls the ―anti-urban bias
in films,‖ in which Hollywood frequently used portrayal of rural settings to provide a mental
escape for urban viewers. Indeed, in a Los Angeles Times article discussing the film‘s success,
the manager of Los Angeles‘ Grauman Theater explains, ―the unusual business we are doing
with ―Call of the Wild‘ is I believe, due to the fact that audiences want Clark Gable in primitive
backgrounds.‖ This manager describes the backgrounds as ―primitive‖ perhaps revealing the true
―call of the wild‖ for Hollywood producers in choosing Washington as a setting, something at
odds with how Washington boosters sought to promote their state as a sophisticated location
connected with the Hollywood industry.
In a similar vein, another theater manager interviewed in the same article attributed the film‘s
success to its climatic incompatibility with urban spaces, noting that it was ―an outdoor picture
with a blizzard in the background, which appeals to the hot weather in the cities.‖ Again, the
manager addresses the escape sought by moviegoers during the Depression. Washington
therefore, having provided the location for Tugboat Annie just two years earlier, offered a variety
of scenery from city life to a remedy for city life. In many cases, Washingtonians were able to
take pride in the beauty of their locations and view Hollywood‘s interest as an exciting and
glamorous event, while Hollywood sought both natural beauty but an authentic location for
―primitive‖ environments.
The next feature film using Washington as a setting capitalized on the rural bias of
Hollywood, with Washington State standing in as a remote Western region. The 1935 Warner
Bros. film Ruggles of Red Gap was originally written by Harry Leon Wilson as a newspaper
story and later adapted as a screenplay due to its great success. The film takes place in the
fictional town of Red Gap, supposedly near Spokane, Washington, follows an ex-English servant
named Ruggles who finds himself in a small rural Western town and is faced with the challenges
of assimilating into American culture. By the end of the film, Ruggles has recognized the great
opportunities America has to offer and becomes truly assimilated and accepted, reciting the
entire Gettysburg Address to a barroom full of country folks. The film was and still is quite
popular but because it was filmed in Hollywood and portrayed a fictional location it did little for
the state of Washington. In fact, the film emphasized the un-specificity of Washington as a
location, as Red Gap seems to stand in for any rural, Western location, emphasizing the cultural
distance between Hollywood and Washington and the perception of Washington as a rough
frontier state rather than the booming cultural center its boosters wanted it to be. Tellingly,
a Seattle Times article discussing the film made no mention of its (fictional) regional setting,
recounting only that ―it is a rollicking comedy with a strong human appeal in it that no audience
will resist.‖
For a few years, Hollywood took a brief break from using Washington in their films but would
come back to share its prosperity with the state and use its scenic backdrops. 1936 saw the
Vitaphone Corporation, one of the smaller film studios of Hollywood during the time, make a
brief visit to Marysville, Washington to film a segment for their Can You Imagine series. Local
newspapers produced no coverage of the event and it seems that the series, a takeoff of the
earlier Believe it or Not series, was rather unsuccessful in gaining any real popularity. However,
Hollywood would find its way back to the state.
In 1937, the last three big box office movies produced by Hollywood during the Depression
were filmed in Washington. One saw the return of Warner Bros. to the region with God’s
Country and the Woman, a story about the battle between members of a logging company that
eventually fostered friendship within the camp but a feud with another company. The newly
merged Twentieth Century-Fox Productions released another film called Thin Ice, which is the
story of a European Prince and an aspiring figure skater who eventually fall in love despite a
rocky beginning. Lastly, Paramount Pictures visited the state with The Barrier, a romantic-
thriller taking place in the Alaskan tundra.
God’s Country and the Woman likely found its way to Washington because Tugboat
Annie’s writer Norman Raine drafted the screenplay for the film. However, the film was unique
from previous Washington sets because it employed Technicolor filming technology.
Technicolor was key to other popular films of the time such as Walt Disney Productions‘ 1937
film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and later MGM‘s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, both of which
received widespread praise for their effective and creative use of the technology. In a Seattle
Times article covering the production of the film, a caption below a picture of two men by a
camera reads: ―Big money is represented by this big camera, one of eleven of its kind in the
world. The Technicolor camera alone is valued at $16,000, and, with complete equipment,
$35,000.‖ Interestingly, the Technicolor color director for the film, Natalie Kalmus, would go on
to work on The Wizard of Oz, making Gods Country and the Woman a sort of proving ground for
perfecting the colorizing process. However God’s Country and the Woman was a picture about
logging and did not focus on the surreal, so production was less forgiving of overly saturated
colors and unrealistic footage.
Filming in Washington‘s forests would prove to be a hit at the box office, but on location
certain technical obstacles had to be overcome to make the film. The director of God’s Country
and the Woman was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 1938 about the use of color in
Hollywood films. ―When we shot ‗God‘s Country and the Woman we stayed on the edge of the
forest, afraid to penetrate its depths for fear there would not be enough light.‖ He goes on to say
that since the production of that film he his crew had become more confident in using the
technology. This confirms the notion that the movie was a sort of proving ground for the camera
technology, showing that Washington‘s forests could be used not only for their scenic beauty but
also their technical challenges.
By the time the film went to theaters, it was clear that Technicolor shots of Washington‘s
made Hollywood‘s use of the region a critical success. One Los Angeles Times review stated:
―God’s Country and the Woman would be classed simply as a good outdoor picture, were it not
for the experimentation of color. That is what gives the film life.‖ Here the critic gives credit to
Washington‘s beautiful natural scenery coupled with color film. In addition to showcasing
Washington in vivid color, the film also included real loggers from Crown Willamette Logging
Company and received an entire page in the Seattle Times detailing its production.The tone of
the article is grateful of the individual stars‘ presence in the state and explains their mannerisms
on the set. The public was still very much infatuated with the stars, thought it seems that because
the film was shot deep in forested areas of Washington away from the public that Hollywood
benefited the most from the film.
The next film, Thin Ice, was filmed at Mt. Rainier for the same reason producers of The Call
of the Wild chose to film elsewhere—there were plenty of skiers. Allegedly taking place at a
Swiss ski hotel rather than the desolate Alaskan Yukon, the movie would actually benefit from
the occasional skier passing in the background of the actors. However, shooting the film at Mt.
Rainier was sometimes seen quite differently from the public‘s perspective. A man interviewed
by the Seattle Times in 1937 explained the antics of the Hollywood film crew that had spent
$1,000 on a special prop only to realize it would be covered with snow: ―They decided it looked
better with snow on it so there is all that money and effort wasted.‖
While the film crew‘s seemingly decadent spending on the arts during America‘s greatest
economic crisis seemed odd or trivial to some commentators, Hollywood‘s expenses on
production also translated to real economic benefits for locals. The Seattle Times reported that
the baggage carriers at Paradise Lodge on Mt. Rainier were quite delighted to be given the
chance to assist the leading lady and glamorous figure skater Sonja Henie. Additionally, the
article notes that ―Two dozen husky lads from the College of Puget Sound, hired as the company
arrived in Tacoma from Hollywood yesterday, got behind schedule as they hauled tons of
properties across the snow banks from trucks.‖ Just as the Mt. Baker lodge had benefited from
20th Century Pictures‘ expensive stay, Paradise Lodge at Mt. Rainier and college students from
around the area were blessed with employment and a touch of glamour from the Hollywood visit.
While the Hollywood studios brought much of their equipment and personnel from California, it
seems that certain amenities and labor was simply cheaper or had to be acquired in Washington.
Paramount Pictures‘ followed in the footsteps of The Call of the Wild with their own
release, The Barrier, also filmed at the Mt. Baker Lodge and depicting scenes of the Alaskan
Yukon. But why were neither of the films simply shot in Alaska? Two Los Angeles
Times articles from 1932 may reveal that filming in Alaska at the time was too difficult of a task
for a large Hollywood film crew to tackle. A May 1932 article describes film director W.S. Van
Dyke en route to an Alaskan expedition to film Eskimos. Speaking of the difficulty in filming
with arctic weathers the article states: ―These expeditions are, therefore, fruitful, and Van Dyke
is one of the few men in pictures who has manifested the requisite generalship to cause them to
be successful.‖ Another article from February 1932 spoke of Bernard R. Hubbard‘s stop in
Seattle to stage for his Alaskan expedition where he would film footage for the Pacific
Geographic Society. Each of the articles has the explicit use of ―expedition‖ which likely
indicates the expensive and harsh nature of Alaskan territory, and that it was unfit for the likes of
movie stars and Hollywood crew who had box office revenue in mind.
However, the neglect of Alaska was to the benefit of Washington, and Mt. Baker in particular,
as it would again enjoy the economic stimulus and free advertisement of having Hollywood stars
and a production team in the area. A Seattle Times article detailed the expenses for filming in the
remote location stating, ―It costs about $38,000 just to feed, sleep, and transport the actors,
directors, cameramen, electricians, technicians, script girls, ‗grips‘ and the rest of the crew.‖ The
funding spent on food, lodging, and transportation among other things would be injected into Mt.
Bakers‘ surrounding economy. Soon, even the government got involved in making sure the film
would support locals. According to the same article, the governor of Washington worked a deal
with the director of The Barrier in which unemployed Washingtonians would work as extras in
the mob scenes, making $60/week. In addition to the money paid out to the Mt. Baker lodge and
unemployed people of the state, the article mentions that an Alaskan village was constructed on
the site where ―half of the men came from Hollywood, half Mount Baker. They are paid $90 a
week for their carpentry.‖ It seems from this article that the film was beneficial to both
Hollywood, in acquiring an authentic-looking set location and labor on the cheap, and to
Washington, who gained an economic boost and free publicity.
A year before the production of The Barrier Mt. Baker outdoor recreational enthusiasts ran
into their own barrier with the Forest Service when they pushed for ski lifts to be installed and
explicitly referenced the previous filming in the region. A Seattle Times article from 1937
captured the sentiments of Mt. Baker skiers, who argued, ―If an escalator or ski lift mars the
natural beauty of the landscape, what will a replica of an Alaskan village do to it?‖ Local
residents were denied their addition to Mt. Baker, yet a California film studio seems to have
come in without contention, showing just how influential Hollywood had become into the late
1930s in the state. While the governor had successfully negotiated work for the unemployed, it
seems that politicians‘ interests in filming in their state went beyond political duties. A 1937
article from the Spokesman Review claims that the governor simply wanted to meet the leading
actress Jean Parker and appear as an extra in the movie, as he went into a lake ―wading in with
his whole summer outfit on, pulled her out of the water and kissed her.‖ Clearly both politicians
and the general public were fascinated with the movie stars.
The last of the major Hollywood studio films in Washington came from MGM in 1940 and
included Seattle: Gateway to the Northwest and Glimpses of Washington State. These two films
were short documentary-style productions featuring various locations of Washington from
Eastern Washington to Seattle and received very little critical acclaim. In fact, their only
appearance in Washington newspapers was as a show time listing. Truly, the last great influential
films of the big Hollywood studios in Washington were those of 1937 that drew the attention of
the public during production and were viewed across the nation. Nonetheless, the two MGM
documentaries had their focus on the natural scenic beauty of the state.
Overall, the most influential Hollywood movies for Washington residents were those in which
the government got involved, such as with plowing the roads for The Call of the Wild and
organizing the unemployed to play extras in The Barrier. In these cases there was a direct
influence on the state‘s economy during production. Surely, Hollywood also benefited from
Washington and effectively used the natural scenic beauty of the state as shown in the critics‘
reviews. And despite Hollywood‘s portrayal of Washington as a rural frontier or uncultured,
non-urban region, in some films, the benefits to Washingtonians seemed to outweigh this
potentially negative depiction of their state. The Golden Era of Hollywood, it seemed, relied for
some of its successes on the Evergreen State.
Cinema in 1950s & 1960s
The decade of the 1950s in film involved many significant films. Films of the 1950s were
of a wide variety. As a result of the introduction of television, the studios and companies sought
to put audiences back in theaters. They used more techniques in presenting their films through
widescreen and big-approach methods, such as Cinemascope, VistaVision, and Cinerama, as
well as gimmicks like 3-D film. Big production and spectacle films were perfect for this gained
popularity, with the many historic and fantasy epics like The Robe (1953),The Story of Robin
Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Seventh Voyage of
Sinbad (1958), and Ben-Hur (1959). Other big-scoped films thrived internationally, too, such as
Soviet fantasy director Aleksandr Ptushko's mythological epics Sadko, Ilya Muromets,
and Sampo, and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's historic Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood,
and Rashomon. Toshiro Mifune, who starred in those Kurosawa films, also starred in the color
spectacle Samurai Trilogy.

This spectacle approach, coupled with Cold War paranoia, a renewed interest in science
from the atomic bomb, as well as increased interest in the mysteries of outer space and
other forteana, lent itself well to what this film decade is best known for, science fiction.
The science fiction genre began its golden age during this decade with such notable films as The
Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), The War of the
Worlds (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black
Lagoon (1954), Them! (1954), This Island Earth (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956),
and Forbidden Planet (1956), as well as Japanese science fiction tokusatsu films. There were
also Earth-based "sci-fi" subjects, including kaiju films such as the Godzilla series as well
as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and When Worlds Collide (1951). Companies such
as American International Pictures, Japan's Toho, and Britain's Hammer Film Productions were
created to solely produce films of the fantastique genres.

The decade was equally adept at both character and realistic films. The highly noted
actors James Stewart, John Wayne, and Marlon Brando were at the peak of their popularity.
Stewart, starring in Winchester '73, and Wayne, starring in John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy and The
Searchers, revitalized the western. Brando mastered versatile roles in films such as A Streetcar
Named Desire, The Wild One (1953), Julius Caesar, On the Waterfront (1954), Guys and
Dolls (1955), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), and Sayonara (1957).

Director Alfred Hitchcock was at the peak of his craft, with films such as Strangers on a
Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959), with James
Stewart and Grace Kelly starring in three each. The Bengali Indian director Satyajit Ray, who
began his career in the 1950s, was also at the peak of his career during this decade, with films
such as The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), Jalsaghar (1958), and Parash Pathar (1958).
ART CINEMA & MILESTONES OF INDIAN CINEMA, JULY 7 1896 – INDIAN
CINEMA IS BORN

On July 7th 1896, the Lumiere Brothers showcased six films at the Watson Hotel in
Mumbai (then Bombay) and this marked the birth of Indian cinema as we know it today.

The Lumiere brothers were French Cinematographers who arrived in India after having
proved their cinematic excellence in Paris. The screening of the films took place on July 7th
1896 at the Watson Hotel in Mumbai and the ticket was priced at Re.1. The Times of
India referred to this event as the ―miracle of the century‖. The show received an overwhelming
response and motion pictures were soon introduced to India, in Kolkata (Calcutta) and Chennai
(Madras).

The six films screened that day were Entry of Cinematographe, The Sea Bath, Arrival of
a Train, A Demolition, Ladies and Soldiers on Wheels and Leaving the Factory. The second film
screening by the Lumiere Brothers took place on July 14th at a new venue, the Novelty Theatre,
Bombay and twenty four films were screened that day, including A Stormy Sea and The Thames
at Waterloo Bridge. Alternating between these two venues, the shows culminated on August
15th 1896.

Much before the introduction of film (silent or talkies) three elements were vital in Indian
culture natya (drama) nritya (pantomime) and nrrita (pure dance). These three aspects were
eventually passed on to Indian cinema. Bollywood films today epitomize Indian culture by their
extravagant song and dance sequences and flamboyant costumes and Bollywood has contributed
immensely to Indian music by composing some of the most melodious tunes in Indian music
history.

After the film screening in Mumbai by the Lumiere brothers, films became a sensation in
India and the following year a Professor Stevenson staged a show at Calcutta‘s (now Kolkata)
Star Theatre. Using Stevenson‘s camera, Hiralal Sen, an Indian photographer, made a motion
picture of scenes from that show, namely The Flowers of Persia (1898). The first film ever to be
shot by an Indian was called the The Wrestlers made in 1899 by H.S Bhatavdekar depicting a
wrestling match in Mumbai‘s Hanging Gradens. This was also India‘s first documentary film.
The first film released in India was Sree Pundalik a silent Marathi film by Dadasaheb Torne on
May 18th 1912.

India‘s first full length film was made by Dadasahed Phalke (also known as the father of
Indian cinema), India‘s earliest film maker who blended together elements from Sanskrit epics to
make his first film Raja Harishchandra in 1913, which was a silent film in Marathi. The roles of
females were played by men and this film remains a landmark moment in the history of Indian
cinema. Raja Harishchandra was a great commercial success and was an inspiration for further
such films.

India‘s very first talkie (that is the first talking film) was Alam Ara made by Ardeshir
Irani which was released on March 14th 1931. The first two south Indian films to have a
theatrical release were Prahalada (Telegu) and Kalidas (Tamil) and were released on October
31st 1931. The first Bengali talkie to be released was Jumai Shasthi. Talkies soon became very
popular in India and actors in these films were much in demand and made a decent amount of
money by acting.

With the development of sound technology, the 1930s saw the use of music in Indian
films and Indra Sabha and Devi Deviyani were one of the first song and dance films in
India. Indian commercial cinema (also known as masala films), which were a heady cocktail of
dance, music, drama, comedy and romance came up after the Second World War. During the
1940s, south Indian films too had gained immense prominence in Indian cinema.
The Partition of India in 1947 also greatly affected Indian cinema and many films were made on
this historic event for many years to come. The Golden Age of Indian cinema came following the
independence of India in 1947 which saw the rise of a new genre of Indian cinema called parallel
cinema, which was predominantly led by Bengali cinema. A few examples of films from this era
were Nagarik by Ritwik Ghatak (1952) and Do Biga Zameen by Bimal Roy (1953). By the mid
1950s, Satyajit Ray had made his entry into Indian Cinema and made Pather Panchali in 1955
which was the first part of his famous Apu trilogy.
 Commercial cinema too was mushrooming and some of the most popular commercial
film in the 1950s and '60s were Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955) Pyaasa (1957), Mother
India (1957) Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960). Commercial cinema
continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s and is today flourishing as one of the most popular and
loved genres in Indian cinema today. Like in the past, Indian films still continue winning
prominent awards at home and abroad.

The credit of establishment of cinema in India goes to the Lumiere Brothers, who ignited
the spark of making motion pictures in various Indian filmmakers.

Also On This day:

1763 - Britishers declare Mir Jafar as Nawab of Bengal.

1799 - Ranjit Singh captures Lahore in Punjab from Sikh rulers.

1943 - Rasbehari Bose hands over the command of 'Azad Hind Fauz' to Netaji Subhashchandra
Bose at Singapore.

1946 - Gandhiji addresses the A.I.C.C. meeting at Bombay; Congress accepts the Cabinet
Mission plan of May 16.

1948 - The first public corporation, the Damodar Valley Corporation, is established.

UNIT – V – FILM THEORY

Realism, Indian cinema’s parallel success story
For decades, India‘s alternative to Bollywood has been lauded abroad—but new
champions of cinematic realism are now fuelling interest at home
ONE country alone made a staggering 2,336 feature films in 2016. Big budgets, showmanship
and flair have made India‘s film industry, Bollywood, a behemoth. Not only is Hollywood‘s
penetration less than 10% of the Indian market, but Bollywood is also predicted to grow by 11%
this year. But Bollywood is not synonymous with Indian cinema; South Asian filmmaking has a
long heritage as varied as the region itself, with its alternative success story in Indian realism.
India‘s realists eschew Bollywood‘s formulaic plots, melodrama and escapism, handling
complicated real-life themes within simple stories and artistic camera work. Realism is now
taking bolder leaps than its costly sister industry and its social seriousness is grabbing first-time
Indian filmmakers and youth audiences.

Realism or Parallel Cinema

The Indian New Wave, commonly known in India as Art Cinema or Parallel Cinema
as an alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema, is a specific movement in Indian
cinema, known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, with a keen eye on the
sociopolitical climate of the times. This movement is distinct from mainstream Bollywood
cinema and began around the same time as the French New Wave and Japanese New Wave.
The movement was initially led by Bengali cinema (which has produced internationally
acclaimed filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak andothers) and then
gained prominence in the other film industries of India.

Origins
Realism in Indian cinema dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. One of the earliest
examples was V. Shantaram's 1925 silent film classic Sawkari Pash (Indian Shylock), about a
poor peasant (portrayed by Shantaram) who "loses his land to a greedy moneylender and is
forced to migrate to the city to becomea mill worker. Acclaimed as a realistic breakthrough,
its shot of a howling dog near a hut, has become a milestone in the march of Indian cinema."
The 1937 Shantaram film Duniya Na Mane (The Unaccepted)also critiqued the treatment of
women in Indian society.

Early years
The Parallel Cinema movement began to take shape from the late 1940s to the 1960s,
by pioneers such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Bimal Roy, Mrinal Sen, Khwaja Ahmad
Abbas, Chetan Anand, Guru Dutt and V. Shantaram. This period is considered part of the
'Golden Age' of Indian cinema. This cinema borrowed heavily from the Indian literature of
the times, hence became an important study of the contemporary Indian society, and is now
used by scholars and historians alike to map the changing demographics the and socio-
economic as well political temperament of the Indian populace. Right fromits inception,
Indian cinema has had people who wanted to and did use the medium for more than
entertainment. They used it to highlight prevalent issues and sometimes to throw open new
issues for the public. An early example was Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946), a social
realist film that won theGrand Prize at the first Cannes Film Festival. Since then, Indian
independent films were frequently in competition for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, with some of them winning major prizes at the
festival.

During the 1950s and the 1960s, intellectual filmmakers and story writers became
frustrated with musical films. To counter this, they created a genre of films which depicted
reality from an artful perspective. Most films made during this period were funded by state
governments to promote an authentic art genre from the Indian film fraternity. The most
famous Indian "neo-realist" was the Bengalifilm director Satyajit Ray, followed by Shyam
Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Girish Kasaravalli. Ray's most famous films
were Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu(1959), which formed
The Apu Trilogy. Produced on a shoestring budget of Rs. 150,000 ($3000), the three films won
major prizes at the Cannes, Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, and are todayfrequently listed
among the greatest films of all time.

Certain art films have also garnered commercial success, in an industry known for its
surrealism or 'fantastical' movies, and successfully combined features of both art and
commercial cinema. An early example of this was Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953),
which was both a commercial and critical success. The film won the International Prize at the
1954 Cannes Film Festival and paved the way for theIndian New Wave. Hrishikesh
Mukherjee, one of Hindi cinema's most successful filmmakers,was named the pioneer of
'middle cinema', and was renowned for making films that reflected the changing middle-class
ethos. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, Mukherjee "carved a middle path between the
extravagance of mainstream cinema and the stark relism of art cinema".[15] Another
filmmaker to integrate art and commercial cinema was Guru Dutt, whose film Pyaasa (1957)
featured in Time magazine's "All-TIME" 100 best movies list.
 In the 1960s, the Indian government began financing independent art films based on
Indian themes. Many of the directors were graduates of the FTII (Film and Television
Institute of India), in Pune. The Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak was a professor at the
institute and a well-known director. Unlike Ray, however, Ghatak did not gain international
fame during his lifetime. For example, Ghatak's Nagarik(1952) was perhaps the earliest
example of a Bengali art film, preceding Ray's Pather Panchali by three years, but was not
released until after his death in 1977. His first commercial release Ajantrik (1958) was also
one of the earliest films to portray an inanimate object, in this case an automobile, as a
character in the story, many years before the Herbie films. The protagonist of Ajantrik, Bimal,
can also be seen as an influence on the cynical cab driver Narasingh (played by Soumitra
Chatterjee) in Satyajit Ray's Abhijan (1962).

Growth
During the 1970s and the 1980s, parallel cinema entered into the limelight of Hindi
cinema to a much wider extent. This was led by such directors as Gulzar, Shyam Benegal and
Saeed Akhtar Mirza, and lateron Mahesh Bhatt and Govind Nihalani, becoming the main
directors of this period's Indian art cinema. Benegal's directorial debut, Ankur (Seeding, 1974)
was a major critical success, and was followed by numerous works that created another field
in the movement. These filmmakers tried to promote realism in their own different styles,
though many of them often accepted certain conventions of popular cinema. Parallel cinema
of this time gave careers to a whole new breed of young actors, including Shabana Azmi,
Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Pankaj
Kapoor, and even actors from commercial cinema like Rekha and Hema Malini ventured into
art cinema.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan extended the Indian New Wave to Malayalam cinema with his
film Swayamvaramin 1972. Long after the Golden Age of Indian cinema, Malayalam cinema
experienced its own 'Golden Age' in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the most acclaimed
Indian filmmakers at the time were fromthe Malayalam industry, including Adoor
Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Padmarajan, John Abraham (director), T. V. Chandran and
Shaji N. Karun. Gopalakrishnan, who is often considered to be Satyajit
 Ray's spiritual heir, directed some of his most acclaimed films during this period,
including Elippathayam (1981) which won the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film
Festival, as well as Mathilukal(1989) which won major prizes at the Venice Film Festival.
Shaji N. Karun's debut film Piravi (1989) won the Camera d'Or at the 1989 Cannes Film
Festival, while his second film Swaham (1994) was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the
1994 Cannes Film Festival. His third film Vanaprastham (1999)was also selected to Cannes
Film Festival, making him the only Indian film maker who could take consecutively three
films to Cannes.

Girish Kasaravalli, Girish Karnad and B. V. Karanth led the way for parallel cinema
in the Kannada filmindustry, while Mani Ratnam has done the same for Tamil cinema.

Decline
By the early 1990s, the rising costs involved in film production and the
commercialization of the films had a negative impact on the art films. The fact that
investment returns cannot be guaranteed made artfilms less popular amongst filmmakers.
Underworld financing, political and economic turmoil, televisionand piracy proved to be fatal
threat to parallel cinema, as it declined.

Resurgence
Konkona Sen Sharma and Rahul Bose, in Aparna Sen's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002). The
term "parallel cinema" has started being applied to off-beat films produced in Bollywood, where
artfilms have begun experiencing a resurgence. This led to the emergence of a distinct genre
known as Mumbai noir, urban films reflecting social problems in the city of Mumbai.

Other modern examples of art films produced in Bollywood which are classified as part
of the parallel cinema genre include Mani Ratnam's Dil Se.. (1998) and Yuva (2004), Nagesh
Kukunoor's 3 Deewarein (2003) and Dor (2006), Sudhir Mishra's Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi
 (2005), Jahnu Barua's Maine Gandhi KoNahin Mara (2005), Pan Nalin's Valley of Flowers
(2006), Nandita Das' Firaaq (2008), Onir's My Brother… Nikhil (2005) and Bas Ek Pal
(2006), Anurag Kashyap's Dev.D (2009) and Gulaal (2009) Piyush Jha's Sikandar (2009) and
Vikramaditya Motwane's Udaan (2009).

Independent films spoken in Indian English are also occasionally produced; examples
include Revathi's Mitr, My Friend (2002), Aparna Sen's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002) and 15 Park
Avenue (2006), Anant Balani'sJoggers' Park (2003), Piyush Jha's King of Bollywood (2004),
Homi Adajania's Being Cyrus (2006), Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Lear (2007) and Sooni
Taraporevala's Little Zizou (2009).

Other Indian art film directors active today include Mrinal Sen, Buddhadeb Dasgupta,
Aparna Sen, Gautam Ghose, Sandip Ray (Satyajit Ray's son) and Rituparno Ghosh in Bengali
cinema; Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Shaji N. Karun and T. V. Chandran in Malayalam cinema;
Kumar Shahani, Ketan Mehta,

Govind Nihalani and Shyam Benegal and Deepa Mehta in Hindi cinema; Mani
Ratnam and Bala inTamil cinema.
Auteur Theory, theory of filmmaking in which the director is viewed as the
major creative force in a motion picture. Arising in France in the late 1940s, the auteur theory—
as it was dubbed by the American film critic Andrew Sarris—was an outgrowth of the cinematic
theories of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc. A foundation stone of the French cinematic
movement known as the nouvelle vague, or New Wave, the theory of director-as-author was
principally advanced in Bazin‘s periodical Cahiers du cinéma (founded in 1951). Two of its
theoreticians—François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard—later became major directors of the
French New Wave.

The auteur theory, which was derived largely from Astruc‘s elucidation of the concept
of caméra-stylo (―camera-pen‖), holds that the director, who oversees all audio and visual
elements of the motion picture, is more to be considered the ―author‖ of the movie than is the
writer of the screenplay. In other words, such fundamental visual elements as camera placement,
blocking, lighting, and scene length, rather than plot line, convey the message of the film.
Supporters of the auteur theory further contend that the most cinematically successful films will
bear the unmistakable personal stamp of the director.

What Is an Auteur?
The concept of the auteur of the filmmaker as artist and author of his or her works
began in Paris, where filmmakers and critics reacted to the industrialization of filmmaking in
the United States and Europe.

The French word auteur literally translates to the english, ―author.‖ Within the context
of cinema, the word auteur is used to describe a director who exerts a high level of control
across all aspects of a film. Auteur directors generally have a distinctive style from film-to-
film and often fill other roles besides directing including: writing, editing, and sometimes
acting in their own films.

Director François Truffaut, writing as a critic in the influential French journal Cahiers
du Cinéma (Cinema Notebook), developed the concept of the auteur in his 1954 essay ―Une
certaine tendance du cinéma français‖ (―A certain trend in French cinema‖).

Truffaut wrote about the films of several new French filmmakers who he
termed auteurs. He drew contrasts between auteurs and directors of mainstream studio movies
who he dismissed as merely metteur en scene, or ―stagers‖ of a script written by another artist.

Truffault argued that the filmmakers who made the best films were those who wrote
and directed their own films and who had a unique, personal vision. Truffault called that
approach La politique des auteurs (―The policy of the authors‖). Truffaut‘s ideas on film were
embraced by an era of French filmmakers who were part of what he called La Nouvelle
Vague (what English speakers call the French New Wave).

Auteurs wrote and directed films that went beyond surface level stories to ask bigger
questions about human existence and explore deeper themes in a nuanced and skillful way.
Whereas most directors translated scripts written by others to the screen, auteurs usually write
their own screenplays or at the very least have a heavy editorial hand in the writing process.

The 3 Components of Auteur Theory

Andrew Sarris, film critic for The New York Times, expanded on Truffaut‘s writing and set
out a more comprehensive definition for auteurs according to three main criteria: technical
competence, distinguishable personality, and interior meaning.

1. Technical competence: Auteurs must be at the top of their craft in terms of technical
filmmaking abilities. Auteurs always have a hand in multiple components of filmmaking
and should be operating at a high level across the board.

2. Distinguishable personality: What separates auteurs from other technically gifted

directors is their unmistakable personality and style. When looking at an auteur‘s collected
works, you can generally see shared filming techniques and consistent themes being
explored. One of the primary tenets of auteur theory is that auteurs make movies that are
unmistakably theirs. This is in sharp contrast with the standard studio directors of the era
who were simply translating script to screen with little interrogation of the source material
or editorial input.

3. Interior meaning: Auteurs make films that have layers of meaning and have more to
say about the human condition. Films made by auteurs go beyond the pure entertainment-
oriented spectacles produced by large studios, to instead reveal the filmmakers unique
perspectives and ruminations on life.

IDEOLOGY IN FILM

Think about any you‘ve watched and the influence that characters and their ideals have
on the audience‘s interpretation of them. Ideology in film is frequently referred to as the body
of ideas. Which reflect the individual social needs of a group, class, culture, or individual
within the story. But what is ideology in film exactly? And how does it influence the media?

WHAT IS IDEOLOGY IN FILM?

 Ideology represents a systematic world view in which we define the
concepts of self and relations of self in regards to the collective state in which we
live.

In order to truly understand ideology in film it is important to first break

down the definition of ideology itself. What is ideology?

THE DEFINITION

One can define ideology as ―the body of ideas reflecting the social needs
and aspirations of an individual group, class or culture.‖

Generally speaking, the term ideology has close associations with either
politics or party platforms.

However, ideology may also be associated with a particular set of moral

values and the underlying assumptions that are made towards individuals with
those ―values‖ or ―beliefs.‖

COMPREHENSIVE VISION

Therefore, when we look at ideology in film, it‘s easy to come to the

conclusion that ideology in film represents a comprehensive vision.

In which assumptions of existing conformity are presented and a push

towards transformation in society is made.

Ideology in film is not foreign nature or difficult to understand, it‘s simply

the power to impose influential views or specific ideals to a particular norm.

HOW IS IDEOLOGY IN FILM EVIDENT?

When you watch a movie, do you see a film that delivers ideals that are
directly in line with your own culture and views? Not always.

It‘s very common for ideology to approach an element of belief.

 In which it is imposed that ideas are the imposed beliefs within a system that are
so widely accepted that they are unrecognized by the audience.

THE DIRECTOR’S IMPACT

Every film has its own ideological slant based on the director‘s values and
underlying belief system.

Basically, the films ideological slant is based on what the director believes
to be right and wrong.

Therefore, certain characters, institutions and cultures within the film are
going to be privileged based on the Directors views.

FOR EXAMPLE:

 Casablanca places the views of nationalism a sacred place above the notion of
family and love.

 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid represents a cowboy‘s failed metamorphosis
as a failure to adjust to changing times.

 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid when Billy says ―Times have changed, but not me,‖
the focus is on the cynicism of the times in Vietnam war era.

 Thelma and Louise attempt to navigate the organized men that are out to destroy
them but female protagonists suggest to men that women are fed up with the way
things are from times past and are changing the future.

An ideology is a belief system that underpins a political or economic theory. Ideologies

form the operating principles for running a society. Examples of ideologies include liberalism,
conservatism, socialism, communism, theocracy, agrarianism, totalitarianism, democracy,
colonialism, and globalism.
TYPES OF IDEOLOGY IN FILM

When it comes to ideology in film there are several different types of

ideologies that can arise in a film. Categories of ideologies in film include the
natural ideology, the implicit ideology and the explicit ideology.

Most of the time, films will represent implicit ideology but there are
instances in which the neutral ideology arises or the ideology is explicit.

The categories of ideology in film or types of ideology in film can be

further understood as follows:

IMPLICIT IDEOLOGY IN FILM

Protagonist and antagonist have conflicting values.

But the message from the Director is slanted with a particular focus on
accepting the system and particular world views as normal and just ―how the
world works.‖

EXPLICIT IDEOLOGY IN FILM

Typically focus on persuasion and are not willing to accept the ―world
views‖ or values as is.

Films that follow explicit ideology are seeking to persuade the audie nce
into thinking outside the ―traditional norm‖ box.

NEUTRAL IDEOLOGY IN FILM

Typically focus on delivering light entertainment without an emphasis on

world views or beliefs. There is no ―this is just how the world operates‖.

Nor is there any instance of attempting to change the views. These films
are often adventurous and action oriented and may lack any focus on a value
system.

Unless it is to reflect on the fun and entertainment consumerism.

CAPTURE INTEREST

Ideologies in film are frequently used to ca pture audience interest. And

engage the thought process of ―what would I do in this situation‖ or ―how would I
feel.‖
Because ideologies frequently engage the juxtaposition of world views and
what ―is‖ within the world.

It‘s very common for ideological viewpoints and principles to help the
audience connect, or detach from their own self -image.

THE TAKEAWAY

So what is ideology in film? And how does ideology cause the audience to
connect with particular viewpoints or detach from the story?

Ideology generally is used as a means of encouraging change in society. Or

in addressing a need for adherence to a particular set of ideals or norms within a
viewpoint.

Where conformity already exists, ideology in film can engage a normative

thought process and connect with audience members.

Likewise, where ideology in film represents abstract thoughts or opinions

the result is an audience that engages in the central concept of influential
decision making and distinct change.

Psychological Film Theory

A method to investigate the mystery behind the thoughts and unconscious activity in the
human mind can be analyzed through psychology. This thought process is associated with film
studies to make psychoanalysis on films.

Sigmund Freud, in 19th century brought forward the psychoanalytical process on the films
that are practised worldwide even today. Even though it is evident that psychoanalysis on the
film started in 1930-40, but wasn‘t until 1970s that the psychoanalytical theory started taking
shape in regard to the effects of cinema in mind. The two renowned individuals brought forward
the psychoanalytical theory

 Freudian Theory of Psychoanalysis

 Lacanian Theory of Psychoanalysis

These two theories put forth the development in the film theories like feminist film theory.

Freudian’s Theory of Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud‘s approach of psychoanalytic theory starts by understanding the human

psyche that strives to fulfill the needs and desires or drown to self pity and self disgust due to the
guilt. These types of feelings that are buried deep in the subconscious mind of a human
resurfaces unconsciously as projections called as dreams.

According to Freud there are three types of psyches in the human mind

1. Id – Uncontrolled
2. Ego – repressed
3. Super Ego – authorities over id and ego

Freud defined that these two types of ego as the realist and narcissist. One can define
narcissist commonly as the person who is excessively self-centered or in other words love with
themselves. But, in terms of psychology, a narcissist means that person is affiliated with the
erotic attributes, selfishness, impulsive and in love of mirrors. Here, it is taken as condition
normal for the personality development in the initial stages of childhood. The desire seeking is
the Id, and the seeking is to means to desire is the reality. Ego works on satisfying the desires
sought by Id and narcissistic ego desiring a mirrored object; since ego is linked to the beginning
stage of narcissistic ego. Freud pointed out that ego‘s relationship is not reality but in acquiring
the pleasure of fulfilling the desires. The realist ego is the mediator between Id and reality where
the narcissist has no such connection with reality.
 Freudian theory of psychoanalysis brings in the Oedipal Crisis. Oedipal crisis can simply
be put as psychological disorder where the person has sexual desire for the parent of opposite
sex. Freud says that such kind of involvements happens with children of age between 3 to 5. This
kind of desire can be repressed when the parent of the same sex as the child identifies it and
helps the child passes through the stage without making it a traumatic experience rather in a
loving relationship of parent and child, he gives an example of male child‘s affiliation to his
mother. It is known that Sigmund Freud used sexual desires and needs in this theory as a primal
explanation. Oedipal Crisis talks about the repression of the male child‘s unconscious sexual
drive and the imaginary unity with the child‘s mother he points out that these types of desires
from the narcissist union from the mother is repressed and must repudiate her to attain stability
until he finds his own female.

Lacanian’s Theory of Psychoanalysis

It can be said that Lacan‘s theory on the psychoanalysis developed on many lacking points
from Freud‘s theory and more importantly the shift in the focus from Freud‘s theory on sexual
drive to a different subject and perspective – Language. Lacan uses linguistic model to explain
the psychoanalytical theory and his own derivation of human psyche.

He justifies his focus on linguistic model for psychoanalysis and states three reason for
choosing language

1. He says that the shift of focus to imaginary stage into symbolic stage is due to the mirror
stage. Once the child enters the Symbolic Order the familial structures becomes the ‗Law‘
– a Symbolic Law and the understanding of lacking in the child (he/she)
2. Entry in social order, experience in lack understanding the desire and repressing the same
is the entry in language
3. Finally, the perception between the mirrored image and the self, here Lacan defines this
mirror image as the illusion and a vacuum. And there can be no relation between the
unified self and the subject of illusion
 The theory goes on with explanation of a person dividing self into ideal and false self to
bring unity. And the key points to be remembered in the psychoanalysis on film theory are

 Creation of Subject
 Divided self

And the order of subjectivity

 Imagination
 Symbolic
 Real

Psychoanalytic Based Films

1. Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock, 1945

2. The Third Secret, Charles Crichton, 1964
3. Atmen (Breathing), Karl Markovics, 2011
4. Shrink, Jonas Pate, 2009
5. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Mel Stuart, 1971

Example

Psychological Film Theory – Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Adapted from the 1964 novel by Roald Dahl entitled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
this musical cinematic motion picture was directed by Mel Stuart and released on June 30, 1971
with Gene Wilder portraying the title role as Willy Wonka. This movie conveys the tale about a
boy named Charlie Bucket, as portrayed by Peter Ostrum, when he luckily given a Golden Ticket
that grants him an opportunity to pay a visit to the chocolate mill of Willy Wonka along with
four other kids from random places of the globe. The movie was subjected with favorable
appraisals yet in theater establishments it turned out to be a letdown, still, it has become a cult
film because of its recurrent television airtime and domestic recreation vending. It was in the
following year from its movie release that the movie was presented with an Oscar Award
nomination for Best Original Score. The lead actor also was nominated as Best Actor in Motion
Picture Musical or Comedy category at the Golden Globe, however, the same was overpowered
by its ―Fiddler on the Roof‖ contender. This psychological film is about feeding and satisfying
the cravings and fantasy of a kid over a chocolate and how his universe was completely
encompassed by such fancy.