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Summary Looking at Movies (Course: Media Aesthetics)
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Media Aesthetics: Looking at Movies
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Media Aesthetics – Looking at MoviesChapter 1 Looking at Movies
Movies shape the way we see the world.
Movies engage viewers’ emotions and transport them inside the world presented on-screen.
The visual vocabulary of film is designed to play upon the same instinct that we use to
navigate and interpret the visual and aural information of our “real life”.
This cinematic language, composed not of words but many integrated techniques and
concepts, connects us to the story while deliberately concealing the means by which it does
so.
What is a movie?
Every movie is a motion picture: a series of still images that, when viewed in rapid
succession (usually 24 frames per second), the human eye and brain see as fluid
movement. In other words, movies move. That essential quality is what separates movies
from all other two-dimensional pictorial art forms.
The terms film, movies and cinema are interchangeable:
- Film: a motion picture that is considered to be more serious or challenging.
o Derives from the celluloid strip on which the images that make up motion
pictures were originally captured, cut, and projected.
- Movies: entertain the masses at the multiplex (and is less serious than film).
o Short for motion pictures.
- Cinema: films that are considered works of art (e.g., “French cinema”).
o From the Greek kinesis (“movement”).
Similarities in movies Differences in movies
- Point of origin: - Cultural differences:
produced and marketed by a large narrative films made in Africa, Asia,
commercial studio. and Latin America reflect storytelling
- Narrative: traditions very different from the
movies tell fictional (or fictionalized) story structure produced in North
stories. America and Western Europe.
Movies are constructed of multiple individual shots joined to one another in an extended
sequence. With each transition from one shot to another, a movie is able to move the viewer
through time and space. This joining together of discrete shots, or editing, gives movies the
power to choose what the viewer sees and how that viewer sees it at any given moment.
Editing’s capacity to isolate details (cut to a close-up view) and juxtapose images and
sounds within and between shots gives movies an expressive agility impossible in any other
dramatic art or visual medium.
The Movie Director
The movie director is the vital link between creative, production, and technical teams. The
director must have a vision for the story and style to inform the initial instructions to
collaborators and to apply in the continual decision-making process necessary in every
stage of production. He or she must be a strong leader with a passion for filmmaking and a
gift for collaboration.
The director’s primary responsibilities are performance and camera – and the coordination of
the two. He or she works with the director of photography to design an overall cinematic look
for the movie and to visualize the framing and composition of each shot before and during
shooting. Along the way, changes are made to everything from the script to storyboards to
blocking to edits. The director is the one making or approving each adjustment.
, Media Aesthetics – Looking at Movies
Ways of Looking at Movies
Invisibility and Cinematic Language
The moving aspect of moving pictures is one reason for invisibility. Movies simply move too
fast for even the most diligent viewers to consciously consider everything they’ve seen.
Recognizing a viewer’s tendency to identify subconsciously with the camera’s viewpoint,
early filmmaking pioneers created a film grammar (or cinematic language) that draws upon
the way we automatically interpret visual information in our real lives, thus allowing
audiences to absorb movie meaning intuitively – and instantly.
To exploit cinema’s capacity for transporting audiences into the world of the story, the
commercial filmmaking process stresses polished continuity of lighting, performance,
costume, makeup, and movement to smooth transitions between shots and scenes, thus
minimizing any distractions that might remind viewers that they’re watching a highly
manipulated, and manipulative, artificial reality.
Invisible techniques that create cinematic language:
1. The fade-out/fade-in: convey a passage of time between scenes. The last shot of a
scene grows gradually darker (fades out) until the screen is rendered black for a
moment. The first shot of the following scene then fades in out of the darkness.
Meaning: our daily experience of time is marked by the setting and rising of the sun
lets us understand intuitively that significant story time has elapsed over that very
brief moment of screen darkness.
2. A low-angle shot: a shot that is made with the camera below the action. It typically
places the observer in a position of inferiority.
Meaning: viewers’ shared experience of literally looking up at powerful figures. We
see these figures as strong, noble or threatening.
3. Cutting on action: a continuity editing technique that smooths the transition between
shots portraying a single action from different camera angles. The editor ends the
first shot in the middle of a continuing action and begins the subsequent shot at
approximately the same point in the matching action.
Meaning: the action flows so continuously over the cut between different moving
images that most viewers fail to register the switch.
Cultural Invisibility
The film industry, for the most part, seeks to entertain its customers. A key to entertaining
the customers is to give them what they want – to tap into and reinforce their most
fundamental desires and beliefs. Because so much of this occurs on an unconscious,
emotional level, the casual viewer may be blind to the implied political, cultural, and
ideological messages that help make the movie so appealing. This cultural invisibility is not
always a calculated decision by the filmmakers. Frequently, the people making the movies
may be just as oblivious of the cultural attitudes shaping their cinematic stories as the people
who watch them.
The filmmakers of Juno are certainly aware that their film, which addresses issues of
abortion and pregnancy, diverges from the ways that movies traditionally represent family
structures and teenage girls. Juno might be seen as resisting common cultural values. But
the filmmakers may not be as conscious of the way their protagonist (main character)
reinforces our culture’s celebration of the individual. So even as the movie seems to call into
question some of contemporary America’s attitude about family, its appeal to an arguably
more fundamental American value (namely, robust individualism) explains in part why,
despite its controversial subject matter, Juno was so popular with audiences.
, Media Aesthetics – Looking at Movies
Implicit and Explicit Meaning
No matter how many different layers of meaning a movie may have, each layer is either
implicit or explicit.
- Implicit meaning: an association, connection, or inference that a viewer makes
based on the given (explicit) meaning by the story and form of a film. Lying below the
surface of explicit meaning, implicit meaning is closest to our everyday sense of the
word meaning.
- Explicit meaning: everything that a movie presents on its surface.
Viewer Expectations
Your experience – and thus your interpretation – of any movie is affected by how a film
manipulates expected patterns.
Expectations that can affect the way viewers react to a movie:
- Previous work by the director, the screenwriter, actors or the genre.
- Previews, commercials, reviews, interviews, and word of mouth.
- The amount of promotion a movie gets.
Formal Analysis
Formal analysis dissects the complex synthesis of cinematography, sound, composition,
design, movement, performance, and editing orchestrated by creative artists such as
screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, actors, editors, sound designers, and art
directors as well as the many craftspeople who implement their vision.
Formal analysis of the “waiting room” scene from Juno:
1. Opening shot dollies in (the camera moves slowly toward the subject), which
gradually enlarges Juno in the frame, increasing her visual significance.
Effect of the dolly in: getting closer to what she is thinking.
2. The shot’s 10-second duration sets up a relaxed rhythm.
When the camera reaches its closest point, a drumming-sound invades the
previously silent waiting room.
3. Cut to a shot right up into Juno’s face.
This shift conveys Juno’s thought process as she turns her head in search of the
sound’s source.
4. The camera shifts to Juno’s point of view by using pan.
Juno sees a mother and her daughter sitting beside her.
This shot reveals that the sound comes from the mother’s fingernails drumming on
her clipboard.
The sound’s abnormally loud level reveals we’ve begun to experience Juno’s
psychological perceptions.
5. Cut back to the already troubled looking Juno.
The juxtaposition connects her anxious expression to both the drumming mother
and the little girl’s gaze.
The camera dollies in, which initiates our intuitive association with a subject’s
moment of realization or decision.
Another noise joins the mix, and Juno’s head turns in response.
6. Cut to a shot of a woman picking her nails.
The shot is too close to be Juno’s literal point of view, which reflects the sight’s
significance to Juno.
7. Cut back to Juno a second later.
The camera is still getting closer to her.
Her gaze shifts again to follow yet another sound.
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