An Introduction to Film

used color film strategically, like the widescreen aspect ratio, to lure people away from their televi- sion sets and back into ...

DVDThis tutorial explores the form and conventions of the Western. Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; director: Tobe Hooper); Carri ...

the lighting shapes the way the movie looks and helps tell the story. As a key component of compo- sition, lighting creates our ...

wasted no time getting into the act. Some of the earliest motion pictures were Westerns, including Thomas Edison’s 46-second, on ...

filmmaking is the softlight, which creates a very soft, diffuse, almost shadowless light. Another piece of lighting equipment, t ...

and John Wayne and on up to Clint Eastwood, are outsized but relatively subdued performers. All of the tertiary character types ...

1 2 Lighting and settingA good way to understand the importance of how lighting influences our impressions of the setting is to ...

out of town, it gets him a job on a Western.) The Western landscape is not limited to background information. The big skies and ...

essential of these three sources. The overall char- acter of the image is determined mainly by the rela- tionship between the ke ...

early film industry had to create a workable system for recording and projecting sound—a process over twenty-five years in the m ...

lights, is used extensively in dramas, musicals, comedies, and adventure films; its even, flat illumi- nation does not call part ...

Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight(1932) freed the genre from the Broadway setting. [Mamoulian also directed Applause(1929), a p ...

The Godfather(1972; cinematographer: Gordon Willis) shown in the accompanying photo—threatening and mysterious. Color Color is a ...

Notable musicals include Le Million(1931; direc- tor: René Clair); The Three Penny Opera(1931; direc- tor: G. W. Pabst); 42nd St ...

(darkness). A hard-edged crime story about U.S. Treasury Department agents’ successful busting of a counterfeit ring, T- M e nin ...

Through the 1930s, a wide variety of subgenres developed: comedy of wit (Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, 1932); romantic c ...

Grace is frustrated by her lot in life and tries to provoke Jack McKay (Ben Gazzara) into taking a more open view of the world, ...

changing society. Arguably, genres that don’t evolve lose the audience’s interest quickly and fade away. The Western, perhaps th ...

farther apart than they actually are, and because this lens elongates depth, charac- ters or objects moving at a normal speed fr ...

sion talk shows but very few movies, Brokeback Mountaindemonstrates that generic transforma- tion can work in very powerful ways ...