Introduction to Film Studies

Film Form and Film Style

Order

• Flashforward – a scene that takes the narrative forward in time from the current time of the plot

• Nichola Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

• A man sees his wife in black on a boat, though she is supposed to be away. At the end of the film, it is revealed that she is with her husband’s coffin.

Frequency

• An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular) Today I went to the bar.

• An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative) I used to go to the bar.

• An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive) I went to the bar. Other people saw me going to the bar.

• An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple) I used to go to the bar and other people saw me going to the bar a number of times.

Frequency

• Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989) – three stories featuring different characters take place in the same run-down hotel and are connected by a gunshot. There is only one gunshot but it is heard three times in three different episodes.

Duration

• Difference between discourse time and narrative time

• Discourse time – time spent to narrate the event

Narrative time – real time that has passed for an

event to take place

• ‘5 years later’ a lengthy narrative time, but it could be a matter of second in discourse time

Duration• Narrative time is normally shorter than discourse

time

• Several million years are covered in Space Odyssey by 161 minutes

• Kane’s life covered in Citizen Kane in 119 mins.

• Many years covered in Amadeus by 138 minutes

• Four days covered in North by Northwest by 136 minutes

• One day covered in Hiroshima, mon amour by 90 minutes

Duration

• In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey several million years are skipped in a few seconds between the scenes in which an ape throws upward a bone and a spaceship cruises in the space.

DurationTokyo Story

• Elipsis: the omission of a large section of a narrative

• Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story - the scene of mother lying in coma cut to the morning scene, in which she is already passed away.

DurationEmpire

• In some films discourse time, plot time last as long as narrative time or real time.

• Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) 485 minutes of the Empire State Building at night

• Cezare Zavattini’s experimental omnibus film, Love in the City (1953) Tre ore di paradiso

Duration• Discourse time is

longer than narrative time, a rare case

• Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad

• 10 second 100 meter race is lengthen to 30 seconds

• Tokyo Olympiade

Voice• Voice is connected with who narrates and from

where

• Where the narration is from:

　　　　　　　 Intra-diagetic: inside the text (narrated from

　　　　　　　　　 the film narrative)

Extra-diagetic: outside the text (narrated from

outside film narrative)

Voice

• Who narrates:

Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character

in a film

Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in a

film

• First person narrating (intra-diegetic & homo-diegetic) and third person narrating (extra-diegetic & hetero-diegetic)

Voice

• Intra-diegetic, homo-diegetic first person narrating• David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) – a housewife

who is having an affair with a married doctor whom she met in a station is narrating what is going on inside herself. Rachmaninov’s music as a extra-diegetic element.

Voice

• Alain Resnais’s short documentary film about Auschwitz, Night and Fog (1955) . The script was written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of Maut-

hausen-Gusen concentration camp and narrated

by Michel Bouquet

Mood• Mood – the various degree of ‘distance’ created

between the narrator of a film and what she narrates.

• Distance helps the viewer to determine the degree of precision in a narrative and the accuracy of information conveyed.

• Unreliable narrator: the distance between a narrator and what he narrates is wide:

• The narrator in Citizen Kane – a journalist gathering information about who Kane really is and what ‘rose bud’ really means.

Mood

Lady in the Lake

• First-person perspective – the camera become the viewpoint of the film as well as a character

• Robert Montgomery’s ambition to create a cinematic version of the first-person narrative of Raymond Chandler in Lady in the Lake (1947)