Assignment for the next class session: please read these three articles. I will conduct a short class recitation in the next meetings (July 25 and August 1, 2015):
(1) The Art of Editing
It took a long time to discover the importance of imaginative editing in films. In the beginning, the film was considered as one continuous whole and not as an assemblage of fragments. For instance, the French filmmaker, George Melies and his American counterpart Edwin Porter, set their cameras in front of the action and let them record things as they happened.But it was Edwin Porter who made a bold step towards the art of editing when he inserted a previously shot footage within a larger film. And in 1915, David Griffith, the Father of American Films, discovered that only part of the action was needed to be shown onscreen. (Read more.)
(2) Movie Pleasures and the Spectator's Experience: Toward a Cognitive Approach
V.F. Perkins claims that for most films, critical appreciation begins (but does not end) with a reconstruction of "the naive response of the film-fan." That response perhaps not so naive as is sometimes assumed has significant implications beyond aesthetic appreciation, for the relationship of film to psychology, culture, and ideology. The nature of the film spectator's experience is key to many of the questions we want to ask about film. In turn, spectator pleasure which both motivates and inflects that experience is central to the inquiry.In film studies, the most visible attempt to explain spectator pleasure comes from the "apparatus theory" which dominated film theory in the 1970s and 80s. The apparatus theorists claimed to have uncovered the deep levels of spectator pleasure, which were said to originate in repressed and unconscious desires. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, argued that mainstream films encourage a regression to primitive stages of human development, a return to a facsimile of infantile wholeness and homogeneity. Baudry and other apparatus theorists described classical cinema as a powerful, univocal fantasy machine with a specific purpose to encourage regressive psychological states that implement the subjection of the spectator to dominant ideology. (Read more.)
(3) Soviet Montage
Montage served different purpose and has several meanings in the context of film and is not exclusively used to refer to Soviet Montage. It is used as a synonym of editing. In Hollywood cinema it means to edit a concentrated sequence using a series of short shots as brief transitions to create the effect of the passage of time or movement over large distances or for expressionistic moods and representation of symbolic meanings. Contrary to the conventional styles and movements, the soviet filmmakers was stepping away from common narrative structure and adapting what has come to be called "Soviet Montage". This new theory of editing was invented by Sergei Eisenstein and then adopted by a few other Russian filmmakers. Eisenstein, however, was the one who discovered its potential and first put it to work to make the people in the audience think whatever he wanted them to think of. “Thematic” or Soviet Montage was achieved arranging striking juxtapositions of individual shots to suggest an idea that goes beyond meanings within an individual shot. It is called collision montage as sequences create significant effects mainly through editing. Its rejection of the forms and conventions of the dominant Hollywood entertainment cinemas have inspired many film-makers to challenge the styles by creating films which emphasizes on the editing which aims to shatter the illusionistic storytelling and seamless continuity cultivated by Classical Hollywood. (Read more.)(4) Five Principles of Editing
As a new industry grew, practitioners raced to understand this amazing new medium and how it worked. Back then there was no precedent and there were no rules about how a shot should look or how a piece should be edited together. Sound familiar? But the early film makers did such a good job of understanding the medium, by the end of the 1920s the basic tenets had been laid down – and are still used by us today. (Read more.)
