t’s a 5-minute scene. By my count, there are 5 setups, one master, two medium shots and two close ups. Fincher cheated a bit by using two cameras which cut down on the number of times they needed to move the camera, but they still took 2 days to shoot that scene in 99 takes. That means Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara did the whole scene 99 times in row over two days to get it right. Exhausting

Let’s start with the most basic obstacle that everyone on a film set must confront and somehow overcome: time. There usually isn’t very much of it. Not only does it take a long time to set up, execute and dismantle every shot for every scene and sequence, the overall schedule is hemmed in by the competing schedules of other productions running long or needing to start on time tying up the cast and crew. The most immediate impact this time crunch has on actors is an extremely limited time for rehearsals. In live theater, actors might have 4 to 6 weeks to rehearse their roles. In cinema, they’re lucky if they get a day or two. Often that means “rehearsals” are really just the first few takes of every shot, working out how to deliver the lines, how to move in the space (known as blocking), how to play off the other actors.

He is a movie star after all.

In contrast to the Classical School of acting, the Stanislavski Method, or Method Acting as it is commonly known, is emotionally oriented, committed to an emotional realism, sometimes at the expense of whatever might be in the script. It began in Russia at the end of the 19th century with a theater director, Konstantin Stanislavski, upending centuries of classical technique by encouraging his actors to let go of their grip on the text and trust their own emotional experience to guide their performance. The result was a more inward-looking, internal, often improvisational approach to acting, not to mention a more naturalistic style, and it became a slow-moving revolution in stage and screen performance throughout the 20th century.

ut the modern classical approach is rooted in the British tradition of Shakespearean performance.

he evolution of performance in cinema hit an inflection point around the time the Golden Age gave way to the New Hollywood in the 1960s. The young, energetic actors, writers and directors who took over cinema in the United States, at least until the blockbusters of JAWS (1975) and Star Wars (1977), brought with them a new naturalistic acting style, which curiously enough, actually started in avant-garde theater of the 1930s and 40s. It was part of a whole new approach to performance, a new school of acting, called the Stanislavski Method, or just The Method for short. But the Classical School of acting, with its emphasis on the text and the precision of performance, had been around at least since Thespis himself. It wasn’t going to simply fade away. Both have their own unique take on technique, and both ultimately have the same goal, to render a performance that moves the audience. Let’s take a look at each one.

Acting, as a profession, has been around a while. The Greeks were doing it as early as 534 BCE when Thespis, the world’s first “actor”, stepped onto a stage in Athens (it’s why we sometimes call actors thespians). By the time Alice Guy-Blaché was framing up that fairy in the baby patch for the world’s first narrative film in 1896, the profession had already been around for more than two thousand years. But all of that accumulated experience was centered around live performance, an actor on a stage in front of an audience. As soon as Alice started cranking film through her cinematographe, acting began a new evolutionary line of descent.

ut before we try to sort out the best from the worst, let’s clarify some technical details about how and what type of music is used in cinema. First, we need to distinguish between diegetic and non-diegetic music. If the music we hear is also heard by the characters on screen, that is, it is part of the world of the film or tv series, then it is diegetic music. If the music is not a part of the world of the film or tv series, and only the audience can hear it, then it is non-diegetic music. Too abstract? Okay, if a song is playing on a radio in a scene, and the characters are dancing to it, then it is diegetic. But if scary, high-pitched violins start playing as the Final Girl considers going down into the basement to see if the killer is down there (and we all know the killer is down there because those damn violins are playing even though she can’t hear them!), then it is non-diegetic.

But what about all those other sounds that weren’t recorded on set? The birds chirping, the cars passing, even those footsteps? Those too have to be created and gathered together in post-production and layered into the sound design. Many of these sounds already exist in extensive sound libraries, pre-recorded by sound technicians and made available for editors. But many of them must be created to match exactly what the audience will see on screen. That’s where foley artists come in. Foley artists are a special breed of technician, part sound recordist and part performance artist. Their job is to fill in the missing sounds in a given scene. By any means necessary:

e have lots of names for it, clapper, sticks, sound marker, but the most common is slate, based on the fact that in the early days it was made out of slate, the same stuff they use to make chalkboards. It serves two purposes. The first is to visually mark the beginning of each take with the key details of the production as well as the scene, shot, and take number. This comes in handy for the editor as they are combing through all of the footage in post-production. The second is to set a mark for sound synchronization. A crew member, usually the second camera assistant, holds the slate in front of the camera and near a microphone and verbally counts off the scene, shot and take number, then SLAPS the slate closed. In post-production, the editors, usually an assistant editor (cause let’s face it, this is tedious work), can line up the exact frame where the slate closes with the exact moment the SLAP is recorded on the microphone. After that, the rest of the shot is synchronized.

Before we get to how that soundscape is shaped in the post-production process, let’s look at how (and what) sound is recorded during production. The production sound department is made up of several specialists dedicated to recording clean sound on set as the camera rolls. They include the on-set location sound recordist or location sound mixer, who oversees the recording of on-set sound and mixes the various sources in real-time during production, boom operators, who hold microphones on long poles to pick up dialogue as close to actors as possible without being seen on camera (it helps if they are very tall, and relatively strong, those poles get heavy after a while), and assistant sound technicians, responsible for organizing the equipment and generally assisting the sound mixe

ost all of these examples rely on a hard cut from one shot to the next, but sometimes an editor simply can’t hide the edit with some matching action, image or idea. Instead, they have to transition the viewer from one shot to the next, or one scene to the next, in the most organic, unobtrusive way possible. We call these, well, transitions. As discussed in Chapter Two, you can think of these as conjunctions in grammar, words meant to connect ideas seamlessly. The more obvious examples, like fade-ins and fade-outs or long dissolves, are drawn from our own experience. A slow fade-out, where the screen drifts into blackness, reflects our experience of falling asleep, drifting out of consciousness. And dissolves, where one shot blends into the next, reflect how one moment bleeds into and overlaps with another in our memory. But some transitions, like wipes and iris outs, are peculiar to motion pictures and have no relation to how we normally see the world. Sure, they might “call attention to themselves,” but somehow they still do the trick, moving the viewer from one shot or scene to the next without distracting from the story itself.

Maybe it’s obvious, but if editing is where the grammar and syntax of cinematic language come together, then the whole point is to make whatever we see on screen make as much sense as possible. Just like a writer wants to draw the reader into the story, not remind them they’re reading a book, an editor’s job, first and foremost, is to draw the viewer into the cinematic experience, not remind them they’re watching a movie. (Unless that’s exactly what the filmmaker wants to do, but more on that later.) The last thing most editors want to do is draw attention to the editing itself. We call this approach to editing continuity editing, or more to the point, invisible editing.

Sometimes an editor lets each shot play out, giving plenty of space between the cuts, creating a slow, even rhythm to a scene. Or they might cut from image to image quickly, letting each flash across the screen for mere moments, creating a fast-paced, edge-of-your seat rhythm. In either case, the editor has to consider how long do we need to see each shot. In fact, there’s a scientific term for how long it takes us to register visual information: the

flashbacks and flashforwards.

The most obvious example of this is the ellipsis, an edit that slices out time or events we don’t need to see to follow the story. Imagine a scene where a car pulls up in front of a house, then cuts to a woman at the door ringing the doorbell. We don’t need to spend the screen time watching her shut off the car, climb out, shut and lock the door, and walk all the way up to the house. The cut is an ellipsis, and none of us will wonder if she somehow teleported from her car to the front door (unless, again, she’s a wizard). And if you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize ellipses are crucial to telling a story cinematically. If we had to show every moment in every character’s experience, films would take years or even decades to make much

One thing you might notice about that sequence: It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, at least in terms of a logical narrative. But Eisenstein was more interested in creating an emotional effect. And he does it by juxtaposing images of violence with images of innocence, repeating images and shots, lingering on some images, and flashing on others. He wants you to feel the terror of those peasants being massacred by the troops, even if you don’t completely understand the geography or linear sequence of events. That’s the power of the montage as Eisenstein used it: A collage of moving images designed to create an emotional effect rather than a logical narrative sequence.

ter viewing the film, the audience raved about the actor and his performance (he was a very famous actor at the time in Russia). They praised the subtly with which he expressed his aching hunger upon viewing the soup, and the mournful sadness upon seeing the child in a coffin, and the longing desire upon seeing the scantily clad woman. The only problem? It was the exact same shot of the actor every time! The audience was projecting their own emotion and meaning onto the actor’s expression because of the juxtaposition of the other images. This phenomenon – how we derive more meaning from the juxtaposition of two shots than from any single shot in isolation – became known as The Kuleshov Effect.

ill confused? Here’s an explanation in just 23 seconds

focal length[1] and is measured in millimeters. So, in a 50mm lens the distance between the sensor of the camera and the point where the light passes through the glass of the lens is 50 millimeters. Focal length determines both the angle of view and the magnification of the image. The shorter the focal length, the wider the angle of view and the smaller the magnification. The longer the focal length, the narrower the angle of view and the greater the magnification. Any lens below 35mm is generally considered a “wide-angle lens” because of its relatively short focal length. Any lens above 70mm is considered a “telephoto lens” because it greatly magnifies the image. Lenses can be divided into two basic types based on how they treat focal length: zoom and prime. Zoom lenses allow you to adjust the focal length by sliding the glass elements closer to or further away from the sensor, thus greatly magnifying the image or widening the angle of view without swapping out the lens itself. Prime lenses have a fixed focal length. What you see is what you get. Now I know what you’re thinking. Why not just slap a zoom lens on there and choose your own focal length? But actually, cinematographers almost always use prime lenses when filming. For one thing, zoom lenses tend to have many more glass elements than primes and that can affect the quality of the image. But more importantly, prime lenses force the cinematographer to be more deliberate and intentional about the angle of view and magnification of a particular shot.

lens. No matter what camera a cinematographer chooses, it’s the lens that determines the clarity, framing, depth of field and exposure of the image. Just by changing the lens, without moving the camera at all, you can radically transform the look of a shot.

atographers plan their lighting set-up for any given scene by thinking carefully about what direction the light is coming from, starting with the main source of illumination, the key light. The key light is usually the brightest light on the set, used to properly expose the main subject. But just one bright light will feel like a spotlight, creating unwanted shadows. So, they use a fill light, usually less intense and a bit softer than the key light, to fill out those shadows. But those two lights shining on the front of your subject can make the scene feel a bit two-dimensional. To bring some depth to the image, they use a back light, usually a hard light that shines on the back of a subject’s head (also called a hair light), to create some separation between the subject and the background. The brightness of each of these lights relative to each other is known as the lighting ratio and can be adjusted for various different effects. This lighting set-up is known as three-point lighting, and it’s the most basic starting point for lighting a scene:

Hard lighting is intense and focused, creating harsh, dramatic shadows. Soft lighting is more diffused and even, filling the space with smooth, gradual transitions from light to dark. The difference is actually less about the light on the subject and more about the shadows cast by the subject. Are the shadows clearly defined with a hard edge? You’ve got hard lighting. Are the shadows fuzzy, less clearly defined or maybe even absent entirely? You’ve got soft lighting. Cinematographers can control the quality of light by adjusting the size of the light source and its distance from the subject. Typically, the smaller the light source and the closer to the subject, the harder the light:

ether shooting film or digital, black and white or color, one of the most powerful tools a cinematographer has to work with is light itself. Without light, there is no image and there can be no cinema. But simply having enough light to expose an image is not enough. A great cinematographer – heck, even a halfway decent one – knows that their job is to shape that light into something uniquely cinematic. To do that, they must have a deep understanding of the basic properties of light. Four properties, to be specific: Source, Quality, Direction and Color.

One of the greatest directors in cinema history, Orson Welles, once said black and white was the actor’s friend because every performance is better without the distraction of color.

resolution isn’t the only factor that affects image clarity. Cinematographers can also manipulate the frame rate to render super sharp imagery. For decades, the standard frame rate for cinema has been 24 frames per second. That produces a familiar, cinematic “look” to the finished film in part because of motion blur, the subtle blurring that occurs between still images passing at 24 fps. But film shot and projected at 48 or 96 or even 120 frames per second renders an ultra-sharp image with almost no motion blur as our brains process far more detail between each individual frame. To be fair, this is possible with analog film stock, but it is impractical to shoot that much film stock at that high a rate. Digital cinematography gives filmmakers like Ang Lee (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), Gemini Man (2019)) and James Cameron (the Avatar series) the freedom to experiment with these

medium of film stock renders an image that many filmmakers claim has a more organic look

digital cinematography. Digital cinematography is identical in every way to analog film cinematography – same basic equipment, same need to control exposure, shape light, compose the image, etc. – with one important difference: the light passing through the lens hits a digital image sensor instead of a strip of plastic film. That sensor uses software to analyze and convert the light bouncing off its surface into a series of still images (just like film stock) that are recorded onto flash memory or an external hard driv

Once a cinematographer commits to this analog, chemical process, there are still a lot of decisions to make. First, they must choose a film gauge, that is, the size of the film stock. The film gauge is determined by measuring from corner to corner the individual frames that will be exposed to light. The standard film gauge in cinema today is 35mm, but sizes range from as small as 8mm all the way up to 70mm. And each size will render a different look, with more or less detail once enlarged. They must also decide how sensitive the film will be to light. Highly sensitive, or “fast” film stock, that is film that reacts quickly to relatively low levels of light, contains relatively large silver halide crystals (more surface area to absorb the light). The benefit is the ability to film at night or other low-light situations. The drawback is a loss in resolution, or detail in the image, due to an increase in the crystals. or grain. Less sensitive, or “slower” film stock produces a crisper image (due to the smaller crystals), but requires more ligh

Good old-fashioned film stock has been around since the dawn of cinema, though it has evolved quite a bit since those early days. In the beginning, the strips of light-sensitive material were made from nitrate, a highly flammable material, which was not so great when it was whirring through a projector past a hot lamp. It’s one of the reasons many early films are lost to history. They simply burned up too easily

a shot is one continuous capture of a span of action by a motion picture camera. A finished film is made up of a series of these shots, of varying length, that ultimately tell the story. But during production, each shot may need to be repeated several (or dozens or even hundreds of) times until everyone gets it right. Every time they repeat the shot, it’s called a take. And once the director and cinematographer feel they have the best version of that shot, it’s time to move the camera – and everything associated with it – to a new shot, sometimes just a slightly different angle on the same scene. That’s called a set-up. New set-ups require everyone on the crew to jump into action, re-arranging the camera, the lights, the set dressing, etc. That can take time. Lots of time. And it’s one reason assistant directors, responsible for planning how long it will all take, think of the schedule in terms of the number of set-ups a crew can accomplish each day.

And if someone is in the bathroom, they’re 10-100 (or 10-200 as the case may be), but they’re definitely not “in the can”, which is what you say when a scene is completed.

C-47s

A simple command from the cinematographer, “Flag off that 10k, we’re going wide on the dolly,” may sound like gibberish, but everyone on a film set knows exactly what to do. In fact, there’s a whole cinema-specific vocabulary that film crews use to keep the shoot moving quickly and efficiently

Outside the dedicated camera department, the cinematographer also oversees the lighting department as well as the grip department, also known collectively as grip and electric. The lighting department is, well, responsible for all the lights required to shoot a scene. As should be obvious, lights require electricity. And electricity can be dangerous. Especially when you have 100 crew people running around trying to get a shot before lunch. So, the head of the lighting department is a skilled electrician, known as the gaffer. The gaffer has a first assistant as well, called a best boy. (I know, not very gender neutral. If the “best boy” is female, they might be called best babe, which is worse.) And then a whole crew of electrics who are responsible for putting the lights wherever the gaffer tells them to. Grips are there to move everything else that isn’t a light. That includes lighting stands, flags, bounces, even cranes, dollies and the camera itself. The head of the grip department is the key grip, and one of their most important jobs is on-set safety. With so many literal moving parts, it is very easy for someone to get hurt.

Photography is the art of fixing an image in durable form through either a chemical or digital process. It requires a detailed, scientific knowledge of how light reflects off the lived environment and how that light reacts to various light-sensitive media. It also requires a sophisticated grasp of color temperature and the interplay of light and shadow. And an artist’s sensibility to composition, the arrangement of objects and setting within the frame of the camera to achieve balance and visual interest. Not to mention a deep, technical understanding of the gear required, cameras, formats, lenses and their respective idiosyncrasies. And it helps if you know how to tell a story in a single image, frozen in time. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Now do that at least 24 times every second. That’s cinematography. Capturing the moving image. For many of film lovers, and even just the casual viewer, this is what we show up for. But I’ve waited five chapters to discuss it because it’s important to understand that cinematography – while it may often get the most glory – is only one part of how cinema works. Without a sophisticated mise-en-scéne and a narrative to follow, it’s just a bunch of meaningless images. Not to mention the importance of editing, sound and performance. Put it all together and cinematography becomes the anchor point to a much larger cinematic experience. The person responsible for all of this is the cinematographer, sometimes known as the director of photography (DP). Their job is to translate the director’s vision into usable footage, using all of the photographic skills listed above and only after making a series of crucial decisions which we will get to below. It is one of the most technical jobs in cinema, requiring as much science as it does art:

To be clear, an anti-hero is not the same as an antagonist. The antagonist’s role is to stop the hero from reaching their goal. In The Dark Knight (2008), Batman is the protagonist, the hero, and the Joker is the antagonist. But in Joker (2019), the Joker is the protagonist, in this case an anti-hero, and the police, ostensibly the “good guys”, are the antagonists.

anti-hero. An anti-hero is an unsympathetic hero pursuing an immoral goal, and somehow we end up rooting for them anyway. Think of basically every heist movie. Or every vigilante action movie. Or any Tarantino movie for that matter. The main characters are all essentially criminals intent on breaking the law. And we can’t wait to see how they pull it off:

A flat character lacks that complexity, does not change at all over the course of the story, and is usually there only to help the more round characters on their journeys.

ct one, which generally runs to 25 or 30 pages (or the first 25 to 30 minutes of screen time), introduces the protagonist, sets up their world, and clarifies the goal they’ll be pursuing for the rest of the story. It might also introduce a central antagonist, or it might wait until later. But typically, by page 25 or 30, we know who we’re rooting for, what they want, and what’s in their way. Maybe they’ve resisted going on the journey to that point, but by the end of act one, they are launched into act two, sometimes against their will. Act two, which is usually about twice as long as act one, is all about the obstacles. Our protagonist must confront and overcome each one, and typically, the stakes get higher every time. That is, with every obstacle, the protagonist must risk more and more, making their journey more and more difficult. Often, those obstacles are put there by someone or something specific, the antagonist. But the obstacles could also be internal, some part of the protagonist’s own psychology. Either way, there’s usually a midpoint, right around page/minute 55 or 60, where the protagonist has a choice: they can turn back, give up on the pursuit of the goal, or double-down and never look back. Of course, they double-down. But by the end of act two, around page/minute 85 or 90, our protagonist meets their biggest obstacle yet. In fact, it seems to seal their fate. All hope is lost. They, and we, feel they will never reach their goal after all. But that’s not what we paid good money to see. Act three, which is usually about the same length as act one, is all about our protagonist rallying to overcome that last obstacle leading to a climactic showdown and a resolution to their story. Usually that means they reach the goal defined in act one. But sometimes the journey clarifies a new goal, or they realize they always had what they were searching for and just needed to see it in themselves (insert eye roll here). But you get the idea, act three brings some kind of resolution.

. Cinematic storytelling draws from this same narrative source, and in that sense, is not so different from a good novel or even just a good yarn spun around the campfire. In fact, a lot of what we’ll discuss here can apply to those other literary genres. Compelling characters are important no matter the form the story takes. Likewise, a clear theme or narrative intent from the storyteller. And sure, cinema, just like novels or short stories or even poetry, come in all shapes and sizes, otherwise known as genres, from thrillers to westerns, comedies to romance.

notice the clip is about one minute, equal to that one page of screenplay. Second, how does the script page compare to the finished scene? What do you notice in the script that isn’t on the screen? And what do you notice about the finished film that isn’t in the script? You’ll likely notice that there is no mention in the screenplay about how the camera moves or how it frames the image. Nor do you notice anything about the music, or the boy’s wardrobe, or that dog in the background, or the fact that it’s raining. But you might notice mention of an alarm clock that doesn’t show up on screen.

e screenplay, or script, in cinema is many things at once. Though rarely meant to be read as literature, it is a literary genre unto itself, with its own unique form, conventions, and poetic economy. It is also often a sales pitch, at least in the early stages of production, the best version of the idea, on paper, to attract collaborators and, ultimately, the capital required to make a motion picture. But first and foremost, the screenplay is a technical document, a kind of blueprint for the finished film. Ever seen a screenplay? Let’s take a look at what one looks like

ther example of national style in cinema is Italian Neorealism, which coalesced around a consistent mise-en-scène in Italian cinema around the end of World War II until the mid-1950s. It was quite the opposite from German Expressionism. Italians, filmmakers included, were coming out of a brutal period of state repression and terrible violence. They had no patience for an escapist cinema with surreal settings and macabre monsters. They had just survived real monsters who were very much human. Films like Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) showed Italian life in a stark, almost documentary-like style. They often used non-professional actors, rarely built any sets, and avoided showy camera techniques. Take a look at a critical scene from De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves where the main character, Antonio, who depends upon his bicycle to provide for his family, is robbed while on the job

Nosferatu

gritty, urban setting, tough, no-nonsense characters, low key lighting, and off-balance compositions. Sometimes they feature a private detective on a case, but not always. Usually they were filmed in black and white, but not always. In fact, film noir – which literally means “dark film” in French (what is with all the French ?!) –

rule of thirds

igure 1.3.11.3.1\PageIndex{1}: Copy and Paste Caption here.The Big Combo, 1955, Joseph H. Lewis, dir.

should be obvious, you can’t have cinema without light. Light exposes the image and, of course, allows us to see it. But it’s the creative use of light, or lighting, is what makes it an element design. A cinematographer can illuminate a given scene with practical light, that is, light from lamps and other fixtures that are part of the set design, set lights, light fixtures that are off camera and specifically designed to light a film set, or even available light, light from the sun or whatever permanent fixtures are at a given location. But in each case, the cinematographer is not simply throwing a light switch, they are shaping that light, making it work for the scene and the story as a whole. They do this by emphasizing different aspects of lighting direction and intensity. A key light, for example, is the main light that illuminates a subject. A fill light fills out the shadows a strong key light might create. And a back light helps separate the subject from the background. And it’s the consistent use of a particular lighting design that makes it a powerful part of mise-en-scène.

as a screenwriter must create – or design – a character on the page, and an actor must create – or design – their approach to inhabiting that character, the wardrobe, hair and make-up departments must also design how that character is going to look on screen. This design element is, of course, more obvious the less familiar the world of the character might be. The clothing, hair and make-up of characters inhabiting worlds in a distant time period or even more distant galaxy will inevitably draw our attention. (Though even there the intention is to add to the mise-en-scène without distracting us from the story.) But even when the context is closer to home, a story set in our time, in our culture, maybe even our own home town, every element of the clothes, the hair and the make-up is carefully chosen, sometimes made from scratch, to fit that context and those particular characters. In other words, each character’s look is carefully designed to support the overall mise-en-scène and help tell the story.

where storytelling through the physical environment – the setting – can really come alive. Every object placed just so on a set adds to the mise-en-scène and helps tell the story. Those objects could be in the background providing context – framed photos, a trophy, an antique clock – or they could be picked up and handled by characters in a scene – a glass of whisky, a pack of cigarettes, a loaded gun. We even have a name for those objects, props, short for “property” and also borrowed from theater, and a name for the person in charge of keeping track of them all, a prop master

e sets may be built on site to blend in with the surrounding landscape, or they may be built within a large, windowless, sound-proof building called a soundstage. A soundstage provides the control over the environment production designers need to give the director exactly the look and feel she wants from a particular scene. On a big enough soundstage, a production designer can fabricate interiors and exteriors, sections of buildings, even small villages. And since it is all shielded from the outside, the production has complete control over lighting and sound. It can be dawn or twilight for 12 hours a day. And a shot will never be interrupted by an airplane flying loudly overhead.

e filmmakers realized the importance of setting as an element of design and what it contributed to the overall look of their films, it wasn’t long before a position was created to oversee it all: the production designer. The production designer is the point person for the overall aesthetic design of a film or series. Working closely with the director, they help translate the aesthetic vision for the project – its mise-en-scène – to the various design departments, including set design, art department, costume, hair and make-up. But arguably their most important job is to make sure the setting matches that aesthetic vision, specifically through set design and set decoration. Set design is exactly what is sounds like, the design and construction of the setting for any given scene in a film or series. Plenty of productions use existing locations and don’t necessarily have to build much of anything (though that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of design involved, as we shall see). But when a production requires complete control over the filming environment, production designers, along with conceptual artists, construction engineers, and sometimes a whole army of artisans, must create each setting, or set, from the ground up. And since these sets have to hold up under the strain of a large film crew working in and around them for days and even weeks, they require as much planning and careful construction as any other real-life home, building, or interplanetary city out there in the universe.

d this is probably as good a time as any to discuss the role of a director in cinema. There’s a school of thought out there, known as the auteur theory, that claims the director is the “author” of a work of cinema, not unlike the author of a novel, and that they alone are ultimately responsible for what we see on the screen. The fact is, cinema requires dozens if not hundreds of professionals dedicated to bringing a story to life. The screenwriter writes the script, the production designer designs the sets, the cinematographer photographs the scenes, the sound crew captures the sound, the editor connects the shots together, and each of them have whole teams of experts working below them to make it all work on screen. But if there’s any hope of that final product having a unified aesthetic, and a coherent, underlying theme that ties it all together, it needs a singular vision to give it direction. That, really, is the job of a director. To make sure everyone is moving in the same direction, making the same work of art. And they do that not so much by managing people – they have an assistant director and producers for that – they do it by managing mise-en-scène, shaping the overall look and feel of the final product. And while mise-en-scène has many moving parts and many different professionals in charge of shaping those individual parts into something coherent, it’s the one element of cinema that is most clearly the responsibility of the director.

othing we see on the screen in cinema is there by accident. Everything is carefully planned, arranged and even fabricated – sometimes using computer generated imagery (CGI) – to serve the story and create a unified aesthetic. That goes double for the setting. If mise-en-scène is the overall aesthetic context for a film or series, setting is the literal context, the space actors and objects inhabit for every scene. And this is much more than simply the location. It’s how that location, whether it’s an existing space occupied for filming or one purpose-built on a soundstage, is designed to serve the vision of the director. As we saw in Chapter One, in the early days of motion pictures, when cinematic language was still in its infancy, not much thought was given to the design of a setting (or editing or performance and no one was even thinking about sound yet). But it didn’t take long for filmmakers to realize they could employ the same tricks of set design they used in theater for the cinema.

Last updated Aug 26, 2023 Save as PDF 1.2: How to Watch a Movie 1.4: Narrative picture_as_pdfFull BookPageDownloadsFull PDFImport into LMSIndividual ZIPBuy Print CopyPrint Book FilesSubmit Adoption ReportPeer ReviewDonate /*<![CDATA[*/ window.hypothesisConfig = function () { return { "showHighlights": false }; }; //localStorage.setItem('darkMode', 'false'); window.beelineEnabled = true; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].prepend(document.getElementById('mt-screen-css'),document.getElementById('mt-print-css')); //$('head').prepend($('#mt-print-css')); //$('head').prepend($('#mt-screen-css'));/*]]>*/ Page ID63598 /*<![CDATA[*/window.addEventListener('load', ()=>LibreTexts.TOC(undefined, undefined, true));/*]]>*/ /*<![CDATA[*/ //CORS override LibreTexts.getKeys().then(()=>{ if(!$.ajaxOld){ $.ajaxOld = $.ajax; $.ajax = (url, options)=> { if(url.url && url.url.includes('.libretexts.org/@api/deki/files')) { let [subdomain, path] = LibreTexts.parseURL(); let token = LibreTexts.getKeys.keys[subdomain]; url.headers = Object.assign(url.headers || {}, {'x-deki-token':token}); } else if (typeof url === 'string' && url.includes('.libretexts.org/@api/deki/files')){ let [subdomain, path] = LibreTexts.parseURL(); let token = LibreTexts.getKeys.keys[subdomain]; options.headers = Object.assign(options.headers || {}, {'x-deki-token':token}); } return $.ajaxOld(url, options); } } });/*]]>*/ \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} }  \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}} \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}} \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,} \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,} \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}} \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}} \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}} \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|} \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle} \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}} \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}} \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}} \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,} \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,} \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}} \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}} \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}} \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|} \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle} \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}} Table of contents SETTINGCHARACTERLIGHTINGCOMPOSITIONCINEMATIC STYLEVideo and Image Attributions Allow me to introduce a word destined to impress your friends and family when you trot it out at the next cocktail party: Mise-en-Scène. And even if you don’t frequent erudite cocktail parties, and who does these days (a shame, really), it’s still a handy term to have around. It’s French (obviously), and it literally means “putting on stage.” Why French? Because sometimes we just like to feel fancy. And let’s face it, to an American, French is fancy. But the idea is simple. Borrowed from theater, it refers to every element in the frame that contributes to the overall look of a film. And I mean everything: set design, costume, hair, make-up, color scheme, framing, composition, lighting… Basically, if you can see it, it contributes to the mise-en-scène. I could have started with any number of different tools or techniques filmmakers use to create a cinematic experience. Narrative might seem a more obvious starting point. Cinema can’t exist without story, and chronologically speaking, it all starts with the screenplay. Or I could have led off with cinematography. After all, we often think of cinema as a visual medium. But mise-en-scène captures much more than any one tool or technique in isolation. It’s more an aesthetic context in which everything else takes place, the unifying look, or even feel, of a film or series

final word on how to watch a movie before we move on to the specific tools and techniques employed by filmmakers. In as much as cinema is a cultural phenomenon, a mass medium with a crucial role in the production of meaning, it’s also an art form meant to entertain. And while I think one can assess the difference between a “good” movie and a “bad” movie in terms of its effectiveness, that has little to do with whether one likes it or not. In other words, you don’t have to necessarily like a movie to analyze its use of a unifying theme or the way the filmmaker employs mise-en-scene, narrative structure, cinematography, sound and editing to effectively communicate that theme. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), arguably one of the greatest films ever made, is an incredibly effective motion picture. But it’s not my favorite. Between you and me, I don’t even really like it all that much. But I still show it to my students every semester. Which means I’ve seen it dozens and dozens of times and it never ceases to astonish in its formal technique and innovative use of cinematic language. Fortunately, the opposite is also true: You can really, really like a movie that isn’t necessarily all that good. Maybe there’s no unifying theme, maybe the cinematography is all style and no substance (or no style and no substance), maybe the narrative structure is made out of toothpicks and the acting is equally thin and wooden. (That’s right, Twilight, I’m looking at you.) Who cares? You like it. You’ve watched it more often than I’ve seen Citizen Kane and you still like it. That’s great. Embrace it. Because taste in cinema is subjective. But analysis of cinema doesn’t have to be. You can analyze anything. Even things you don’t like.

And it is also due in part to the social reality that the people who have historically had access to the capital required to produce that very expensive medium tend to all look alike. That is, mostly white, and mostly men. And when the same kind of people with the same kind of experiences tend to have the most consistent access to the medium, we tend to get the same kinds of stories, reproducing the same, often unexamined, norms, values and ideas.

Another word for this is composition, the arrangement of people, objects and setting within the frame of an image. And if you’ve ever pulled out your phone to snap a selfie, or maybe a photo of your meal to post on social media (I know, I’m old, but really? Why is that a thing?), you are intimately aware of the power of composition. Adjusting your phone this way and that to get just the right angle, to include just the right bits of your outfit, maybe edge Greg out of the frame just in case things don’t work out (sorry, Greg). Point is, composing a shot is a powerful way we tell stories about ourselves every day. Filmmakers, the really good ones, are masters of this technique. And once you understand this principle, you can start to analyze how a filmmaker uses composition to serve their underlying thematic intent, to help tell their story.

All of the above applies to both cinema and theater, but cinema has one distinct advantage: the intimacy and flexibility of the camera. Unlike theater, where your experience of a performance is dictated by how far you are from the stage, the filmmaker has complete control over your point of view. She can pull you in close, allowing you to observe every tiny detail of a character’s expression, or she can push you out further than the cheapest seats in a theater, showing you a vast and potentially limitless context. And perhaps most importantly, cinema can move between these points of view in the blink of an eye, manipulating space and time in a way live theater never can. And all of those choices effect how we engage the thematic intent of the story, how we connect to what that particular cinematic experience really means. And because of that, in cinema, whether we realize it or not, we identify most closely with the camera. No matter how much we feel for our hero up on the screen, we view it all through the lens of the camera.

We can say the same about the relationship between cinema and theater. Both use a carefully planned mise-en-scene – the overall look of the production including set design, costume, make-up – to evoke a sense of place and visual continuity. And both employ the talents of well-trained actors to embody characters and enact the narrative structure laid out in the script.

So, what are some of those meaningful units of our cinematic language? Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of them are based on how we experience the world in our everyday lives. Camera placement, for example, can subtly orient our perspective on a character or situation. Place the camera mere inches from a character’s face – known as a close-up – and we’ll feel more intimately connected to their experience than if the camera were further away, as in a medium shot or long shot. Place the camera below the eyeline of a character, pointing up – known as a low-angle shot – and that character will feel dominant, powerful, worthy of respect. We are literally looking up to them. Place the camera at eye level, we feel like equals. Let the camera hover above a character or situation – known as a high-angle shot – and we feel like gods, looking down on everyone and everything. Each choice effects how we see and interpret the shot, scene and story. We can say the same about transitions from shot to shot. Think of them as conjunctions in grammar, words meant to connect ideas seamlessly. The more obvious examples, like fade-ins and fade-outs or long dissolves, are still drawn from our experience. Think of a slow fade-out, where the screen drifts into blackness, as an echo of our experience of falling asleep, drifting out of consciousness. In fact, fade-outs are most often used in cinema to indicate the close of an act or segment of story, much like the end of a long day. And dissolves are not unlike the way we remember events from our own experience, one moment bleeding into and overlapping with another in our memory.

images, angles, transitions and camera moves that we all understand mean something when employed in a motion picture.

Because all of this happens so fast, faster than our optic nerves and synaptic responses can perceive, the mechanics are invisible. There may be 24 individual photographs flashing before our eyes every second, but all we see is one continuous moving picture. It’s a trick. An illusion. The same applies to cinematic language. The way cinema communicates is the product of many different tools and techniques, from production design to narrative structure to lighting, camera movement, sound design, performance and editing. But all of these are employed to manipulate the viewer without us ever noticing. In fact, that’s kind of the point. The tools and techniques – the mechanics of the form – are invisible. There may be a thousand different elements flashing before our eyes – a subtle dolly-in here, a rack focus there, a bit of color in the set design that echoes in the wardrobe of the protagonist, a music cue that signals the emotional state of a character, a cut on an action that matches an identical action in the next scene, and on and on and on – but all we see is one continuous moving picture. A trick. An illusion.

or example, between 1969 and 2004, entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian bought and sold MGM three times (mostly so he could put its name on a casino in Las Vegas) until finally selling it to Sony, the Japanese electronics company. In 1990, Warner Bros. merged with Time, Inc. to form Time Warner which was in turn purchased by AOL, an internet service provider, in 2000, then spun off into its own company again in 2009 before being purchase by AT&T in 2019. Throughout the 1980s, 20th Century Fox changed hands among private investors multiple times until finally falling into the hands of Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It was in turn acquired by Disney in 2019. But it’s Universal that has the most colorful acquisition history. In 1990, MCA which owned Universal was acquired by Panasonic, another Japanese electronics company. In 1995, Panasonic sold it to Seagram, a Canadian beverage company, which in turn sold it to Vivendi, a French water utility in 2000 (the French again!). Vivendi sold the studio to General Electric, this time an American electronics company that already owned NBC. Finally, in 2011, GE sold NBC Universal to Comcast, the cable provider (which incidentally joined forces with Sony to purchase MGM back in 2004). If all of that makes your head spin, you’re not alone. In short, back in 1983, 90% of all American media was controlled by more than 50 distinct companies. By 2012, that same percentage was controlled by just 5. By 2019, it was down to 4: Comcast, Disney, AT&T and National Amusements.

he New Hollywood was done in by a one-two punch of films that were so successful, so astronomically profitable, they would have to coin a new term for them: Blockbusters

It cost less the $500,000 to make and earned nearly $60 million at the box office. Something had indeed changed. The major studios weren’t sure exactly what It was, but they knew they wanted a piece of it.

Warren Beatty, an ambitious young actor, walked into Jack Warner’s office with a scandalous script about two mass murderers named Bonnie and Clyde in his hand. Inspired by the upstart, avant-garde filmmakers making waves in France with their edgy, experimental films like Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) (we can’t seem to get away from the French!), Beatty wanted to break the mold of the Warner Bros. gritty crime thriller. He wanted to make something bold, unpredictable, and transgressive. He begged the aging Warner brother to finance the film. Maybe Jack Warner was at the end of his creative rope. Maybe he knew the movie business needed to start taking risks again. Maybe he was inspired by Beatty’s artistic vision. Or maybe he had just sold the studio to Seven Arts and figured Beatty’s crazy idea for a movie would be their problem, a parting shot before the last Warner left the building. Whatever the reason, Warner Bros. bankrolled Bonnie and Clyde (1967), tried to bury it on release, but ultimately had to admit they had a huge hit on their hands. It was as bold, unpredictable, and transgressive (for its time) as Beatty had hoped. And audiences, especially younger audiences, loved it

he was the first to win her case.

house style of a given studio meant that all of their resources went into making the very best version of certain kind of film

house style

the studios maintained a stable of actors on contracts that limited their salaries to low weekly rates for years on end no matter how successful their films might become. There were no per-film negotiations and certainly no profit sharing. And if an actor decided to sit out a film or two in protest, their contracts would be extended by however long they held out.

Essentially, the studios would force theaters to buy a block of several films to screen (block booking), sometimes without even knowing what they were paying for (blind bidding). One or two might be prestige films with well-known actors and higher production values, but the rest would be low-budget westerns or thrillers that theaters would be forced to exhibit. The studios made money regardless.

It was a HUGE success. Unfortunately, Sam Warner didn’t live to see it. He died of a brain infection on October 5th, the day before the premiere.

The Jazz Singer, the first film to include synchronized

What next? Color? Don’t be ridiculous…

Sam, had a vision. Or rather, an ear.

They built extravagant movie palaces in large market cities, and hundreds more humble theaters in small towns, effectively controlling all aspects of the business: production, distribution and exhibition. In business terms that’s called vertical integration. It’s a practice that would get them in a lot of trouble with the U.S. government a couple of decades later, but in the meantime, it meant big profits with no end in sight.

1915, after a few years of failed lawsuits (and one imagines a fair number of temper-tantrums), Thomas Edison admitted defeat and dissolved his Motion Picture Patents Company.

y 1912, Los Angeles had replaced New York as the center of the film business, attracting filmmakers and entertainment entrepreneurs from around the world. World-renowned filmmakers like Ernst Lubitsch from Germany, Erich von Stroheim from Austria, and an impish comedian from England named Charlie Chaplin, all flocked to the massive new production facilities that sprang up around the city. Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros., all of them motion picture factories able to mass-produce dozens, sometimes hundreds of films per year. And they were surrounded by hundreds of other, smaller companies, all of them competing for screen space in thousands of new movie houses around the country.

his burgeoning new entertainment industry was not, however, located in southern California. Not yet, anyway. Almost all of the production facilities in business at the time were in New York, New Jersey or somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. Partly because the one man who still controlled the technology that made cinema possible was based there: Thomas Edison. Edison owned the patent for capturing and projecting motion pictures, essentially cornering the market on the new technology (R.I.P. Louis Le Prince). If you wanted to make a movie in the 1900s or 1910s, you had to pay Edison for the privilege

Weber, Griffith helped pioneer the full-length feature film and invented many of the narrative conventions, camera moves and editing techniques still in use today.

hort film

uspense (1913) she pioneered the use of intercutting and basically invented split screen editing.

The Kuleshov Effect

Fritz Lange and Robert Weine helped form one of the earliest examples of a unique and unified cinematic style, consisting of highly stylized, surreal production designs and modernist, even futuristic narrative conventions that came to be known as German Expressionism

A Trip to the Moon,

The following year she wrote, directed and edited what many consider the first fully fictional film in cinema history, The Cabbage Fair

turns out there was another French inventor, Louis Le Prince (apparently we owe a lot to the French), who was experimenting with motion pictures and had apparently perfected the technique by 1890. But when he arrived in the US for a planned public demonstration that same year – potentially eclipsing Edison’s claim on the technology – he mysteriously vanished from a train. His body and luggage, including his invention, were never found. Conspiracy theories about his untimely disappearance have circulated ever since (we’re looking at you, Thomas Edison).

The Lumiere brothers would receive the lion’s share of the credit, but Latham and the Lumieres essentially tied for first place in the invention of cinema as we know it.

kinetoscope

5 second “scene” of a man sneezing.

first “movie studio,” a small, cramped, wood-frame hut covered in black tar paper with a hole in the roof to let in sunlight. His employees nicknamed it the Black Maria because it reminded them of the police prisoner transport wagons in use at the time (also known as “paddy wagons” with apologies to the Irish).

The basic concept of animation was already in the air through earlier inventions like the magic lantern and eventually the zoetrope

fixing an image on a photographic plate through a chemical reaction of silver, iodine and mercury. He called it a daguerreotype

photoetching

Camera Obscura, a technique for reproducing images by projecting a scene through a tiny hole that is inverted and reversed on the opposite wall or surface

Muybridge pocketed the $25,000 and became famous for the invention of series photography, a critical first step toward motion pictures.

1872, Stanford was a wealthy robber baron, former Governor of California, and horse racing enthusiast with way too much time on his hands. Spending much of that time at the track, he became convinced that a horse at full gallop lifted all four hooves off the ground. His friends scoffed at the idea. Unfortunately, a horse’s legs moved so fast that it was impossible to tell with the human eye. So he did what really wealthy people do when they want to settle a bet, he turned to a nature photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, and offered him $25,000 to photograph a horse mid gallop.