1 research outputs found
Up-to-Speed Cinema: An Elucidation of Griffith’s 1909 Contribution to Montage and Representation, through the Ratio of Shots to Camera Setups
- Author
- A full theoretical discussion exceeds the scope of this essay. My case for Griffith does not depend on a Cartesian or Aristotelian approach
- Barry
- Barry
- Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs likewise seem to veer toward Aristotle when they declare that “we do not take the shot as a syntagmatic unit to which can be attributed a set of paradigmatic values”
- Biograph alumnus Mack Sennett continued this style from 1912 onward at Keystone where distant and frontal views were optimal for representing performing bodies.
- Bordwell
- Charles Musser
- Charles Musser
- Charles O’Brien
- Charlie Keil
- David Bordwell
- David Mayer
- Enda Duffy
- G.W. (Billy) Bitzer
- Georges Méliès
- Georges Sadoul
- Gunning
- Gunning
- However some have criticized Bordwell and Thompson’s picture of “classical” Hollywood as overly instrumental and clear. Todd Berliner, for instance, makes a strong case for obscurity and difficulty as complementary elements in Hollywood’s normal aesthetic. A larger debate over the description of Hollywood as classical or modernist underlies the issue of editing.
- Hugo MĂĽnsterberg was the first significant theorist to recognize these elements
- I am suggesting that the precision of their semiological categories may overlook the uneven preservation of films from the era with a “lopsided” basis around Biograph
- I share the view of Scott Simmon and others that Griffith’s best work lies in the Biograph shorts (owing in part to their consonance with the Progressive Era-USA and their importance to the industry’s transformation) although his features may have had more direct cultural impact and are not without artistic interest.
- In a way I heed Jacques Aumont’s call for early cinema scholars to shift attention from narration to figuration
- Jacobson
- Jacobson
- Jacques Aumont
- Jean Epstein
- Mayer a theatre historian, dismisses Vardac’s oversimplified account that cinema tamed the histrionic stage actor. He cautions film historians against drawing conclusions about the development of acting styles from singular changes in narrow windows, and frames the drift toward naturalism as a century-long trend with many facets.
- Punctuation developed from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries introducing white spaces, periods, and commas that changed writing from an opaque record of speech to a vehicle for silent reading rapidly perceived through the eye, and transforming the entire habitus of literary culture.
- Ricciotto Canudo
- Richard Abel
- Salt
- Salt
- Stan Brakhage theorizes that sound repetitions follow a dominating regular beat whereas visual repetitions explore irregular patterns. He decries “the dumb drum which destroys cinema,” instead favouring the kind of accelerating and decelerating rhythms hinted at by Epstein.
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Thanks to Philippe Gauthier for bringing this important research to my attention.
- The film Dogs Used as Smugglers tells a story of border crossing for profit that makes a useful emblem for Pathé’s transnational empire.
- Tom Gunning
- Vitagraph emerged as Pathé’s principal American rival by 1907 having built a new studio in Brooklyn in 1905 and continued to expand over the following six years.
- Publication venue
- 'University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)'
- Publication date
- Field of study