FILM THEORY

CAMERA

2007-06-06T15:34:00.003+07:00

A camera is a device that records/stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura (Latin for "dark chamber"), an early mechanism for projecting images. The modern camera evolved from the camera obscura.

Cameras may work with the light of the visible spectrum or with other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. A camera generally consists of an enclosed hollow with an opening (aperture) at one end for light to enter, and a recording or viewing surface for capturing the light at the other end. A majority of cameras have a lens positioned in front of the camera's opening to gather the incoming light and focus all or part of the image on the recording surface. Most 20th century cameras used photographic film as a recording surface, while modern ones use an electronic camera sensor. The diameter of the aperture is often controlled by a diaphragm mechanism, but some cameras have a fixed-size aperture.

A typical still camera takes one photo each time the user presses the shutter button. A typical movie camera continuously takes 24 film frames per second as long as the user holds down the shutter button, or until the shutter button is pressed a second time.

HISTORY
The forerunner to the camera was the camera obscura. It was a dark chamber (in Latin, a camera obscura, demonstrating the etymology), "consist[ing] of a darkened chamber or box, into which light is admitted through a pinhole (later a convex lens), forming an image of external objects on a surface of paper or glass, etc., placed at the focus of the lens". In the 6th century, Greek mathematician and architect Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments. The camera obscura was described by the Arabic scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) in his Book of Optics (1015–1021). Scientist-monk Roger Bacon also studied the matter. The actual name of camera obscura was applied by mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler in his Ad Vitellionem paralipomena of 1604. He later added a lens and made the apparatus transportable, in the form of a tent. English scientist Robert Boyle and his assistantRobert Hooke developed a portable camera obscura in the 1660s.

The first camera obscura that was small and portable enough for practical use was built by Johann Zahn in 1685. At this time there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them. However, in 1724, Johann Heinrich Schultz discovered that a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Early photography built on these discoveries and developments. The early photographic cameras were essentially similar to Zahn's camera obscura, though usually with the addition of sliding boxes for focusing. Before each exposure, a sensitized plate would be inserted in front of the viewing screen to record the image. The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris and building on Johann Heinrich Schultz's discovery about silver and chalk mixtures darkening when exposed to light.Jacques Daguerre's popular daguerreotype process utilized copper plates, while the calotype process invented by William Fox Talbot recorded images on paper.

The development of the collodion wet plate process by Frederick Scott Archer in 1850 cut exposure times dramatically, but required photographers to prepare and develop their glass plates on the spot, usually in a mobile darkroom. Despite their complexity, the wet-plate ambrotype and tintype processes were in widespread use in the latter half of the 19th century. Wet plate cameras were little different from previous designs, though there were some models, such as the sophisticated Dubroni of 1864, where the sensitizing and developing of the plates could be carried out inside the camera itself rather than in a separate darkroom. Other cameras were fitted with multiple lenses for making cartes de visite. It was during the wet plate era that the use of bellows for focusing became widespread.

The first color photograph was made by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, with the help of English inventor and photographer Thomas Sutton, in 1861

The electronic video camera tube was invented in the 1920s, starting a line of development that eventually resulted in digital cameras, which largely supplanted film cameras after the turn of the 21st century.

MECHANISM
Image capture
19th century studio camera, with bellows for focusing

Traditional cameras capture light onto photographic film or photographic plate. Video and digital cameras use an electronic image sensor, usually a charge coupled device (CCD) or a CMOS sensor to capture images which can be transferred or stored in a memory card or other storage inside the camera for later playback or processing.

Cameras that capture many images in sequence are known as movie cameras or as ciné cameras in Europe; those designed for single images are still cameras. However these categories overlap as still cameras are often used to capture moving images in special effects work and many modern cameras can quickly switch between still and motion recording modes. A video camera is a category of movie camera that captures images electronically (either using analogue or digital technology).

Lens
The lens of a camera captures the light from the subject and brings it to a focus on the film or detector. The design and manufacture of the lens is critical to the quality of the photograph being taken. The technological revolution in camera design in the 19th century revolutionized optical glass manufacture and lens design with great benefits for modern lens manufacture in a wide range of optical instruments from reading glasses to microscopes. Pioneers included Zeiss and Leitz.

Camera lens are made in a wide range of focal lengths. They range from extreme wide angle, wide angle, standard, medium telephoto and telephoto. Each lens is best suited a certain type of photography. The extreme wide angle may be preferred for architecture because it has the capacity to capture a wide view of a building. The normal lens, because it often has a wide aperture, is often used for street and documentary photography. The telephoto is useful for sports, and wildlife but they are more susceptible to camera shake.

FOCUS

Due to the optical properties of photographic lenses, only objects within a limited range of distances from the camera will be reproduced clearly. The process of adjusting this range is known as changing the camera's focus. There are various ways of focusing a camera accurately. The simplest cameras have fixed focusand use a small aperture and wide-angle lens to ensure that everything within a certain range of distance from the lens, usually around 3 metres (10 ft) to infinity, is in reasonable focus. Fixed focus cameras are usually inexpensive types, such as single-use cameras. The camera can also have a limited focusing range orscale-focus that is indicated on the camera body. The user will guess or calculate the distance to the subject and adjust the focus accordingly. On some cameras this is indicated by symbols (head-and-shoulders; two people standing upright; one tree; mountains).

Rangefinder cameras allow the distance to objects to be measured by means of a coupled parallax unit on top of the camera, allowing the focus to be set with accuracy. Single-lens reflex cameras allow the photographer to determine the focus and composition visually using the objective lens and a moving mirror to project the image onto a ground glass or plastic micro-prism screen. Twin-lens reflex cameras use an objective lens and a focusing lens unit (usually identical to the objective lens.) in a parallel body for composition and focusing. View cameras use a ground glass screen which is removed and replaced by either a photographic plate or a reusable holder containing sheet film before exposure. Modern cameras often offer autofocus systems to focus the camera automatically by a variety of methods

Exposure control
The size of the aperture and the brightness of the scene controls the amount of light that enters the camera during a period of time, and the shutter controls the length of time that the light hits the recording surface. Equivalent exposures can be made with a larger aperture and a faster shutter speed or a corresponding smaller aperture and with the shutter speed slowed down.

Shutters
Although a range of different shutter devices have been used during the development of the camera only two types have been widely used and remain in use today.

The Leaf shutter or more precisely the in-lens shutter is a shutter contained within the lens structure, often close to the diaphragm consisting of a number of metal leaves which are maintained under spring tension and which are opened and then closed when the shutter is released. The exposure time is determined by the interval between opening and closing. In this shutter design, the whole film frame is exposed at one time. This makes flash synchronisation much simpler as the flash only needs to fire once the shutter is fully open. Disadvantages of such shutters are their inability to reliably produce very fast shutter speeds ( faster than 1/500th second or so) and the additional cost and weight of having to include a shutter mechanism for every lens.

The focal-plane shutter operates as close to the film plane as possible and consists of cloth curtains that are pulled across the film plane with a carefully determined gap between the two curtains (typically running horizontally) or consisting of a series of metal plates (typically moving vertically) just in front of the film plan. The focal-plane shutter is primarily associated with the single lens reflex type of camera's, since covering the film rather than blocking light passing through the lens allows the photographer to view through the lens at all times except during the exposure itself. Covering the film also facilitates removing the lens from a loaded camera (many SLR's have interchangeable lenses).

Complexities
Professional medium format SLR cameras (typically using 120/220 roll film) use a hybrid solution, since such a large focal-plane shutter would be difficult to make and/or may run slowly. A manually inserted blade known as a dark slide allows the film to be covered when changing lenses or film backs. A blind inside the camera covers the film prior to and after the exposure (but is not designed to be able to give accurately controlled exposure times) and a leaf shutter that is normally open is installed in the lens. To take a picture, the leaf shutter closes, the blind opens, the leaf shutter opens then closes again, and finally the blind closes and the leaf shutter re-opens (the last step may only occur when the shutter is re-cocked).

Using a focal-plane shutter, exposing the whole film plane can take much longer than the exposure time. The exposure time does not depend on the time taken to make the exposure over all, only on the difference between the time a specific point on the film is uncovered and then covered up again. For example an exposure of 1/1000 second may be achieved by the shutter curtains moving across the film plane in 1/50th of a second but with the two curtains only separated by 1/20th of the frame width. In fact in practice the curtains do not run at a constant speed as they would in an ideal design, obtaining an even exposure time depends mainly on being able to make the two curtains accelerate in a similar manner.

When photographing rapidly moving objects, the use of a focal-plane shutter can produce some unexpected effects, since the film closest to the start position of the curtains is exposed earlier than the film closest to the end position. Typically this can result in a moving object leaving a slanting image. The direction of the slant depends on the direction the shutter curtains run in (noting also that as in all cameras the image is inverted and reversed by the lens, i.e. "top-left" is at the bottom right of the sensor as seen by a photographer behind the camera).

Focal-plane shutters are also difficult to synchronise with flash bulbs and electronic flash and it is often only possible to use flash at shutter speeds where the curtain that opens to reveal the film completes its run and the film is fully uncovered, before the second curtain starts to travel and cover it up again. Typically 35mm film SLR's could sync flash at only up to 1/60th second if the camera has horizontal run cloth curtains, and 1/125th if using a vertical run metal shutter.

FILM FORMATS
A wide range of film and plate formats have been used by cameras. In the early history plate sizes were often specific for the make and model of camera although there quickly developed some standardisation for the more popular cameras. The introduction of roll film drove the standardisation process still further so that by the 1950s only a few standard roll films were in use. These included 120 film providing 8, 12 or 16 exposures, 220 film providing 16 or 24 exposures, 127 film providing 8 exposures (principally in Brownie cameras) and 35mm film providing 12, 20 or 36 exposures - or up to 72 exposures in bulk cassettes for the Leica Camera range.

For cine cameras, 35mm film was the original film format but 16mm film soon followed produced by cutting 35mm in two. An early amateur format was 9.5mm. Later formats included 8mm film and Super 8.

CAMERA ACCESSORIES

Accessories for cameras are mainly for care, protection, special effects and functions.
Lens hood: used on the end of a lens to block the sun or other light source in order to prevent glare and lens flare.[12]
Lens cover: covers and protects the lens during storage
Lens adapter: sometimes called a step-ring, adapts the lens to other size filters
Lens extension tubes allow close focus in macro photography
Flash equipment: including light diffuser, mount and stand, reflector, soft box, trigger and cord
Care and protection: including camera case and cover, maintenance tools, and screen protector
Large format cameras use special equipment which includes magnifier loupe, view finder, angle finder, focusing rail /truck.
Battery and charger

CAMERA DESIGN

Plate camera

The earliest cameras produced in significant numbers used sensitised glass plates and are now termed plate cameras. Light entered a lens mounted on a lens board which was separated from the plate by an extendible bellows. Many of these cameras, had controls to raise or lower the lens and to tilt it forwards or backwards to control perspective . Focussing of these plate cameras was by the use of aground glass screen at the point of focus. Because lens design only allowed rather small aperture lenses, the image on the ground glass screen was faint and most photographers had a dark cloth to cover their heads to allow focussing and composition to be carried out more easily. When focus and composition were satisfactory, the ground glass screen was removed and a sensitised plate put in its place protected by a dark slide (photography) . To make the exposure, the dark slide was carefully slid out and the shutter opened and then closed and the dark-slide replaced. In current designs the plate camera is best represented by the view camera.

LARGE FORMAT

The large format camera is a direct successor of the early plate cameras and remain in use for high quality photography and for technical, architectural and industrial photography. There are three common types, the monorail camera, the field camera and the press camera. All use large format sheets of film, although there are backs for medium format 120-film available for most systems, and have an extensible bellows with the lens and shutter mounted on a lens plate at the front. These cameras have a wide range of movements allowing very close control of focus and perspective.

MEDIUM FORMAT

Medium-format cameras have a film size somewhere in between the large format cameras and the smaller 35mm cameras. Typically these systems use 120- or 220-film. The most common sizes being 6x4.5 cm, 6x6 cm and 6x7 cm. The designs of this kind of camera show greater variation than their larger brethren, ranging from monorail systems through the classic Hasselblad model with separate backs, to smaller rangefinder cameras. There are even compact amateur cameras available in this format.

FOLDING CAMERA

The introduction of films enabled the existing designs for plate cameras to be made much smaller and for the base-plate to be hinged so that it could be folded up compressing the bellows. These designs were very compact and small models were dubbed Vest pocket cameras.

BOX CAMERA

Box cameras were introduced as a budget level camera and had few if any controls. The original box Brownie models had a small reflex viewfinder mounted on the top of the camera and had no aperture or focusing controls and just a simple shutter. Later models such as the Brownie 127 had larger direct view optical viewfinders together with a curved film path to reduce the impact of deficiencies in the lens.

RANGE CAMERA

As camera and lens technology developed and wide aperture lenses became more common, range-finder cameras were introduced to make focussing more precise. The range finder has two separated viewfinder windows, one of which is linked to the focusing mechanisms and moved right or left as the focusing ring is turned. The two separate images are brought together on a ground glass viewing screen. When vertical lines in the object being photographed meet exactly in the combined image, the object is in focus. A normal composition viewfinder is also provided.

SINGLE-LENS FLEX

In the single-lens reflex camera the photographer sees the scene through the camera lens. This avoids the problem of parallax which occurs when the viewfinder or viewing lens is separated from the taking lens. Single-lens reflex cameras have been made in several formats including 220/120 taking 8, 12 or 16 photographs on a 120 roll and twice that number of a 220 film. These correspond to 6x9, 6x6 and 6x4.5 respectively (all dimensions in cm). Notable manufacturers of large format SLR include Hasselblad, Mamiya, Bronica and Pentax. However the most common format of SLRs has been 35 mm and subsequently the migration to digital SLRs, using almost identical sized bodies and sometimes using the same lens systems.

Almost all SLR used a front surfaced mirror in the optical path to direct the light from the lens via a viewing screen and pentaprism to the eyepiece. At the time of exposure the mirror flipped up out of the light path before the shutter opened. Some early cameras experimented other methods of providing through the lens viewing including the use of a semi transparent pellicle as in the Canon Pellix and others with a small periscope such as in the Corfield Periflex series

TWIN REFLEX

Twin-lens reflex cameras used a pair of nearly identical lenses, one to form the image and one as a viewfinder. The lenses were arranged with the viewing lens immediately above the taking lens. The viewing lens projects an image onto a viewing screen which can be seen from above. Some manufacturers such as Mamiya also provided a reflex head to attach to the viewing screen to allow the camera to be held to the eye when in use. The advantage of a TLR was that it could be easily focussed using the viewing screen and that under most circumstances the view seen in the viewing screen was identical to that recorded on film. At close distances however, parallax errors were encountered and some cameras also included an indicator to show what part of the composition would be excluded.

Some TLR had interchangeable lenses but as these had to be paired lenses they were relatively heavy and did not provide the range of focal lengths that the SLR could support. Although most TLRs used 120 or 220 film some used 127 film.

CINE CAMERA

ciné camera or movie camera takes a rapid sequence of photographs on strips of film. In contrast to a still camera, which captures a single snapshot at a time, the ciné camera takes a series of images, each called a "frame" through the use of an intermittent mechanism. The frames are later played back in a ciné projector at a specific speed, called the "frame rate" (number of frames per second). While viewing, a person's eyes and brain merge the separate pictures to create the illusion of motion. The first ciné camera was built around 1888 and by 1890 several types were being manufactured. The standard film size for ciné cameras was quickly established as 35mm film and this remains in use to this day. Other professional standard formats include 70 mm film and 16mm filmwhilst amateurs film makers used 9.5 mm film, 8mm film or Standard 8 and Super 8 before the move into digital format.

The size and complexity of ciné cameras varies greatly depending on the uses required of the camera. Some professional equipment is very large and too heavy to be hand held whilst some amateur cameras were designed to be very small and light for single-handed operation. In the last quarter of the 20th century camcorders supplanted film motion cameras for amateurs. Professional video camerasdid the same for professional users around the turn of the century.

Auteur Theory

2007-06-03T15:13:00.000+07:00

In film criticism, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director's films reflect that director's personal creative vision, as if he were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the films in question being made as part of an industrial process, the author's creative voice is distinctive enough to shine through all kinds of studio interference. In some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar "auteur" role for films that they have produced.

In law the auteur is the creator of a film as a work of art, and is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law the film director shall always be considered the author or one of the authors of a film.

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. "Auteurism" is the method of analyzing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director's work that makes him or her an auteur. Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical Cahiers du Cinéma.

HISTORY

Origin

Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema enthusiasts who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision. They championed filmmakers such asHoward Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean Renoir as absolute 'auteurs' of their films. Although André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers, provided a forum for Auteurism to flourish, he himself remained wary of its excesses, as he explained in his article "On the Auteur Theory" (Cahier # 70, 1957). Another key element of Auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen" and the idea that directors should wield their cameras like writers use their pens and that they need not be hindered by traditional storytelling.

Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that moviemaking was an industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for: the director should use the commercial apparatus the way a writer uses a pen and, through the mise en scène, imprint their vision on the work (conversely, the role of the screenwriter was minimized in their eyes). While recognizing that not all directors reached this ideal, they valued the work of those who neared it.

Truffaut's development

In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("A certain tendency in French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs", and asserted that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than the best of Jean Delannoy's. "Politique" might very well be translated as "policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to look at films and to value them in a certain way. Truffaut provocatively said that "(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors".

Truffaut's article dealt primarily by his own admission with scenarists or screenwriters. Precisely the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost whom Truffaut believed simplified and compromised many of the great works of French literature in order to support the political topic of its day. In his article, he quotes the director Claude Autant-Lara describing his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh as an "anti-war" book when the book pre-dated the Second World War. The term auteur described by Truffaut is applied to directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson, who aside from having a distinct style also wrote the screenplays or worked on the screenplays of the film as well.

The auteur theory in its embryonic form dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and Truffaut's discomfort with the screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that any film adaptation of a novel should capture its spirit and deal only with the "filmable" aspects of the books. Truffaut believed that film directors like Robert Bresson using the film narrative at its disposal could approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes, for which he used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest as an example.

Much of Truffaut's writing of this period, and of his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma, was designed to lambaste post-war French cinema, and especially the big production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films"). Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma de papa (or "Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichygovernment did not allow the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. When French film critics were finally able to see these 1940s U.S. movies in 1946, they were enamoured with these films.

Truffaut's theory maintains that all good directors (and many bad ones) have such a distinctive style or consistent theme that their influence is unmistakable in the body of their work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of both directors with a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock), and those whose visual style was less pronounced but who had nevertheless a consistent theme throughout their movies (such as Jean Renoir's humanism).

IMPACT

The auteur theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema in the 1960s (many of whom were also critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma) as justification for their intensely personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of the Auteur theory is that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being made.

The "auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the 1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted Auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962". This essay is where the term, "Auteur theory", originated. To be classified as an "auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical competence in their technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning (although many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague[citation needed]). Later in the decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of auteurism.

The auteurist critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—wrote mostly about directors (as they were directors themselves), although they also produced some shrewd appreciations of actors. Later writers of the same general school have emphasised the contributions of star personalities like Mae West. However, the stress was on directors; and screenwriters, producers and others have reacted with a good deal of hostility. Writer William Goldman has said that, on first hearing the Auteur theory, his reaction was, "What's the punchline?"

CRITICISM

Starting in the 1960s, some film critics began criticising auteur theory's focus on the authorial role of the director. Pauline Kael and Sarris feuded in the pages of The New Yorker and various film magazines. One reason for the backlash is the collaborative aspect of shooting a film, and in the theory's privileging of the role of the director (whose name, at times, has become more important than the movie itself). In Kael's review of Citizen Kane, a classic film for the auteur model, she points out how the film made extensive use of the distinctive talents of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland.

Notable screenwriters such as Ernest Lehman, Nicholas Kazan, Robert Riskin and William Goldman have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more authorial than screenwriters, while film historian Aljean Harmetz, referring to the creative input of producers and studio executives in classical Hollywood, argues that the auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system".

The auteur theory was also challenged by the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret works of art by speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's personality or life experiences. New Critics argued that that information or speculation about an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page as the basis of the experience of reading literature.

In 2006, David Kippen coined the term Schreiber theory to refer to the theory of the screenwriter as the principal author of a film.

LIST OF AUTEURS

The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors (or, more rarely, producers, or writers) who are considered to have a distinctive, recognizable style, because they

(a) repeatedly return to the same subject matter,

(b) habitually address a particular psychological or moral theme,

(d) demonstrate any combination of the above. In theory, an auteur's films are identifiable regardless of their genre. The term was first applied in its cinematic sense in François Truffaut's 1954 essay "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema"

Apparatus Theory

2007-06-02T15:02:00.000+07:00

Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s. It maintains that cinema is by nature ideologicalbecause its mechanics of representation are ideological. Its mechanics of representation include the camera and editing. The central position of the spectator within the perspective of the composition is also ideological.

Apparatus theory also argues that cinema maintains the dominant ideology of the culture within the viewer. Ideology is not imposed on cinema, but is part of its nature.

Apparatus theory follows an institutional model of spectatorship.

Philosophy of Film

2007-06-01T14:54:00.000+07:00

The philosophy of film is a branch of aesthetics within the discipline of philosophy that seeks to understand the most basic questions regarding film.

The earliest person to explore philosophical questions regarding film was Hugo Münsterberg. During the silent film era, he sought to understand what it was about film that made it conceptually distinct from theater. He concluded that the use of close-ups, flash-backs, and edits were unique to film and constituted its nature.

Rudolf Arnheim, with the beginning of the era of sound for film, argued that the silent film era was aesthetically superior to the "talkies". He held that by adding sound to previously silent moving images, the unique status of film had been removed. Instead of being a unique art form that could carefully study bodies in motion, film had become merely a combination of two other art forms.

André Bazin, contrary to Arnheim, held that whether or not a film has sound is largely irrelevant. He believed that film, due mainly to its foundation in and relationship with photography, had a realist aspect to it. He argued that film has the ability to capture the real world. The film Waking Life also features a discussion of the philosophy of film where the theories of Bazin are emphasized. In it, the character waxes philosophic that every moment of film is capturing an aspect of God.

American philosopher Noël Carroll has argued that the earlier characterizations of film made by philosophers too narrowly defined the nature of film and that the incorrectly conflated aspects of genres of films with film in general.

Aspects of Bazin's realist theories have been accepted by philosophers in spite of Carroll's critique. The transparency thesis, which says that film is a medium transparent to true reality, has been accepted by Kendall Walton.

Film Theory

2007-05-20T14:52:00.001+07:00

Film theory is an academic discipline, closely allied with critical theory, that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, though there can be some crossover between the two disciplines.

In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory anticipated the development of film theory at a time that the cinema was just being born as a new medium—the early 1900s. He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (inL'évolution créatrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form.

In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema, arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality.

In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics andlinguistics.

During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an indexical image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion of the Real, Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of the gaze extensively used in contemporary film analysis.[3] There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/37145451/Concepts-in-Film-Theory
http://www.scribd.com/doc/1250569/Film-Theory

Moy & Bastie [1909]

2007-05-12T23:19:00.000+07:00

At the age of 16, Ernest Francis Moy [c.1869-1926] was placed in charge of the lighting at London's Her Majesty's Theatre, one of the first electrically lighted theatres. He quickly progressed within the industry and met another electrical engineer,Percy Henry Bastie. In 1895, they set up a public company, Ernest F. Moy Ltd., to manufacture electric fuses, switches and circuit-breakers. They were introduced to the newly emerging science of cinematography through a customer, Robert W. Paul.

From 1897, Moy published various patents to produce cine items and the company began producing films on the flat roof of their London factory. The partners quickly formed a new company, the Cinematograph Company Ltd., to handle this side of their interests. In 1900 Moy and Bastie launched their own film camera with daylight loading. The camera was soon competing with Williamson, Darling and Prestwich. One of their cameras was taken on Captain Robert Scott's Antarctic Expedition of 1905. Then, in 1909, the company began producing its most famous camera, a well-made and practical design described in their catalogue as 'Simple - Efficient - Reliable.' It was a professional hand crank 35mm motion picture camera in the English 'upright style'. The camera was constructed from mahogany and had two internal 400 foot film magazines. Focusing was achieved by viewing the image through the film via a tube from the rear. The camera utilized a unique film transport featuring the 'drunken screw' movement to achieve film pull-down. The Moy & Bastie camera was well known for its impressive chain driven movement and brass gear wheels. The largest version had a price tag of £108, with an extra £5 for the Cooke lens. A 400ft external magazine, attached to the top of the camera, and a viewfinder mounted on the top right side were later additions to the original basic design. By 1911 Moy cameras were in constant use by British studios and topical film makers worldwide. It is said that the first picture shot in Hollywood was shot with a Moyer camera [also popularly known as 'Moy'].

Debrie 'Le Parvo' [1908]

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Joseph Jules Debrie [1919] founded the Établissements J. Debrie in 1898 in Paris, France. [In 1918, his son André (1891-1967) took over the company.]

In 1908, Joseph Debrie developed the 'Le Parvo' camera, described at the time to be robust, compact and at the height of technology. The original models were constructed from polished hardwood, but the 'Le Parvo' series also included metal bodied cameras in a variety of model types designed for studio and location work, the 'L' [for studio work], the 'E' and the 'K'. The wooden casing was an enclosing shell. The gears, film gate, etc. were mounted on, and contained within a metal chassis. On the front panel was a brass knob to open the front of the camera and a further brass knob to unlock the shutter mechanism. The camera had a fold-out Newton finder and eyepiece. The rear of the camera featured a footage counter dial marked in feet, a cranking speed indicator marked 16fps and 24fps and a pull-out focusing eyepiece with diopter adjustment and an eyepiece light-trap cover.

Also on the rear panel was a spirit level to level the camera on a tripod. The camera front lifted up and the side panels were hinged to reveal the very impressive movement and two 400 feet co-axial metal film magazines.

The hand-cranked 'Le Parvo' [meaning 'compact' and of small dimension] was at one time the most popular European made camera. Even in the early 1920's, the 'Le Parvo' was the most used camera in the world. Famous users included F.W. Murnau [for his silent film 'Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens'] and Leni Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

In 1921 followed the Super Parvo with an automatic dissolve facility.

The Debrie Parvo was a 35mm motion picture camera developed in France by Joseph Jules Debrie, in 1908. The camera was relatively compact for its time. It was hand cranked, as were its predecessors. To aid the camera operator in cranking at the correct speed, the camera had a built in tachometer.

The Parvo held up to 120 meters of film (approximately 400 ft) inside without the need for an external film magazine, yielding almost 6 minutes of film when cranked at the standard 16 frames per second silent film rate. It allowed the camera operator to focus the camera lens but - as all other cine cameras of its era - had a side optical viewfinder to be used during actual filming.

The Parvo was immensely popular in Europe during the silent film era, straight through the 1920's. Directors who particularly liked the camera were Abel Gance, Leni Riefenstahl, and Sergei Eisenstein. The latter's cinematographer, Eduard Tisse, would use the camera into the sound era, i.e. filming the duelling sequence in Alexander Nevsky.

Pathé [1903]

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Charles Morand Pathé [1863-1957], who had earned his first 'capital' with selling Edison Phonographs, saw a new opportunity in the Edison Kinetoscope. In 1895 he went to London and bought pirated Kinetoscopes manufactured by Robert Paul and resold them to fairgrounds in France. His clients became tired of always seeing the same films, and the copies wore out rapidly. Pathé met the engineer and inventor Marie Henry Joseph Joly [1866-1945], who offered to make a camera in order to renew Pathé's stock of films. Pathé advanced the necessary funds and on 26 August 1895, Joly filed his patent for a camera capable of serving both the projector and Kinetoscope. In 1896, Pathé came to understand the importance of the camera-projector manufactured by Joly. He broke with the inventor but reserved for himself the rights to the precious camera and started to exploit the machine and its films, with great success. In September 1896, Charles and his brothers Émile, Théophile and Jacques founded their company Société Pathé Frères, whose office was at the rue de Richelieu, Paris. The aim of the company, at first, was to build cameras and projectors. A year later, the company became the Compagnie Générale de Cinématographes, Phonographes et Pellicules [Anciens Établissements Pathé Frères] under the direction of Émile for the phonograph and of Charles for the cinematograph. In August 1900 the company merged with the Manufacture Française d'Appareils de Précision to form the Compagnie Générale de Phonographes, Cinématographes et Appareils de Précision. From then on Charles Pathé developed both the manufacture of negative and positive film, the creation of factories and studios, and the making of cameras and projectors.

The camera above was built by Pathé around 1903. The design of the camera [hand-cranked (the crank handle projected from the back of the camera) - leather covered wood - 2x 400ft magazines on top] was closely based on that of the original Lumière camera, but it was rather larger, and also had a few extra features.

"The camera lens was mounted on a precision dovetail/keyway and focus change was actuated by an external lever against a calibrated scale. The lens iris was controlled by an external lever and scale. The opening of the rotary shutter was controlled externally. Originally the rotating shutter had a fixed opening but later refinements provided an adjustable opening shutter. Further refinements provided an adjustable shutter that could produce lap dissolves from an external control. The camera hand crank input could be used for the standard 16fps or variations thereof. A separate hand crank input access was provided for a single frame per turn for special effects or animation.

"Just before WW1 the Pathé studio camera was the most used movie camera in the world. In America the Pathé camera was copied by the Sigmund Lubin studio and by the Wilart Instrument Company. They both added metal bodies.

"With the introduction of the great Bell & Howell 2709 cine camera in 1911 the popularity of the Pathé began to wane.

"During the post war period there was still difficulty in producing a good copy negative from the original negative. Two negatives were required so that the second one could be expeditiously sent to Europe for that concurrent movie market. Often two cameras were operated at the same site so as to generate two original negatives. The Pathé was increasingly delegated to the second camera designation." [From article by Wes Lambert in the Summer 1994 issue of the 'Operating Cameraman'.]

The Studio model of the Pathé camera was still extensively used in Europe in the early 1920's, and even in America some impoverished [the price of the camera was $ 552] or conservative cameramen continued to use it.

"The Pathé camera was commonly called a cracker box, because of its light wooden construction. It might with more justice have been called a Pandora's box, for all the troubles it could loose upon a poor defenseless cameraman. Something was forever going wrong with these Pathé's, so something was forever having to be fixed, generally with the black sticky tape used by electricians." [Karl Brown in 'Adventures with D.W. Griffith', 1973.]

French producer, manufacturer

Charles Pathé, the third son of Jacques and Émilie Pathé, established pork butchers, was born at Chevry-Cossigny, a market town in the Seine et Marne Départment, on 26 December 1863. After what he later described as a difficult childhood and youth, lengthy military service and a hazardous journey in South America, Charles returned to France and, in October 1893, he married. While working for a meagre salary for a lawyer, he chanced on the novelty of the moment, the Edison Phonograph, which was a sensation at the Vincennes Fair on the east of Paris and with partly borrowed money, he bought one. On 9 September 1894 he returned with his wife to one of the best known fairs of the period, that of Monthéty to the east of Paris, and in the one day, at a charge of 20 centimes a listener, made 200 francs. Quickly seeing the advantages of selling rather than using the Phonograph, he bought three examples in London, and successfully resold them. Shortly after, another curiosity appeared - the Edison Kinetoscope. Charles, who had opened a shop at 72, cours de Vincennes in Paris, revisited London in 1895, bought pirated Kinetoscopes manufactured by Robert Pauland resold them to fairgrounds. Later in 1895, he was associated for a while with Henri Jolywho manufactured for him a camera to take films for the Kinetoscope.

But the future of Charles Pathé was decided by the arrival of the Lumière Cinématographe. On 28 September 1896, with his brother Émile, he formed the Société Pathé Frères, whose office was at 98, rue de Richelieu in Paris. A year later, the company became, thanks to a certain Claude Grivolas, the Compagnie Générale de Cinématographes, Phonographes et Pellicules (Anciens Établissements Pathé Frères) with the two brothers as directors. From then on, the company, under the direction of Émile for the phonograph and of Charles for the cinematograph, flourished, expanded and sold all over the world. 'I did not invent the cinema, but I industrialised it' wrote Charles Pathé later. A modest first factory had been installed since 1896 at Vincennes. Charles Pathé himself probably made the first films of the Société Pathé Frères such as Le Passage à niveau à Joinville le Pont and L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de Bel-Air. For several years the phonograph underwrote the success of the company. In 1898, a phonograph cylinder factory was built at Chatou, west of Paris and, in 1903, enlarged. In August 1900 the company amalgamated with the Manufacture Française d'Appareils de Précision, (Anciens Établissements René Bünzli et Victor Continsouza) to form the Compagnie Générale de Phonographes, Cinématographes et Appareils de Précision. From then on Charles Pathé developed both the manufacture of negative and positive film, the creation of factories and studios, and the making of cameras and projectors for sale worldwide.

From 1902, new film studios and new factories for the manufacture and development of film were constructed at Vincennes, at Montreuil sous Bois and at Joinville le Pont. The company then extended, creating branches all over the world: February 1904, Moscow; July 1904, New York, and so on. At the beginning of 1908 Charles Pathé decided to create centres of film production abroad more or less independent of the French parent company: in 1909 at Rome and Moscow, in 1910 in the United States at Jersey City, and later in Holland, in Belgium, etc. The number of films produced continued to increase growing from seventy in 1901 to nearly 800 in 1912. In 1907, Charles Pathé, following English and American practice, started to rent his films instead of selling them. A little earlier, he had undertaken, in collaboration with exhibitors, the construction of permanent halls of which the first, the Omnia-Pathé in Paris, opened on 15 December 1906. By now many Pathé films were hand-coloured, but very quickly, mechanical colouring processes were perfected in the company's laboratories and by 1912, the Pathé-Color process was used in at least one film in five. In 1912, Charles Pathé, who had proposed the idea in 1909, created the famous Pathé Kok, 'the home cinema' in 28 mm format that the Pathé-Baby was to supplant in 1922.

As the company had expanded, Charles had surrounded himself with numerous devoted collaborators: commercial travellers and branch managers such as Sigmund Popert, J. A. Berst, Hache; directors or producers such as Ferdinand Zecca, Albert Capellani, Pierre Decourcelle, Paul Gugenheim or Louis J. Gasnier; chemists or engineers such as Jacques Marette, Henri Garrel; experts like Dr J. Comandon and a whole galaxy of valued performers to whom Charles Pathé paid tribute in his memoirs. Charles Pathé, in addition to having the obstinacy and drive needed to create and lead the company that carries his name, was a shrewd and pragmatic businessman with an exceptional commercial talent. However, Charles Pathé, co-director in 1912 with his brother Émile, was obliged from early 1914, to attempt to restructure this huge empire. But four years of war provoked the breakup of the firm. In 1927, with the creation of Kodak-Pathé, Charles Pathé retired. He died at Monaco on his 94th birthday.

Prestwich Model 4 [1898]

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Designed by John Alfred Prestwich [1874-1952] and manufactured by the Prestwich Manufacturing Company in London, England, in ca. 1898. The camera had 400ft external magazines.
The first cameras had the magazines on the outside of the camera, but Prestwich and all the other camera manufacturers, except for Pathé, soon decided that for reasons of light leaking on the film it was best to enclose the magazines inside the camera body.
When there are no second takes, reliability of the camera is of the utmost importance. This is the reason Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer and cinematographer of the Shackleton Antarctic Expedition, chose a Prestwich as his cine camera. In October 1914, Hurley sailed on the wooden ship Endurance from Buenos Aires for Antarctica. He had to abandon his camera when the ice crushed the ship on November 21, 1915.

John Alfred Prestwich (1874 – 1952) was an English engineer.

Famous as much for his creation of cinematography projectors as his J. A. P. engines. He worked with S.Z. de Ferranti and later the cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene. He founded the company JA Prestwich Industries Ltd in 1895. He was awarded the Edward Longstreth Medal in 1919.

Léon Bouly

2007-05-08T22:23:00.000+07:00

Léon Guillaume Bouly (1872 – 1932) was a French inventor who created the word cinematograph.

After devising chronophotography devices, Bouly applied a patent on a reversible device of photography and optics for the analysis and synthesis of motions, calling it the Cynématographe Léon Bouly on February 12, 1892. On December 27, 1893, he shortened his device name to cinématographe.

This device is able to perform both, shooting and projection. It uses a sensible film without perforations and all principles required by cinematography are available: the film's jerky sledding is synchronized with the shutter. Two of these devices are conserved in the French Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

In 1894, Bouly could not pay the rent for his patents and the name "cinématographe" became available again, it was patented by the Lumière Brothers who are not its original authors. Today, modern historians agree on the fact Léon Bouly was, before the Lumière Brothers, the true original inventor of the term cinématographe.

Louis Lumiere & Auguste Lumiere

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Louis Jean Lumiere
Louis Jean (5 October 1864, Besançon, France – 6 June 1948, Bandol), were among the earliest filmmakers in history. (Appropriately, "lumière" translates as "light" in English.)

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas

The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas (19 October 1862, Besançon,France – 10 April 1954, Lyon)

HISTORY

The Lumière brothers were born in Besançon, France, in 1862 and 1864, and moved to Lyon in 1870, where both attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon.[3] Their father, Claude-Antoine Lumière (1840–1911), ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for him: Louis as a physicist and Auguste as a manager. Louis had made some improvements to the still-photograph process, the most notable being the dry-plate process, which was a major step towards moving images.

It was not until their father retired in 1892 that the brothers began to create moving pictures. They patented a number of significant processes leading up to their film camera - most notably film perforations (originally implemented by Emile Reynaud) as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. Thecinématographe itself was patented on 13 February 1895 and the first footage ever to be recorded using it was recorded on March 19 1895. This first film shows workers leaving the Lumière factory.

FIRST FILM SCREENING

The Lumières held their first private screening of projected motion pictures in 1895. Their first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.

It is believed their first film was actually recorded that same year (1895) with Léon Bouly'scinématographe device, which was patented the previous year. The cinématographe — a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures — was further developed by the Lumières.

The public debut at the Grand Café came a few months later and consisted of the following ten short films (in order of presentation):

La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (literally, "the exit from the Lumière factories in Lyon", or, under its more common English title, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory), 46 seconds
La Voltige ("Horse Trick Riders"), 46 seconds
La Pêche aux poissons rouges ("fishing for goldfish"), 42 seconds
Le Débarquement du Congrès de Photographie à Lyon ("the disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyon"), 48 seconds
Les Forgerons ("Blacksmiths"), 49 seconds
Le Jardinier (l'Arroseur Arrosé) ("The Gardener," or "The Sprinkler Sprinkled"), 49 seconds
Le Repas ("Baby's Breakfast"), 41 seconds
Le Saut à la couverture ("Jumping Onto the Blanket"), 41 seconds
La Place des Cordeliers à Lyon ("Cordeliers Square in Lyon"--a street scene), 44 seconds
La Mer (Baignade en mer) ("the sea [bathing in the sea]"), 38 seconds

The Lumières went on tour with the cinématographe in 1896 - visiting Bombay, London, New York and Buenos Aires.

The moving images had an immediate and significant influence on popular culture with L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat (literally, "the arrival of a train at La Ciotat Station", but more commonly known as Arrival of a Train at a Station) and Carmaux, défournage du coke(Drawing out the coke). Their actuality films, or actualités, are often cited as the first, primitive documentaries. They also made the first steps towards comedy film with the slapstick of L'Arroseur Arrosé.

Lumiere Brothers

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Lumière Cinématographe [1895]

The brothers Louis [1864-1948] and Auguste Lumière [1862-1954] were the most successful photographic plate manufacturers in France. They first saw an Edison Kinetoscope in the summer of 1894. Impressed by the demonstration but put off by the high prices demanded by Edison's agents, they decided to develop their own product. In February 1895, they patented a combined camera, projector and printer, which used an intermittent claw derived from the mechanism used in sewing machines to move the cloth. The intermittent pull-down of the film was accomplished by a claw driven by two cams, one of which produced the vertical motion of the claw, and the other its insertion into the sprocket holes in the film before pulldown, and then its withdrawal afterwards. The apparatus was called the Cinématographe. [The small box on top contained the unexposed negative.

The first public presentation was made at the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale in Paris on 22 March 1895. The public saw a one-minute film of workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons ['La sortie des usines Lumière']. Encouraged by its reception, further films were made and for the first time on 28 December 1895 an audience [33 persons] paid to see projected, moving photographic pictures in the 'Salon Indien' of the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucins, Paris.

At the end of October 1895, Jules Carpentier [1851-1921] began to manufacture the Cinématographe [the first model had been built at Lyons]. The machine traveled to and fro between Lyons and Paris, for the final delicate adjustments, and the definitive model was finished by the end of the year. Lumière then asked Carpentier to make 200 of them. Carpentier continued to work with Lumière: at least 700 or 800 Cinématographes were eventually made.

Lumiere Film

Classic Motion Picture Camera

2007-05-05T18:41:00.001+07:00

Bouly Cinématographe [1892]

Manufactured by Léon-Guillaume Bouly [1872-1932] in Paris, France. In the Bouly Cinématographe, the film is driven by a segmental roller, and stopped intermittently by a pressure pad. Bouly deposited a second patent, 27 December 1893, for a machine said to be capable of both filming and projecting. The Bouly bands were not perforated, and would not have given a steady projection.

Cinematography 3

2007-04-20T18:37:00.002+07:00

Frame rate selection
Main article: Frame rate

Motion picture images are presented to an audience at a constant speed. In the theater it is 24 frames per second, in NTSC (US) Television it is 30 frames per second (29.97 to be exact), in PAL (Europe) television it is 25 frames per second. This speed of presentation does not vary.

However, by varying the speed at which the image is captured, various effects can be created knowing that the faster or slower recorded image will be played at a constant speed.

For instance, time-lapse photography is created by exposing an image at an extremely slow rate. If a cinematographer sets a camera to expose one frame every minute for four hours, and then that footage is projected at 24 frames per second, the event that took four hours to record will now take 10 seconds to present (1 frame per minute for 4 hours equals 240 frames, projected at 24 frames per second equals 10 seconds). This compresses the event that took place in four hours into just 10 seconds. At this speed, one can present the events of a whole day (24 hours) in just one minute. The inverse of this, if an image is captured at speeds above that at which they will be presented, the effect is to greatly slow down (slow motion) the image. If a cinematographer shoots a person diving into a pool at 96 frames per second, and that image is presented back at 24 frames per second, it will take 4 times as long to watch the dive as it did for it to actually happen. Taken to extremes, capturing many thousands of frames per second can allow visual representation of events normally invisible to the human eye, such as bullets in flight and shockwaves travelling through media, a potentially powerful cinematographical technique.

In motion pictures the manipulation of time and space is a considerable contributing factor to the narrative storytelling tools. Film editingplays a much stronger role in this manipulation, but frame rate selection in the photography of the original action is also a contributing factor to altering time.

Speed ramping, or simply "ramping", is a process whereby the capture frame rate of the camera changes over time. For example, if in the course of 10 seconds of capture, the capture frame rate is adjusted from 60 frames per second to 24 frames per second, when played back at the standard film rate of 24 frames per second, a unique time-manipulation effect is achieved. For example, someone pushing a door open and walking out into the street would appear to start off in slow-motion, but in a few seconds later within the same shot the person would appear to walk in "realtime" (normal speed). The opposite speed-ramping is done in The Matrix when Neo re-enters the Matrix for the first time to see the Oracle. As he comes out of the warehouse "load-point", the camera zooms into Neo at normal speed but as it gets closer to Neo's face, time seems to slow down, perhaps visually accentuating Neo pausing and reflecting a moment, and perhaps alluding to future manipulation of time itself within the Matrix later on in the movie.

ROLE OF CINEMATOGRAPHY

In the film industry, the cinematographer is responsible for the technical aspects of the images (lighting, lens choices, composition, exposure, filtration, film selection), but works closely with the director to ensure that the artistic aesthetics are supporting the director's vision of the story being told. The cinematographers are the heads of the camera, grip and lighting crew on a set, and for this reason they are often called directors of photography or DPs.

Directors of photography make many creative and interpretive decisions during the course of their work, from pre-production to post-production, all of which affect the overall feel and look of the motion picture. Many of these decisions are similar to what a photographerneeds to note when taking a picture: the cinematographer controls the film choice itself (from a range of available stocks with varying sensitivities to light and color), the selection of lens focal lengths, aperture exposure and focus. Cinematography, however, has a temporal aspect (see persistence of vision), unlike still photography, which is purely a single still image. It is also bulkier and more strenuous to deal with movie cameras, and it involves a more complex array of choices. As such a cinematographer often needs to work co-operatively with more people than does a photographer, who could frequently function as a single person. As a result, the cinematographer's job also includes personnel management and logistical organization.

Cinematography 2

2007-04-15T18:33:00.020+07:00

Lens

Lenses can be attached to the camera to give a certain look, feel, or effect by focus, color, etc.

As does the human eye, the camera creates perspective and spatial relations with the rest of the world. However, unlike one's eye, a cinematographer can select different lenses for different purposes. Variation in focal length is one of the chief benefits. The focal length of the lens determines the angle of view and, therefore, the field of view. Cinematographers can choose from a range of wide angle lenses, "normal" lenses and telephoto lenses, as well as macro lenses and other special effect lens systems such as borescope lenses. Wide-angle lenses have short focal lengths and make spatial distances more obvious. A person in the distance is shown as much smaller while someone in the front will loom large. On the other hand, telephoto lenses reduce such exaggerations, depicting far-off objects as seemingly close together and flattening perspective. The differences between the perspective rendering is actually not due to the focal length by itself, but by the distance between the subjects and the camera. Therefore, the use of different focal lengths in combination with different camera to subject distances creates these different rendering. Changing the focal length only while keeping the same camera position doesn't affect perspective but the angle of view only. A Zoom lens allows a camera operator to change their focal length within a shot or quickly between setups for shots. As prime lenses offer greater optical quality and are "faster" (larger aperture openings, usable in less light) than zoom lenses, they are often employed in professional cinematography over zoom lenses. Certain scenes or even types of filmmaking, however, may require the use of zooms for speed or ease of use, as well as shots involving a zoom move.

As in other photography, the control of the exposed image is done in the lens with the control of the diaphragm aperture. For proper selection, the cinematographer needs that all lenses be engraved with T-Stop, not f-stop, so that the eventual light loss due to the glass doesn't affect the exposure control when setting it using the usual meters. The choice of the aperture also affects image quality (aberrations) and depth of field (see below).

Depth of field and focus

Focal length and diaphragm aperture affect the depth of field of a scene — that is, how much the background, mid-ground and foreground will be rendered in "acceptable focus" (only one exact plane of the image is in precise focus) on the film or video target. Depth of field (not to be confused with depth of focus) is determined by the aperture size and the focal distance. A large or deep depth of field is generated with a very small iris aperture and focusing on a point in the distance, whereas a shallow depth of field will be achieved with a large (open) iris aperture and focusing closer to the lens. Depth of field is also governed by the format size. 70 mm film has much more depth of field for the same focal length lens than does 35 mm. 16 mm has even less and most digital video cameras have less depth of field than 16 mm. But if one considers the field of view and angle of view, the smaller the image is, the shorter the focal length should be, as to keep the same field of view. Then, the smaller the image is, the more depth of field is obtained, for the same field of view. Therefore, 70mm has less depth of field than 35mm for a given field of view, 16mm more than 35mm, and video cameras even more depth of field than 16mm. As videographers try to emulate the look of 35 mm film with digital cameras, this is one issue of frustration - excessive depth of field with digital cameras and using additional optical devices to reduce that depth of field.

In Citizen Kane (1941), cinematographer Gregg Toland and director Orson Welles used tighter apertures to create very large depth of field in the scenes, often rendering every detail of the foreground and background of the sets in sharp focus. This practice is known as deep focus. Deep focus became a popular cinematographic device from the 1940s onwards in Hollywood. Today, the trend is for more shallow focus.

To change the plane of focus from one object or character to another within a shot is commonly known as a rack focus.

Aspect ratio and framing

The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. This can be expressed either as a ratio of 2 integers, such as 4:3, or in a decimal format, such as 1.33:1 or simply 1.33.

Different ratios provide different aesthetic effects. Standards for aspect ratio have varied significantly over time.

During the silent era, aspect ratios varied widely, from square 1:1, all the way up to the extreme widescreen 4:1 Polyvision. However, from the 1910s, silent motion pictures generally settled on the ratio of 4:3 (1.33). The introduction of sound-on-film briefly narrowed the aspect ratio, to allow room for a sound stripe. In 1932 a new standard was introduced, the Academy ratio of 1.37, by means of thickening theframe line.

For years, mainstream cinematographers were limited to using the Academy ratio, but in the 1950s, thanks to the popularity of Cinerama,widescreen ratios were introduced in an effort to pull audiences back into the theater and away from their home television sets. These new widescreen formats provided cinematographers a wider frame within which to compose their images.

Many different proprietary photographic systems were invented and utilized in the 1950s to create widescreen movies, but one dominates film today: the anamorphic process, which optically squeezes the image to photograph twice the horizontal area to the same size vertical as standard "spherical" lenses.

The first commonly used anamorphic format was CinemaScope, which used a 2.35 aspect ratio, although it was originally 2.55. CinemaScope was used from 1953 to 1967, but due to technical flaws in the design and its ownership by Fox, several third-party companies, led by Panavision's technical improvements in the 1950s, now dominate the anamorphic cine lens market.

Changes to SMPTE projection standards altered the projected ratio from 2.35 to 2.39 in 1970, although this did not change anything regarding the photographic anamorphic standards; all changes in respect to the aspect ratio of anamorphic 35 mm photography are specific to camera or projector gate sizes, not the optical system.

After the "widescreen wars" of the 1950s, the motion-picture industry settled into 1.85 as a standard for theatrical projection in the United States and the United Kingdom. This is a cropped version of 1.37. Europe and Asia opted for 1.66 at first, although 1.85 has largely permeated these markets in recent decades. Certain "epic" or adventure movies utilized the anamorphic 2.39.

In the 1990s, with the advent of high-definition video, television engineers created the 1.78 (16:9) ratio as a mathematical compromise between the theatrical standard of 1.85 and television's 1.33, as it was not practical to produce a traditional CRT television tube with a width of 1.85. Until that point, nothing had ever been originated in 1.78. Today, this is a standard for high-definition video and for widescreen television. Some cinema films are now shot using HDTV cameras.

Lighting

Light is necessary to create an image exposure on a frame of film or on a digital target (CCD, etc.). The art of lighting for cinematography goes far beyond basic exposure, however, into the essence of visual storytelling. Lighting contributes considerably to the emotional response an audience has watching a motion picture.

Camera movement
Main article: Cinematic techniques

One aspect of cinematography that strongly separates it from still photography (aside from having a moving subject) is the ability to move the camera, which represents the audience's viewpoint or perspective, during the course of filming. This movement plays a considerable role in the emotional language of film images and the audience's emotional reaction to the action on the screen. Techniques range from the most basic movements of panning (horizontal shift in viewpoint from a fixed position; like turning your head side-to-side) and tilting (vertical shift in viewpoint from a fixed position; like tipping your head back to look at the sky or down to look at the ground) to dollying (placing the camera on a moving platform to move it closer or farther from the subject), tracking (placing the camera on a moving platform to move it to the left or right), craning (moving the camera in a vertical position; being able to lift it off the ground as well as swing it side-to-side from a fixed base position), and combinations of the above.

Cameras have been mounted to nearly every imaginable form of transportation.

Most cameras can also be handheld, that is the camera operator literally holds the camera in their hands and moves from one position to another while filming the action. Personal stabilizing platforms came into being in the late 1970s through the invention of Garrett Brown, which became known as the Steadicam. The Steadicam is a body harness and stabilization arm that connects to the camera that allows the operator to move naturally while completely isolating the movements of their body from the movements of the camera. After the Steadicam patent expired in the early 1990s, many other companies began manufacturing their concept of the personal camera stabilizer.

François Truffaut 2

2007-03-15T12:22:00.000+07:00

Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés) is a French film directed by François Truffaut, released in 1968.
Follows the "Adventures of Antoine Doinel" from The 400 Blows and begins his relation to Christine; it is followed by Bed & Board and Love on the Run.

Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) loves his new sweetheart, violinist Christine Darbon (Claude Jade). Christine is with friends when he drops by, and her parents must entertain Antoine themselves. After she learns that Antoine has returned from military service, she goes to greet him at his new job as a hotel night clerk. It is a promising sign that perhaps this time, the romance will turn out happily for Antoine.

Two English Girls (original French title: Les deux anglaises et le continent, UK Title:Anne and Muriel), is a film directed by François Truffaut and based on a 1956 novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Claude, Kika Markham as Anne, and Stacey Tendeter as Muriel.
Une histoire d'eau (English: A Story of Water) is a film directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut in 1961. It recounts the story of a woman's trip to Paris, which is surrounded by a large flooded area.

François Truffaut

2007-03-14T17:20:00.005+07:00

François Roland Truffaut (French IPA: [tʀyˈfo]) (February 6, 1932 – October 21, 1984) was one of the founders of the French "New Wave" in filmmaking, and remains an icon of the French film industry. In a film career lasting just over a quarter of a century, he fulfilled the functions of screenwriter, director, producer or actor in over twenty-five films. --

Filmography :

Jules and Jim (French: Jules et Jim) is a 1961 film by François Truffaut based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché.

The film is set before, during and after the First World War in several different parts of France and Germany. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy writer from Austria who makes friends with the more extroverted Jim (Henri Serre). They share an interest in the world of the arts and the Bohemian life. Early in the movie, they become entranced with a statue of a goddess, smiling serenely.

The Bicycle Thief

2007-03-09T17:16:00.001+07:00

Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Story of the person who live in Italy at that moment.
We know that in 1948, was having the trouble looking for something that might be stolen.

Father (Lamberto Maggiorani) and son (Enzo Staiola) that looking all over the Italy and got so many trouble's. This film like any other movie such as "LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL" and that was heartfelt drama.

Premise

2006-10-03T18:18:00.000+07:00

prem·ise

n. also

1. A proposition upon which an argument is based or from which a conclusion is drawn.

2. Logic

a. One of the propositions in a deductive argument.

b. Either the major or the minor proposition of a syllogism, from which the conclusion is drawn.

3. premises Law The preliminary or explanatory statements or facts of a document, as in a deed.

4. premises

a. Land and the buildings on it.

b. A building or part of a building.

v. prem·ised, prem·is·ing, prem·is·es

v.tr.

1. To state in advance as an introduction or explanation.

2. To state or assume as a proposition in an argument.

v.intr.

To make a premise.

[Middle English premisse, from Old French, from Medieval Latin praemissa (proposition), (the proposition) put before, premise, from Latin, feminine past participle of praemittere, to set in front :prae-, pre- + mittere, to send.]

Word History: Why do we call a single building the premises? To answer this question, we must go back to the Middle Ages. But first, let it be noted that premises comes from the past participlepraemissa, which is both a feminine singular and a neuter plural form of the Latin verb praemittere, "to send in advance, utter by way of preface, place in front, prefix." In Medieval Latin the feminine formpraemissa was used as a term in logic, for which we still use the term premise descended from the Medieval Latin word (first recorded in a work composed before 1380). Medieval Latin praemissa in the plural meant "things mentioned before" and was used in legal documents, almost always in the plural, a use that was followed in Old French and Middle English, both of which borrowed the word from Latin. A more specific legal sense in Middle English, "that property, collectively, which is specified in the beginning of a legal document and which is conveyed, as by grant," was also always in the plural in Middle English and later Modern English. And so it remained when this sense was extended to mean "a house or building with its grounds or appurtenances," a usage first recorded before 1730.

Film Philosophy

2006-09-30T14:38:00.000+07:00

Have you ever heard words "Filmosophy".. what is exactly is this? Filmosophy is from Film Philosophy.

Film Philosophy
Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. The book coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of ‘film-thinking’, arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic ‘intent’ about the characters, spaces and events of film. With discussions of contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke and the Dardenne brothers, this timely intervention into the study of film and philosophy will stir argument and discussion among both filmgoers and filmmakers alike.
Daniel Frampton is a London-based writer and filmmaker, and the
founding editor of the salon-journal Film-Philosophy.

The important thing about philosophy to adapted their movie is when they write the story. Know well the PREMISE. Premise of a film or screenplay is the fundamental concept that drives the plot.

A good premise can usually be expressed very simply, and many films can be identified simply from a short sentence describing the premise.

The filmmaker still really need to understand what is philosophy of their works, their script, their screenplay and they can really imagine what exactly they need it for the set. The basic cinema is to know the film philosophy on their film.

Cinematography 1

2005-10-03T06:29:00.002+07:00

Cinematography (from Greek: kinema - κίνημα "movement" and graphein - γράφειν "to record"), is the making of lighting and camerachoices when recording photographic images for the cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography. Many additional issues arise when both the camera and elements of the scene may be in motion, though this also greatly increases the creative possibilities of the process.

HISTORY

The first attempt at cinematography can be traced back to the world's first motion picture film,Roundhay Garden Scene.[citation needed] It was a sequence directed by Louis Le Prince, Frenchinventor and showman, on October 14, 1888 in the garden at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, Leeds,West Yorkshire, England.[citation needed] This groundbreaking event happened seven years before theLumière Brothers' Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon made the first paid exhibition on December 28, 1895 at Le Grand Café, in Paris, France.[citation needed]. This date is known as the birth of cinema since it was the first time the cycle of production-distribution-exhibition happened. The European city soon became the motion picture capital of the world.

Cinematography is an art form unique to motion pictures. Although the exposing of images on light-sensitive elements dates back to the early 1800s (Canadian Geographic), motion pictures demanded a new form of photography and new aesthetic techniques.

In the infancy of motion pictures, the cinematographer was usually also the director and the person physically handling the camera. As the art form and technology evolved, a separation between director and camera operator emerged. With the advent of artificial lighting and faster (more light sensitive) film stocks, in addition to technological advancements in optics and various techniques such as color film and widescreen, the technical aspects of cinematography necessitated a specialist in that area.

Cinematography was key during the silent movie era - no sound apart from background music, no dialogue - the films depended on lighting, acting and set.

In 1919, in Hollywood, the new motion picture capital of the world, one of the first (and still existing) trade societies was formed: theAmerican Society of Cinematographers (ASC), which stood to recognize the cinematographer's contribution to the art and science of motion picture making. Similar trade associations have been established in other countries, too.

The ASC defines cinematography asa creative and interpretive process that culminates in the authorship of an original work of art rather than the simple recording of a physical event. Cinematography is not a subcategory of photography. Rather, photography is but one craft that the cinematographer uses in addition to other physical, organizational, managerial, interpretive and image-manipulating techniques to effect one coherent process.

ASPECTS

Film stock

Cinematography can begin with rolls of film or a digital image sensor. Advancements in film emulsion and grain structure have provided a wide range of available film stocks. The selection of a film stock is one of the first decisions they must make during any film production.

Aside from the film gauge selection — 8 mm (amateur), 16 mm (semi-professional), 35 mm (professional) and 65 mm (epic photography, rarely used except in special event venues) — the cinematographer has a selection of stocks in reversal (which, when developed, create a positive image) and negative formats along with a wide range of film speeds (varying sensitivity to light) from ISO 50 (slow, least sensitive to light) to 800 (very fast, extremely sensitive to light) and differing response to color (low saturation, high saturation) and contrast (varying levels between pure black (no exposure) and pure white (complete overexposure)).

Advancements and adjustments to nearly all gauges of film created the "super" variety wherein the area of the film used to capture a single frame of an image is expanded, although the physical gauge of the film remains the same. Super 8 mm, Super 16 mm and Super 35 mm are all formats that utilize more of the overall film area for the image than their "regular" non-super counterparts.

The larger the film gauge, the higher the overall image resolution clarity and technical quality.

The techniques used by the film laboratory to process the film stock can also offer a considerable variance in the image produced. By controlling the temperature and varying the duration in which the film is soaked in the development chemicals and by skipping certain chemical processes (or partially skipping them), cinematographers can achieve very different looks from a single film stock in the laboratory. Some techniques that can be used are push processing, bleach bypass and cross processing.

Digital imaging has no film stocks, but the cameras themselves can be adjusted in ways that go far beyond the abilities of one particular film stock. They can provide varying degrees of color sensitivity, image contrast, light sensitivity and so on. One camera can achieve all the various looks of different emulsions, although it is heavily argued as to which method of capturing an image is the "best" method. Digital image adjustments (ISO, contrast etc.) are executed by estimating the same adjustments that would take place if actual film were in use, and are thus vulnerable to the cameras sensor designers perceptions of various film stocks and image adjustment parameters.

FILTERS

Filters, such as diffusion filters or color-effect filters, are also widely used to enhance mood or dramatic effects. Most photographic filters are made up of two pieces of optical glass glued together with some form of image or light manipulation material between the glass. In the case of color filters, there is often a translucent color medium pressed between two planes of optical glass. Color filters work by blocking out certain color wavelengths of light from reaching the film. With color film, this works very intuitively wherein a blue filter will cut down on the passage of red, orange and yellow light and create a blue tint on the film. In black and white photography, color filters are used somewhat counter intuitively; for instance a yellow filter, which cuts down on blue wavelengths of light, can be used to darken a daylight sky (by eliminating blue light from hitting the film, thus greatly underexposing the mostly blue sky), while not biasing most human flesh tone. Certain cinematographers, such as Christopher Doyle, are well known for their innovative use of filters. Filters can be used in front of the lens or, in some cases, behind the lens for different effects.

Thank You

2005-05-05T15:30:00.003+07:00

Thank you for my visitor that finally I could make some blog about film/movie theory. This is not enough information, I will always try to make it better and rich of film education.