ComS 142: Film as Communication

Cinema and Place

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Syllabi to ComS 142

Convention

A subject or technique that makers of textsand audiences have grown to accept asnatural or typical in certain contexts

Genre

Recognizes that audiences watch any one film within

the contexts of other films

•This makes films comprehensible and more or less

familiar. (Turner)

•A Genre is a type of film that has its own set of

conventions

Examples of genres?Ways that genre conventions can be broken:

Identification vs Alienation

• When Cinematic Conventions are followed: Identification Occurs

• What is the experience of identification?

• Alienation tends to occur when conventions are not followed

• What does the experience of alienation feel like?

Common Film Conventions

• Exposition

• Plausibility

• Naturalistic performances

• Spacial Clarity in Cinematography and Editing

• Casting to type

• Clear Sound

• Music score or audio effects are appropriate to the mood of the film

• Happy Ending

• A story with a beginning, middle and end (narrative and documentary)

• Clarity of Genre

• Complete removal of the apparatus

Alienation: going against conventions

• Limited or no exposition--or exposition is illogical

• Everything in the story seems impossible (this can be subjective)

• Bad acting, super low-key acting, melodramatic acting

• Lack of spatial clarity

• Casting against type

• improper sound levels, muddled or out of sync sound

• Music score, effects or etc. do not seem to match the mood of the film

• A story that is not structured in a linear way

• Genre inconsistency

• Apparatus is apparent in the film

The Bicycle Thief / Bicycle Thieves (1949) by Vittorio De Sica

• Intrenched as an official masterpiece

•Given an honorary Oscar in 1949, routinely voted one of the greatest films of all time

•Vittorio De Sica, who believed that everyone could play one role perfectly: himself.

•Written by Cesare Zavattini

•De Sica and his writer were found inspiration close to the ground in those days right after the war, when Italy was paralyzed by poverty

•Lamberto Maggiorani, not a professional actor, as Ricci

•De Sica and others often used real people instead of actors, and the effect, after decades of Hollywood gloss, was startling to audiences.

Neorealism

•often refers to films of working class life, set in the culture of poverty, and with the implicit message that in a better society wealth would be more evenly distributed.

•Italian directors, newly freed from Fascist censorship, were able to merge a desire for cinematic realism (a tendency already present during the Fascist period) with social, political, and economic themes that would never have been tolerated by the regime

•Chronicled the average, undramatic daily events in the lives of common people with the assistance of a literate script

Neorealism Cont.

•the "happy ending" they associated with Hollywood was to be avoided at all costs.

•Neorealism preferred location shooting rather than studio work, as well as the grainy kind of photography associated with documentary newsreels

•The most influential critical appraisals of Italian neorealism today emphasize the fact that Italian neorealist cinema rested upon artifice as much as realism and established, in effect, its own particular realist conventions