America on Film. Sean Griffin

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Название America on Film
Автор произведения Sean Griffin
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Серия
Издательство Кинематограф, театр
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781118743881



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and figures.

      ABOUT THE COMPANION WEBSITE

      This book is accompanied by a companion website:

      www.wiley.com/go/Benshoff/Americaonfilm3e

      The website includes:

       Case studies

Part I CULTURE AND AMERICAN FILM

      The purpose of this book is to analyze how American films have represented race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability throughout the twentieth century and into the early twenty‐first. It is a basic principle of this work that by studying American film history, we can gain keen insights into the ways that different groups of American people have been treated (and continue to be treated). Images of people on film actively contribute to the ways in which people are understood and experienced in the “real world.” As seminal cultural theorist Richard Dyer has asserted, “Images Matter.” Furthermore, there are multiple and varied connections between film and “real life,” and we need to have agreed‐upon ways of discussing those connections and their ramifications. Therefore, before examining in detail how specific groups of people have been represented within American cinema, we need to understand some preliminary concepts: how film works to represent people and things, how and why social groupings are and have been formed, and how individuals interact with the larger socio‐cultural structures of the United States of America. This chapter introduces some basic ideas about film form, American history, and cultural studies.

      Many entire books have been written analyzing the various formal elements of film but, for the purposes of this basic introduction, they can be broken into five main aspects: literary design, visual design, cinematography, editing, and sound design. The first aspect of film form, literary design, refers to the elements of a film that come from the script and story ideas. The literary design includes the story, the setting, the action, the characters, the characters’ names, the dialog, the film’s title, and any deeper subtexts or thematic meanings. Film is capable of many literary devices: metaphor, irony, satire, allegory, and so forth. Some films are black comedies and must be understood according to that form. Other films are dramas to be taken seriously while still others try to make us laugh by being deliberately juvenile. Yet other films try to shock or provoke us with new and unexpected ideas. Analyzing a movie’s literary design is a good place to start when analyzing a film, but one should not ignore the four other axes of film form and how they contribute to a film’s meaning.

      Another broad aspect of film form has been labeled mise‐en‐scène, a French term for what goes into each individual shot (or uninterrupted run of film). Aspects of mise‐en‐scène include our second and third formal axes: the visual design of what’s being filmed (the choice of sets, costumes, makeup, lighting, color, and actors’ performance and arrangement before the camera) and the cinematographic design – that is, how the camera records the visual elements that have been dictated by the literary design. The cinematographic design includes things like the choice of framing, lenses, camera angle, camera movement, what is in focus and what is not. Each of these choices of mise‐en‐scène can affect the viewer’s feelings toward the story and its characters. A room that is brightly lit may seem comfortable or even festive; that same room with heavy shadows may seem threatening or scary. If everyone in a crowd scene is wearing various shades of gray and black, the viewer will tend to see them as just a crowd; if one person is wearing red, the viewer will tend to focus on that one person. Similarly, a camera shooting up from the floor at a character will create a different feeling than a camera aimed at eye‐level. In yet another example, if only one couple on a dance floor are kept in focus, the viewer will pay attention to them; if the whole ballroom is kept in focus, the viewer may choose to look in a number of directions.

      The fifth and final formal axis of cinema is sound design. Although cinema audiences are usually referred to as viewers or spectators, audiences both watch and listen to films, and the same types of artistic choices that are made with the visual images are also made with the soundtrack. The dialog of some of the characters on the screen is easy to hear, while the dialog of others is inaudible (thus directing the audience member to pay attention to the conversation that the filmmakers want them to pay attention to). Most films have a musical score that the audience can hear but which the characters cannot. Choosing what type of music to play under a scene will greatly affect viewer comprehension – that is why the music is there in the first place – by directing the viewer toward the preferred understanding of the images. Playing a luscious ballad during a scene between a woman and her fiancé helps create a romantic sense, but playing ominous music during the same scene may make the viewer think the man is out to hurt the woman (or vice versa).

      Although this only begins to introduce the subject of film form, these few examples do point out how cinema’s basic aesthetic qualities help to create meaning. Discussing how various types of people are represented in American cinema, then, requires more than analyzing only the stories and the characters. For example, let’s imagine a film about both a white man and a Native American man. The story alternates between the two characters, showing their daily activities: getting up, eating, interacting with their family and friends,