YALE FILM STUDIES
Film Analysis Web Site 2.0
WHAT THE FILM ANALYSIS GUIDE COVERS
Welcome to the Yale Film Analysis Web Site.
The Film Analysis Guide was developed to meet the needs of faculty and students at Yale who are interested in becoming familiar with the vocabulary of film studies and the techniques of cinema. The user can either read the complete document or search out a particular topic of interest. -- Related links within the Guide are provided as appropriate, as are links to film clips illustrating the topic or term in question.
HOW THE GUIDE IS ORGANIZED
The Guide is broken into six parts corresponding to the major divisions within cinema technique and film studies. These major divisions are further broken down into sections, subsections and definitions for terms. The final Part (Analysis) offers basic examples of how to analyze two film sequences.
NAVIGATING THE GUIDE
If you see a drop down menu in the left frame, but no table of contents, click on the button below. (This problem occasionally arises with some older browsers that are unable to understand the particular JavaScript instructions used to create the table of contents.)
There are multiple ways to navigate the Film Analysis Guide, depending on the type of browser being used and the visitor's needs. For those who wish to read the Guide straight through without skipping around, the complete site can be navigated using the forward and backward arrows visible at the top and bottom of each page.
Most users are likely to prefer to browse the site using the navigational tools offered in the left frame. The content for each of the major divisions (e.g., cinematography) is clustered in a single web page. In addition, particular topics within the major divisions can be accessed by expanding the table of contents and clicking on the relevant link or by using the alphabetized index and search function. If you are unfamiliar with navigating this sort of site, more detailed instructions can be found in the menu item labeled About this Guide.
You can view the complete list of film clips used in the Guide by choosing the Film Clips option on the drop down menu to the left.
CONVENTIONS USED IN THIS GUIDE
When the film icon appears next to an image, that means that a film clip can be viewed that illustrates the relevant topic or term. Click on the icon to start the clip. In order to view the clips, you must have the Windows Media Player and browser plug-in installed on your computer. If you do not, they can be downloaded for free at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/default.asp.
Cross-links within the Guide are offered to direct the user to related concepts or to provide a more detailed discussion of a particular topic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Yale University's Film Study Center houses a large collection of films on a variety of formats. Click on Film Study Center or use the drop down menu on the left frame from anywhere within this site to learn more.
Yale University Libraries host a research guide on film studies which will help you to find film related articles and publications. The URL is http://www.library.yale.edu/humanities/film/.
Click here, or on the drop down menu to check our weekly list of On-Campus Film Screenings.
FEEDBACK
Send comments, corrections and suggestions about this site to Mariano Prunes.
CREDITS
Mariano Prunes, Michael Raine, Mary Litch
Part 1: Basic Terms
AUTEUR
French for "author". Used by critics writing for Cahiers du cinema and other journals to indicate the figure, usually the director, who stamped a film with his/her own "personality". Opposed to "metteurs en scene" who merely transcribed a work achieved in another medium into film. The concept allowed critics to evaluate highly works of American genre cinema that were otherwise dismissed in favor of the developing European art cinema.
Director Abbas Kiarostami appearing as himself in the last scene of Taste of Cherry (Ta'm e Guilass, Iran, 1997)
DIEGESIS
The diegesis includes objects, events, spaces and the characters that inhabit them, including things, actions, and attitudes not explicitly presented in the film but inferred by the audience. That audience constructs a diegetic world from the material presented in a narrative film. Some films make it impossible to construct a coherent diegetic world, for example Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad, Alan Resnais, 1961) or even contain no diegesis at all but deal only with the formal properties of film, for instance Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963). The "diegetic world" of the documentary is usually taken to be simply the world, but some drama documentaries test that assumption such as Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes, Luis Buñuel, 1932).
Different media have different forms of diegesis. Henry V (Lawrence Olivier, England, 1944) starts with a long crane shot across a detailed model landscape of 16th century London. Over the course of its narrative, the film shifts its diegetic register from the presentational form of the Elizabethan theater to the representational form of mainstream narrative cinema.
EDITING
The joining together of clips of film into a single filmstrip. The cut is a simple edit but there are many other possible ways to transition from one shot to another. See the section on editing.
Picture: Yelizaveta Svilova at the editing table of Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Dziga Vertov USSR, 1929)
FLASHBACK FLASHFORWARD
A jump backwards or forwards in diegetic time. With the use of flashback / flashforward the order of events in the plot no longer matches the order of events in the story. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) is a famous film composed almost entirely of flashbacks and flashforwards. The film timeline spans over 60 years, as it traces the life of Charles Foster Kane from his childhood to his deathbed -- and on into the repercussions of his actions on the people around him. Some characters appear at several time periods in the film, usually being interviewed in the present and appearing in the past as they tell the reporter of their memories of Kane. Joseph Cotten, who plays Kane's best friend, is shown here as an old man in a rest home (with the help of some heavy make-up) and as a young man working with Kane in his newspaper.
FOCUS
Focus refers to the degree to which light rays coming from any particular part of an object pass through the lens and reconverge at the same point on a frame of the film negative, creating sharp outlines and distinct textures that match the original object. This optical property of the cinema creates variations in depth of field -- through shallow focus, deep focus, and techniques such as racking focus. Dziga Vertov's films celebrated the power of cinema to create a "communist decoding of reality", most overtly in Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, USSR, 1929).
GENRES
Types of film recognized by audiences and/or producers, sometimes retrospectively. These types are distinguished by narrative or stylistic conventions, or merely by their discursive organization in influential criticism. Genres are made necessary by high volume industrial production, for example in the mainstream cinema of the U.S.A and Japan.
Thriller/Detective film: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
Horror film: Bride of Frankestein (John Whale, 1935)
Western: The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
Musical: Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952)
MISE-EN-SCENE
All the things that are "put in the scene": the setting, the decor, the lighting, the costumes, the performance etc. Narrative films often manipulate the elements of mise-en-scene, such as decor, costume, and acting to intensify or undermine the ostensible significance of a particular scene.
STORY / PLOT
Perhaps more correctly labelled fabula and syuzhet, story refers to all the audience infers about the events that occur in the diegesis on the basis of what they are shown by the plot -- the events that are directly presented in the film. The order, duration, and setting of those events, as well as the relation between them, all constitute elements of the plot. Story is always more extensive than plot even in the most straightforward drama but certain genres, such as the film noir and the thriller, manipulate the relationship of story and plot for dramatic purposes. A film such as Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) forces its audience to continually reconstruct the story told in a temporally convoluted plot.
SCENE / SEQUENCE
A scene is a segment of a narrative film that usually takes place in a single time and place, often with the same characters. Sometimes a single scene may contain two lines of action, occurring in different spaces or even different times, that are related by means of crosscutting. Scene and sequence can usually be used interchangeably, though the latter term can also refer to a longer segment of film that does not obey the spatial and temporal unities of a single scene. For example, a montage sequence that shows in a few shots a process that occurs over a period of time.
SHOT
A single stream of images, uninterrupted by editing. The shot can use a static or a mobile framing, a standard or a non-standard frame rate, but it must be continuous. The shot is one of the basic units of cinema yet has always been subject to manipulation, for example stop-motion cinematography or superimposition. In contemporary cinema, with the use of computer graphics and sequences built-up from a series of still frames (eg. The Matrix), the boundaries of the shot are increasingly being challenged.
Part 2: Mise-en-scene
The representation of space affects the reading of a film. Depth, proximity, size and proportions of the places and objects in a film can be manipulated through camera placement and lenses, lighting, decor, effectively determining mood or relationships between elements in the diegetic world.
Section 1 - Decor
An important elememt of "putting in the scene" is décor, the objects contained in and the setting of a scene. Décor can be used to amplify character emotion or the dominant mood of a film. In these shots from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1969) the futuristic furniture and reduced color scheme stress the sterility and impersonality of the space station environment. Later, the digital nature of the HAL computer is represented by the repeating patterns and strong geometrical design of the set.
In Senso (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1954) décor emphazises the social difference between a wealthy married woman in her richly furnished apartment and her soldier lover in the barren military barracks. Ultimately, she finds the contrast so appalling that she ruins her reputation and financial standing in order to satisfy her lover's desire for a luxurious lifestyle.
REAR PROJECTION
Usually used to combine foreground action, often actors in conversation, with a background often shot earlier, on location. Rear projection provides an economical way to set films in exotic or dangerous locations without having to transport expensive stars or endure demanding conditions. In some films, the relationship between scenes shot on location and scenes shot using rear projection becomes a signifying pattern. In other films, it's just cheap...
Rear projection is featured extensively in Douglas Sirk's lush melodrama Written On The Wind (1956). Specifically, almost every car ride is shot in this way, a common feature in Classical Hollywood films, due to the physical restrains of shooting in the studio. In addition, by speeding up the rate of the projected images in the background, or quickly changing its angle, rear projection allows for an impression of speed that involves no real danger.
Even if one of the protagonists of Written On The Wind is a fast-driving alcoholic millionaire (and therefore there are multiple instances of careless driving), rear projection is preferred to stunts both for economic and aesthetic reasons. For example, physical spectacle is not as important in a melodrama as it would be in an action film..
Section 2 - Lighting
The intensity, direction, and quality of lighting have a profound effect on the way an image is perceived. Light affects the way colors are rendered, both in terms of hue and depth, and can focus attention on particular elements of the composition. Much like movement in the cinema, the history of lighting technology is intrisically linked to the history of film style. Most mainstream films rely on the three-point lighting style, and its genre variations. Other films, for example documentaries and realist cinema, rely on natural light to create a sense of authenticity.
THREE-POINT LIGHTING
The standard lighting scheme for classical narrative cinema. In order to model an actor's face (or another object) with a sense of depth, light from three directions is used, as in the diagram below. A backlight picks out the subject from its background, a bright key light highlights the object and a fill light from the opposite side ensures that the key light casts only faint shadows.
Illustration courtesy of http://www.tcf.ua.edu/TVCrit/
These shots from Written On The Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) demostrate the classical use of three-point lighting. Laurel Bacall and Rock Hudson are rendered glamorous by the balanced lighting. Compare this to the manipulation of lighting for expressive purposes on the high-key lighting and low-key lighting pages.
HIGH-KEY LIGHTING
A lighting scheme in which the fill light is raised to almost the same level as the key light. This produces images that are usually very bright and that feature few shadows on the principal subjects. This bright image is characteristic of entertainment genres such as musicals and comedies such as Peking Opera Blues (Do Ma Daan, Tsui Hark, Honk Kong, 1986)