Tag: art film
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Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)
The first establishing shot in the film follows a subjective shot, consistent with Bergman form that emphasizes subjective experience even while thematically concerned with big ideas like God. Persons, characters, repetition, and coldness dominate the opening Eucharist scene. Much of it is shot in a long take, highlighting the lifeless and static rite being “celebrated.”…
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“Exploring Art Film Audiences: A Marketing Analysis”
Chuu, Sharon et al. “Exploring Art Film Audiences: A Marketing Analysis.” Journal of Promotion Management Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (2009): 212-228. The study reveals no real surprises, mainly demonstrating by quantitative data, that “art film audiences are found to warrant marketing attention because they are more committed to movie attendance, have a more favorable attitude towards…
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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
From its first shot, here is a film that invites its own phenomenology, another potential description or requirement of the art film. We slowly zoom into a line of men descending a South American mountain. The aspect ratio must be 4:3, because the screen is working with an unusual vertical movement, human vertical movement. It’s…
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Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)
An “art film” in the sense that every shot provides a new occasion for experimentation but with a stronger sense of connection between story and plot. Other WKW films, particularly 2046 a few years later, render the break between story and plot more stark. Here, we have lots of black-and-white, then back to color, with…
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Modernism in the Narrative Cinema, William Charles Siska
It’s worth noting at the outset that, although published in 1980, this is a doctoral dissertation from 1976. As such, it is dated and functions chiefly (at this point) as a critical artifact that helps trace the discourse of art-cinema criticism. Siska begins by more-or-less establishing “genre” as something determined by its audience (1) but…
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On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell
Another work from Borwell within his broader project of doing aesthetic/formal film history that doesn’t discount the industrial or economic aspects but nevertheless insists that aesthetics on its own demands its own account. As is becoming more customary for Bordwell’s work, it starts off on the defensive. In chapter 1, Bordwell responds to accusations that…
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The Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell et al.
For my purposes, I only cursorily read the bulk of this and focused on chapter 30, “Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice.” Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger’s method is scientific and highly valuable, which this book goes to show. It’s even laid out like a Bible, with dual columns on each page that cross-reference the…
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Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
Have been reading through Mark Betz’s Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema, which includes a chapter entitled, “Wandering Women: Decolonization, Modernity, Recolonization.” Although the chapter only mentions Antonioni’s Red Desert, its main argument applies as much to this film as to any. Monica Vitti functions, according to Betz, as the archetypal European woman of cinema…
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Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
The opening credits sequence is all slow-mo, glorying in a static frame long shot of LaMotta warming up in the ring alone, distanced but surrounded by spectators. Occasional flashes of diegetic photography punctuate the image. The bold, overt shot (uninterrupted save for the flashes?), set to orchestral music, sets the film apart from sports…
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Delicatessen (Marc Caro + Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
An aesthetic of stylized trash set in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic France overwhelmed with a warm red-orange-green color scheme. Terry Gilliam meets Time Burton, and then some. It’s a live-action cartoon, warped, overly filtered, highly stylized. Sounds function as the abnormal but regular heartbeat of a social space. The synchronized rhythms move toward a climax and…
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Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
See previous post on Deleuze and the crystal image as it applies to this film. The ashes in the first shot of the film shifts to sweat via dissolve. The memory and the present are not conflated but intimately related, blurred into one another. Similar to the museum scene shortly thereafter. Identities in the present…
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All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
Highly intertextual, referencing All About Eve, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Almodóvar’s own work, not to mention the form of the soap opera. Early shot in the kitchen highly reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman. The grainy photos on the facade of the theater anticipates the photographs in Almodóvar’s later Broken Embraces. When Esteban gets hit by the car, slow-motion…
Precious Bodily Fluids 