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1/30/2018

Film analysis methodologies

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Film analysis methodologies

1. Textual analysis of the film. A historical look.

{Elena Dagrada}

1964 Christian Metz founds the semiology of cinema as a discipline by publishing some essays; proposes the great syntagmatic : typology of the different ways in which assembly orders space and time in the different segments of the narrative film. 1966 is the year in which we could trace the birth of textual analysis: Raymond Bellour theorises and practices film analysis and publishes a volume dedicated to the analysis of films. In 1977 Roger Odin publishes a biographical repertoire due to the practice of textual analysis; In his opinion the objective of film analysis is to distinguish oneself from the criticism that expresses value judgments by lending attention to the significant functioning of a film in order to produce meaning. Bellour wonders about the origins of film analysis by focusing on what he calls analysis prehistoric . Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie trace a prehistory of analytic practice by identifying a primitive example in the 1934 script dedicated to the battleship Potemkin by director Ejzenstejn. Yes they examine these writings as deemed pertinent to embody the origins of the phylological analysis because present two components related to the objectives formulated by Odin: attention to the meaning of a film yes accompanies attention to the mechanisms that produce this meaning, systematically identified in the form + attention to the perspective adopted to bring out such mechanisms. Exemplars le Truffaut's considerations regarding Hitchcock's Shadow of Doubt (associates the theme of identity with recurrence of the number two through which the film is structured), the reflections of Bazin on the sequence plan e the depth of field concerning Welles, the plastic composition of his Ejzenstejn montage. Structuralism : structuralist semiology creates the conditions for the birth of textual analysis of the film which accords equal attention to its object and its method, therefore it interacts on two levels. While owing largely to structuralist semiology the first examples of textual analysis of the film seldom purely Structural. Important Metz (applies the great syntagmatics) and Bellour (analyzes The Birds and writes a essay on the sequence set in Bodega Bay where Melanie Daniels donates to Mitch's sister two parrots: we have a story in pictures. The idea that classic American cinema takes shape of which the Hitchcockian is representative, activates a structure based on a game of rhymes, recalls, breakages, tears but also displacements and condensations that concern the stylistic dimension of the text, the succession of shots, editing and also the psychic universe and in particular the Oedipus). Openness to psychoanalysis is the first of a long series of contaminations. Francesco Casetti e Roger Odin reiterated the need to continue talking about filmic text because the analysis of the film appears doubly textual: tackles the filmic text and wonders in what sense a film is a text. They are found two ideological strands: the one that converges in the so-called semiopsicanalysis and the one represented from the analysis that deals with the film as a story by concepts of enunciation and point of view. Semiopsicanalysis : Thierry Kuntzel assumes that the work of the film is published as such dreamlike, deploying thematic and formal figures through similar processes of condensation and displacement to those of the dream - Bellour analysis conducted mostly on classic American cinema and by Hitchcock Psycho, and International Intrigue where the filmic structures present an analogy with those of our psychic apparatus and especially with the dynamics of the Oedipus. Enunciation vs Suture : Suture (concept introduced in the 60s by Jean Pierre Oudart and then taken up by Stephen Heath: it is based on the belief that at the cinema every portion of the field represented on the screen extends beyond the fourth wall it should close it in an imaginary space that does not show itself but from which it is seen. At each field visible corresponds to an invisible field defined by the Oudart field of the Assumption where the viewer is the Absent). Enunciation (Emile Benveniste: it is proposed to distinguish between utterance (what is said) and enunciation (the means used to say it). According to Benveniste there are formal brands that in a statement they exhibit the traces of his enunciation while other choices of an always linguistic nature tend to hide them. Metz hypothesizes that classical cinema is similar to a type of statement aimed at favoring choices that obscure enunciation, unlike modern cinema intended to exhibit them. Point of view : the concept of point of view or focusing is due to Gérard Genette according to the what a story can give more or less information about what it narrates by adopting a certain point of view. Possible answers to the question: who sees? They are 3: omniscient narrator who says more than what know the pg (non-focused story), narrator who only says what the pg (internal focusing) know, narrator who says less than what the pg (external focus) know. The analyzes on these issues are

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but many stand out that conducted by Nick Browne on twelve shots of red shadows set in Dry Fork Station where the passengers of the stagecoach refuel waiting to leave (analysis of the looks distinguishing between the look of the characters and the look of the camera; Dallas vs Lucy reflects the difference in social hierarchy).

2. Beyond semiotics. Text and context.

{Federico Villa}

We have, in 1967-1977, the transition to a second semiotics and the analysis of the film becomes the search for a desire that leads to the film, inside the film and tries to find the principle of intelligibility. Semiotics ai concepts of sign and code favor those of langue and parole and contaminate with other disciplines and paintings of thought. The discovery of an intertextual research horizon opens up. Since the end of the 90s it suffers one reviewing the theory about film genres starting with Rick Altman, Stephen Neale and Janet Staiger proposing the idea that gender articulations are linked within the culture that hosts them. The idea of genre as a cultural construct leads to the identification of generational mechanisms in the history of cinema (Altman) aimed at identifying social and dynamic places that allow to process perceptions collectives of the generality of texts. In the 50s we have a cinema for the people. It is noted that the cinematographic production practices a sort of constant mediation with its own context of belonging. They come to define themselves as narrative macrotypologies that mark a significant turning point with respect to the utopian antispectracity and mark the belonging of a given production to its context. we find often the second story (narratives filtered by the subjectivity of a pg: The brat of the road, Before evening, The girls of Piazza di Spagna) responsible for the birth of the story interlocking (type of storytelling composed of a main nucleus from which a series of digressions are generated and the occasion for the digression is offered by the flashback). Another episode is the episodic story understood as zibaldone di autonomous and ended narrative moments (emblematic: Bread, love and fantasy of Comencini, Two money from hope of Castellani). We find a coexistence of proximity and distance made of mediation between the film and its reception horizon and we detect it in certain characteristics: the stories told aim utopian to a degree of narration close to zero; neorealist stories are transformed becoming stories with strong, present, invasive narratives. The film production of the 50s becomes a deposit of traces of the experience of rebalancing chaos in an ordered form. Thirty years of research trends they try to define in what terms to take the over text into consideration. We find three trends: the semi-pragmatic turn carried out by Odin (research framework close to semiotics; the context coincides with an around next to the text), the works related to historical revisionism (re-foundation of the history of cinema where the context becomes a host macrosystem), the tendency to search for a cultural matrix (the context yes it narrows around the viewer becoming a precise microsystem). 1 - Semi - pragmatics → Only with the end of the 80's will there be a transition to the spectator as a subject participates in the movie sense negotiation game. Odin's semi-pragmatic research shifts the focus from the texts themselves to the modes of sense production that sustain them: for him the meaning of the film is not in the text but al outside, although it is not completely independent of it and the viewer turns out to be a point of passage. Odin identifies various ways of producing meaning: spectacular, private, fictional, documentary, educational, aesthetic etc. An example of dialectic between fictional mode and documentary mode we have it on Sunday di Agosto by Luciano Emmer: a linear segmentation story model, staging systems pg complexes rather than single protagonists; fragmentariness of the action that disarticulates the story in a summation of stories; the two modes of production work together; the car movement is reduced in search of the stable framework. Under the microscope we see Sunday in Ostia as a document. Emmer creates a new cinema by obtaining a document that makes fiction and a reality that needs to be financed. 2 - Context as a macro-system → The attempt to define the context as a reference macro-system prefigures an integrated history of cinema. The 60s were opened by Rocco and his brothers, L'avventura, La dolce life: contemporaneousness of the output of the three films shows a discursive dynamic with its own time. The three films I am a manifesto of the transition from an experimental to an awareness phase. The trauma that discorsivizzano is the common one of the apparent neocapitalistic integration, of the short consolidation of the economic boom for an industrially advanced society, a trauma expressed through a definitive one capitulation of the ethical conscience for Fellini, of the existential consciousness for Antonioni and that sociopolitics for Visconti. At a thematic and ideological level we have the theme of provisionalism with commissioning scene of aborted paths, without a goal, without goals or landings. On the stylistic level there is the provisional in an unresolved structure of the chapters destined to portray the brothers, in Rocco, and that results

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ineffective in containing the various personalities; or in the fresco of the city, in the Dolce Vita, where the sense of the composition is lost; or in the adventure where the investigation aimed at finding Anna is lost sight the goal resolving itself in a pure crossing of the stubborn Sicilian landscape. The choices made they are devoid of objectives and goals and failures. 3 - Context as a microsystem → Even studies of the mainly cultural type, which belong at the University of Birmingham and find maximum expression in the Cultural Studies, they worked on one redefinition of the notion of context as a microsystem. From the mid-60s we have a decrease of https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_f

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cinematic audience and a redefinition of the social image of cinema lived not as an experience daily and family but as an exclusive choice linked to counterculture phenomena understood as evasion or as a propulsive moment for an idea of social rebirth. The episodic film requires one discontinuity and the transition from one episode to another requires the exercise of a gaze, able to negotiate reading processes. Among the episodes of the decade in question: What are the clouds of Pasolini (fragment of the Capriccio all'Italiana): the episode features the Otello by Shakespeare solved in puppet show. The spectator does not align himself with the audience in the stalls and at the end we have the bars puppets actors executed by the popular fury of the public and thrown as objects in disuse in the landfill. The viewer, who could trace a fictional alter ego, was unable to position himself in a body and perceiving the scene from a precise point of view: in fact, Pasolini decides to return the sight to his puppets only after dead. The path of What are Clouds works on the progressive distancing of the viewer from the filmic present: first from the body of the public, then from that of the camera he is dead body.

3. Feminist Film Theory and Gender Studies.

{Veronica Pravadelli}

The Feminist Film Theory emerged in the early 70s as a research line that developed first in Gran Brittany and in the United States, then in Australia with diffusion also in Germany. The macro-management concerns the relationship between cinema and sexual difference declined in all its forms: the most significant areas they concern the relationship between the modes of filmic representation and the inscription of gender difference . The The first forms of analysis of the relationship between cinema and gender are a direct manifestation of the movement feminist. The interest of the first feminist critique is to establish a relationship between cinema and reality, between filmic treatment of women and the daily experience of women in the public and private sphere. These Issues have been explored since the mid-1960s by Metz, Baudry and Bellour and resumed by some scholars English in the early 70s, investigated through the filter of sexual difference: Claire Johnston, Pam Cook and Laura Mulvey. Both in the English and American context, the work of the fft focused on two lines of research: classic Hollywood cinema and experimental cinema of women (feminist avant garde of the 70s). The fft considers the classical cinema and the feminist avant garde the two opposite poles of the cinema system to represent and give voice to the female subject. The reduction of women to one position of absence, marginality or subordination is attributable to the modes of narration and of putting in scene, choices of shooting and editing (linguistic and stylistic question). The work of Johnston and Cook shows that we need to go beyond the judgment on female images as positive or negative. The work looks at reasons why women occupy the place they occupy in the film world and show that the feminine is viewed in a substantially patriarchal way. The reading that Lacan makes of Levi-Strauss elaborates the concept that the woman as a sign means first of all the non-man, the difference, the lack and the castration (cf. Walsh rebel female). Looking at Arzner's cinema, Johnston and Cook try to see if one a woman director has staged the female subject in a different way. In the films of Arzner and Lupino there is a rift between ideology and text: es. Dance, Girl, Dance by Arzner in the final Judy returns the look to the audience shouting his disdain for that audience (we have not only a direct attack on the audience inside the film but also to that of the film with the aim of breaking the illusory regime of the text; the woman affirms his own identity through desire and transgression and in the end the viewer can only to recognize the difficulties that female desire meets in the patriarchal system to find expression) We have the most important intervention of the fft with Laura Mulvey who presents a intervention at a convention in the United States then published on Screen in 1975. Mulvey proposes a theory psychoanalysis of the classic film and of the cinematographic apparatus and of the spectator experience. La Mulvey theorizes the centrality of the gaze in the cinematographic experience. Visual pleasure is based on activation of two drives of contradictory look: voyeurism and narcissism. The voyeuristic scopophile pleasure born from the pleasure of using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight; one

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narcissistic comes from the identification of the subject with the image through the fascination caused by the recognition of one's similar. In the classic film the pleasure of watching was split into active / masculine and passive / feminine: the function of the woman is erotic and is exhausted in sustaining the masculine, motor desire of narrative action. The act of looking is reserved for the man while the woman is placed in position passive of object looked at, of spectacle. The gender difference is inscribed in the filmic representation in the cinematographic experience. Classical cinema would be built for the sole pleasure of the spectator male. Mulvey denies the spectator's existence. The image of the woman evokes the threat of castration and the meaning of the woman is in her not being a man. According to Mulvey, the exit is to investigate on the mystery of the woman and her castration and control (solution linked to voyeurism and sadism that find in the noir and in Hitchcock the striking examples); or deny castration by elevating the woman to fetish (we see it in Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich). While in Hitchcock there is homogeneity between what sees the protagonist and what the viewer sees, in Sternberg the two experiences are not equivalent and the the consequence is that the male character can not control diegetic space nor the woman. This female autonomy is not grasped by Mulvey but by Gaylyn Studlar. Mulvey concludes visual pleasure invoking the demolition of the voyeuristic gaze, maker of traditional and filmic pleasure of female objectification. The cinema of women is articulated in the feminist avant garde (auteur cinema founded on the experimentation with the narrative form; the purpose of feminist cinema is to give a subjective position to https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_f

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woman object and only the narration can assume this task) and in the documentary form. vanguard and documentary are the two macroforms of cinema filmed by women. The editorial of the Camera Obscura expresses that feminist cinema is recognized for its narrative and formal devices and that it makes us reflect on meaningful process, on the representation and on the figure and function of the image of the woman. From the point of narrative view, these are minimalist stories in which a female protagonist lives an experience of research with long shots and use of the voice over (see Akerman's News from Home). In the 80s we have abandoned the concept of sex and sexual difference in favor of that of gender. Mulvey states that classic cinema allows the viewer to identify with the image film and refers to Freud in the concept that the viewer can identify with the hero by virtue of the regression to the pre-oedipal phase. The study by Tania Modleski on Hitchcock reverses the conclusions of the Mulvey who had seen the radicalization of the gender dynamics of classical cinema in him they also collide with those of Bellour for which the feminine has no self-determination. For Modleski Hitchcock's cinema is marked by ambiguous desire dynamics. The violence they come to subjected to women is a sign of their power (cf. Rebecca, the first wife: an oedipal trajectory is narrated feminine and the specific desire declined in the mother / daughter relationship is staged. The fascination with femininity it subverts the aspirations to the control and authority of the masculine pg and the author. Hitchcock activates changing identifications and positions and often the viewer assumes passive, feminine identifications and masochists as in Jeff's case in the Courtyard Window). Studlar disputes the basic assumptions of the Mulvey's paradigm proposing to consider the filmic pleasure and the spectator experience as an activity close to the pre-oedipal phase and not to the oedipal phase of the subject, dominated by the marked father sexual difference and castration. Mary Ann Doane tries to outline the paths of the spectator by hypothesiz...