NEXT WEEK & TIME-LAPSE (STOP-MOTION) PHOTOGRAPHY

FOR NEXT WEEK, you should view the documentary on Georges Lumiere; you also get to see another "feature" movie by the Lumiere Brothers. If you see the whole DVD, you can tell your friends you saw ten movies in one day and amaze them.
    You should also view The Last Laugh, the only silent film without a single intertitle (the images speak for themselves). (I except of course the intertitle that introduces the "false ending.")
    That film is one example of what is called Expressionist Cinema: using the camera to express extreme emotional states. Expressionist cinema is more related to formalism than to realism. Remember: the screen as frame vs. the screen as window. Do you know which is which?
    In just two class sessions, we've come a long way! From the actualites of Lumiere Brothers, to formalist cinema with Melies, to minimal use of continuity cutting in Max Linder only a few years later (match/cut on action, as when he leaves one room and we see him enter another), to a more "plastic" handling of space in D. W. Griffith's comedy/drama. Then we move into Expressionist cinema. Next week we'll see the first undisputed masterpiece of cinema, Griffith's Birth of a Nation. As Alfred Hitchcock said, "Everything we have comes from Griffith."
    We saw the first screen closeup, from an early Edwin S. Porter film (the cowboy shooting at the audience); but that was a gimmick and was not part of the film's misen-en-scene (plot, story, action). Griffith changed the history of cinema by making closeups one "choice" among many in terms of shot scale (how close the subject is to the camera). The rest is history!
    Remember also Chaplin's dictum: "Long shots for comedy, closeups for tragedy." Can one violate that rule? Of course one can! But it still stands as a general rule (just like low-angle and high-angle shots can be used in different ways too).
    So how can one violate that rule? Here's an example: a young boy, barely a man, waves goodbye to his mother. He has never left home before. He turns around to look at her one last time, from a bend in the road. We see her in long shot, from his point-of-view. The director refuses to cut to a closeup (as John Ford commonly refused to do, considering it too sentimental). Yet that's a tragic shot: the mother, a diminutive (small) figure, getting smaller in a tracking-out (dolly back) shot, from the new soldier's POV (point of view).
    Nothing is written in stone in cinema. Staring into the camera is usually forbidden; but Charlie Chaplin did that often enough; and as recently as the 1940s, the final shot of Hitchcock's Spellbound has the train conductor staring straight at us, with great comic effect. Everything depends on content. Form in cinema can never be divorced from content.
    As for time-lapse photography, I've included a description of that process so that you will understand it better. It's basic to animated cartoons as well as to true-life documentaries. Disney, incidentally, was master of both genres, almost inventing the modern nature documentary as well as the modern cartoon.

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