Word: films
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Godard calls cinema "truth twenty-four times a second," a debatable point when we consider that the foundation of film technique, both narrative and experimental, is still that of montage, the art of putting shots together to convey something other than that conveyed by each individual shot--an art of illusion. But the truth of the image itself is beyond question; regardless of the motivations of the men who create films, and their skill at suggesting connections which metaphysically must not exist, film-making is supremely pure: a recording by the camera of that which stands before the lens...
...Fritz Lang's Fury, twenty-two members of a lynch mob on trial for their lives, presumably cleared by the perjured testimony of their neighbors, are proven guilty by the camera. A newsreel filmed during the height of the mob violence containing the indelible record of their faces is presented in court. The scene is cathartic, as Lang presents the camera per se as an instrument of fate, the omniscient agent of grim truths. It is even more cathartic in its simplicity, for the concept of film-as-evidence recalls the very motives for the genesis of the medium, that...
When we deal with movies, the reality of the image rarely coincides with our own image of reality. Although cinema-verite film-makers attempt to capture life as we know it, the presence of the camera alters reality, affecting the spontaneity of those conscious of being filmed. The greatness of Jean Rouch's Chronicle Of A Summer rests largely in its being a deliberate study of how lives change in the prolonged company of a camera. On another level, editing and use of subjective techniques, from point-of-view shots to the optical changes defined by the variations in different...
There are no rules to be drawn from any of this, but film history supports one or two generalizations. Most of the great films transcend a primary level of visual reality, that of superficial "slice of life" recording and, aware of the magical power of the image to convey an absolute truth, move toward dramatic metaphor in subject and theme, in order to convey ideas that will affect us, living in the one reality film cannot reproduce. The meaning of great film exists ultimately not in the script mechanics but in the treatment of script mechanics by distinct camerawork...
Turning to camera styles, those conflicts quickly established in a melodrama, for example, allow a director like Hitchcock to bare to an audience the senses and emotions of a character through cutting, just as romantic abstraction allow a Sternberg to light experimentally with a daring inconceivable in plainer films. Themes and preoccupations as serious as these would be substantially unbearable treated in the context of everyday life--all films would resemble Judgment At Nuremberg. And, just as Poe and Hawthorne made their statements through the heightened reality of romance, the master film-makers are invariably liberated by the specialized contexts...