Film Language

Film Language - Cohen
Montage - the art of combining pieces of film / shots into a larger language

• Griffith (Birth of a Nation)
  
• Eisenstein
  o montage is collision of conflict between shot & its successor  emotional content
   illumination
   rhythm
   objects
   direction of movement  distances 
• Bazin
  o agreed with Eisenstein that montage & dialogue are incompatible o believed that synchronized speech was a necessary development o film should reveal reality as whole (mise-en-scéne)
  o anticipated depth of field shot (Orsen Welles)
  
• Henderson
  

o long tracking shot (goddard)
• Metz
o structuralism / semiotics
 syntagm: is necessarily made up of a sequence of signs which are meaningful because they are different
o film is not a reality but a language • Dayan
o theorizes shot/reverse shot sequence • Rothman
o film, not the sequence, makes the statement • Silverman
o suture can be made even more irresistible when the field of the speaking subject is implied
• Brown
o critiques POV, saying that shots refer jointly to the action of the
implied narrator and the spectator Film Form - Eisenstein
Cinema is Montage

• example of Japanese calligraphy / hieroglyphics
  o dog & mouth = bark
  
• the shot is the basic cell of montage
  
• collision of ideas
  
• dialectical approach: thesis + antithesis = synthesis
  
• logical vs. alogical
  
• emotional dynamism
  
• goal of synthesis of art & science