Introduction to Film Studies

Film Form and Film Style

Openings and Endings

• The narrative starts from its very beginning – ab obo or ab initio

• Casablanca begins with an introduction in which the film’s backgrounds are explained away.

• Alfred Hitchcock’s Stranger on a Train (1951) Tennis star Guy Haines meets Bruno Anthony, a stranger on a train. Knowing from a gossip magazine that Guy wants to divorce from his wife, Bruno proposes the perfect ‘criss-cross’ murders.

Opening and Endings

• Medias-res - an artistic and literary technique of relating a story from a midpoint rather than the beginning.

• Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) - about the rise and fall of a Lucchese Family associate Henry Hill and his friends over the period of 1955 to 1980

Openings and Endings• Closed ending - narrative ends with an unequivocal

conclusion Casablanca • Open ending - narrative ends without clear

conclusion and solution so that the reader and the viewer wonder what will happen after the end of the stories.

• François Truffaut’s 400 Blows (Quatre cent coups, 1959)

• A teenage boy misunderstood at home and school, commits a minor crime and is sent to an observation centre for the juvenile delinquent. He escapes from it while playing football.

Narrative Analysis • Five foci in the narrative analysis of Gérard

Genette’s Narratology. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980)

• Order, frequency, duration, voice and mood

• Order: an order of event units being told

• Chronological order: telling events following one after another in time; from the oldest to the most recent event

• (a) crime conceived (b) crime planned (c)crime committed (d) crime discovered (e) detective investigates (f) detective reveals

Narrative Analysis • Narration out of chronological order

• Order of telling events is manipulated according to the logic other than chronological

• Events sequence (a)(b)(c)(d)(e)(f) can be very typically into (d) crime discovered (e) detective investigates (f) detective reveals and then (a) crime conceived (b) crime planned (c)crime committed; or (d)(e), and simultaneously with (e) (a)(b)(c) and finally (f)

• Telling older events later, (a)(b)(c) told after (d)(e)(f) is called ‘flashback’

OrderDistant Lives

• Most of the stories in Citizen Kane are flashbacks.• In Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, we

see scenes set in the present during a young woman’s wedding day. These alternate with flashbacks to a time when her family lived under the sway of an abusive, mentally disturbed father.

Order

• Flashforward – a scene that takes the narrative forward in time from the current time of the plot

• Nichola Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

• A man sees his wife in black on a boat, though she is supposed to be away. At the end of the film, it is revealed that she is with her husband’s coffin.

Frequency

• An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular) Today I went to the bar.

• An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative) I used to go to the bar.

• An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive) I went to the bar. Other people saw me going to the bar.

• An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple) I used to go to the bar and other people saw me going to the bar a number of times.

Frequency

• Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998) – a young woman gets fired from her public relations job. After she waits for her train on the London Underground, the plot splits into two: one in which she catches the train, the other detailing the separate path she would have taken if she missed it.

Duration

• Difference between discourse time and narrative time

• Discourse time – time spent to narrate the event

Narrative time – real time that has passed for an

event to take place

• ‘5 years later’ a lengthy narrative time, but it could be a matter of second in discourse time

Duration• Narrative time is normally shorter than discourse

time

• Several million years are covered in Space Odyssey by 161 minutes

• Kane’s life covered in Citizen Kane in 119 mins.

• Many years covered in Amadeus by 138 minutes

• Four days covered in North by Northwest by 136 minutes

• One day covered in Hiroshima, mon amour by 90 minutes

Duration

• Elipsis: the omission of a large section of a narrative

• Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story - the scene of mother lying in coma cut to the morning scene, in which she is already passed away.

Duration

• In some films discourse time, plot time last as long as narrative time or real time.

• Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) • Cezare Zavattini’s experimental omnibus film,

Love in the City (1953) Tre ore di paradiso

Duration• Also rarely discourse

time is longer than narrative time

• Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad

• 10 second 100 meter race is lengthen to 30 seconds

• Tokyo Olympiade

Voice• Voice is connected with who narrates and from

where

• Where the narration is from:

　　　　　　　 Intra-diagetic: inside the text (narrated from

　　　　　　　　　 the film narrative)

Extra-diagetic: outside the text (narrated from

outside film narrative)

Voice

• Who narrates:

Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character

in a film

Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in a

film

• First person narrating and third person narrating

Voice

• Intra-diegetic, homo-diegetic first person narrating• David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) – a housewife

who is having an affair with a married doctor whom she met in a station is narrating what is going on inside herself. Rachmaninov’s music as a extra-diegetic element.

Voice

• Extra-diegetic, hetero-diegetic third person narrating: the speaker speaks from outside the story never using ‘I’

• Luchino Visconti’s La Terra trema Fishermen’s plight and exploitation is narrated by Visconti.

Mood• Mood – the various degree of ‘distance’ created

between the narrator of a film and what she narrates.

• Distance helps the viewer to determine the degree of precision in a narrative and the accuracy of information conveyed.

• Unreliable narrator: the distance between a narrator and what he narrates is wide:

• The narrator in Citizen Kane – a journalist gathering information about who Kane really is and what ‘rose bud’ really means.

Mood

Lady in the Lake

• First-person perspective – the camera become the viewpoint of the film as well as a character

• Robert Montgomery’s ambition to create a cinematic version of the first-person narrative of Raymond Chandler in Lady in the Lake (1947)