Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
NOTES ON SOME IMPORTANT TERMS FOR FILM STUDIES
Gopa B. Caesar:
Ford, John: The director of over 125 films, Ford is one of the most influential and written-about directors in cinematic history. He gained greatest acclaim for his picturesque and epic westerns, including Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and Rio Grande (1950). In these films, Ford explores the moral and psychological dilemmas facing individuals and communities on the border between civilization and wilderness. A cultural conservative, Ford’s vision of American history is steeped in the mythology of the frontier, where courage, loyalty, and honor fuel the drive toward survival and progress. Unlike von Sternberg and Welles, Ford worked successfully within the studio system, sharing its emphasis on expert storytelling and populist values, as well as its racism and historical revisionism.
Deren, Maya: Trained as a professional dancer and choreographer, Deren became the most important practitioner, theorist, and promoter of American avant-garde film during the 1940s and 1950s. In “poetic films†such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944), Deren expressed the metaphysics of movement and action—the vertical meanings and feelings associated with a given moment rather than its place within the horizontal logic of narrative. Influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s ideas of myth and ritual, Deren’s films are full of dreamlike, surrealist imagery that explores the relationship between conscious and subconscious states.
Other major directors: George Cukor, John Grierson, John Huston, Leni Riefenstahl, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, William Wyler.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Film History: Postwar Period (1946–1959)
World War II left the European film industry in ruins, as only Italy’s production facilities avoided devastation. The war also affected American filmmakers and audiences, leading to the production of dark, morally ambiguous and socially critical films in the film noir style. As a result of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, many of Hollywood’s most talented actors, directors, and screenwriters were blacklisted by the studios because of suspected ties to the Communist Party. Some moved to Europe, some continued to work by using colleagues’ names as fronts, and others saw their careers and lives ruined.
In response to competition from the new medium of television, Hollywood made films that showcased cinema’s distinctive qualities: stereophonic sound, large screen size, and color images, benefiting from the emergence of widescreen technology and better color film stock. By the mid-1950s, the blacklist and new technologies led Hollywood to concentrate on apolitical, spectacular films such as biblical epics, westerns, and musicals. A 1948 Supreme Court decision forced Hollywood studios to end their vertical integration policies, making the marketplace more competitive and increasing opportunities for independent and foreign producers.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Movements
Italian neorealism: After World War II, Italian filmmakers had to work under adverse conditions, facing a scarcity of film stock, studio space, lighting and editing equipment, and professional actors. The most talented of these directors turned these disadvantages into an aesthetic that came to be termed neorealism—a style characterized by on-location shooting; non-professional actors; natural lighting; grainy, documentary-like imagery; long takes; and stories about ordinary people. In the wake of the war’s devastation, neorealist films articulated the social, political, and economic problems facing Italy’s most disadvantaged and neglected citizens. Key films include Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).
Gopa B. Caesar:
Japanese art cinema: Influenced by both Western film aesthetics and Eastern artistic and philosophical traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Noh theater, several Japanese directors became the first non-Western filmmakers to gain international prominence. Noted for their technical brilliance, they ably chronicled the postwar transformations shaping Japanese society. Akira Kurosawa used sophisticated tracking shots, widescreen composition, and fast-paced editing to create epic allegorical recreations of Japanese history in the samurai era. Yasujiro Ozu employed long takes and a low-angled, motionless camera to make acute observations about generational tensions in post-war Japanese families. Kenji Mizoguchi combined Ozu’s use of the long take with Kurosawa’s fluid camera movement to shed a critical light on Japan’s feudal history and the circumscribed role of women within it. Key films include Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953).
Gopa B. Caesar:
Major Directors
Welles, Orson: Unlike many of his contemporaries, Welles gained international prominence on the basis of only one film, Citizen Kane (1941). The film is full of technical innovations, including crane shots, overlapping dialogue, multiple audio tracks, purposely grainy film stock, and low-angle photography. It explores themes that Welles would revisit throughout his career: the corruption of power and wealth, the fine line between desire and obsession, the precariousness of knowledge, and the limits of ego and ambition. Welles’s use of deep focus, long takes, and chiaroscuro lighting, which located meaning in mise-en-scène rather than editing, influenced a generation of filmmakers working in the postwar film noir and realist styles. Though rejected by audiences and undermined by studio executives throughout his career, Welles still managed to make several more highly acclaimed films, including The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Touch of Evil (1958).
Hitchcock, Alfred: In a career spanning half a century, Hitchcock won success in both his native Britain and Hollywood and directed some of the most memorable films of all time, including The 39 Steps (1935), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959). Influenced by German expressionism (he was an assistant to F. W. Murnau at Ufa) and Soviet montage, Hitchcock used detailed visual and aural compositions to express his protagonists’ feelings of paranoia and claustrophobia, along with sophisticated editing to create suspense. With a fine-tuned sense of irony, Hitchcock examined the abnormal perversions and obsessive desires lurking beneath the surface of ordinary lives and societies, enabling him to become an astute observer of America in the 1950s, the decade during which he directed his greatest films.
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