Fernand Léger: The Cinema Of Attraction

Leaving the Movie Theater examines semiotics (the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing. dictionary.com) in popular culture and how it affects individuals in society. Barthes uses denotations, connotations, rhetorical questions, repetition, and alliteration to unveil hidden messages surrounding us in everyday life. In the essay, the rhetorical question “What does the “darkness” of the cinema mean?”, emerges as Barthes investigates the elements surrounding movie theater. Rather than seeking an actual answer, rhetorical questions are used to make points. In this case, he questions what the “Darkness” represents. The denotation of “darkness:

During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that,

In “A Century of Cinema”, Susan Sontag explains how cinema was cherished by those who enjoyed what cinema offered. Cinema was unlike anything else, it was entertainment that had the audience feeling apart of the film. However, as the years went by, the special feeling regarding cinema went away as those who admired cinema wanted to help expand the experience.

David Bordwell wrote his article ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film’ in an effort to convey the main idea that “art cinema” can be considered as a distinct mode of film practice, through its definite historical existence alongside other cinematic modes, set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures. Rather than searching for the source of the art, or what drives the art in film, Bordwell compares art cinema to the classical narrative cinema, and highlights the differences in narrative structure. Bordwell makes the assumption that it defined itself against the classical narrative mode; especially with the way it deals with space, time, and the cause and effect link of events.

Early cinema is often referred to as a progression to narrative cinema, Tom Gunning would argue that it was not a progression but had its own purpose and coined the term The Cinema of Attractions in his essay ‘Now you see it, Now you don’t’. This is the concept that a large quantity of the first film makers produced films that were more about the spectacle, most of the films leading up to 1900 reflected the fascination with technology and how things happened rather than why. Gunning noted that there were three assumptions of film; the general ideas that people had about the timeline of film and where it would end up. There is the cinematic assumption, the idea that film was ‘restricted to the technological reproduction of theatre’ (Gunning T.1993) early cinema was primitive and only a practice for what was to come. The narrative assumption is that film is ‘only important as it is a predecessor to a more engaging and effective form of film,’ (Gunning T. 1993) this suggests that narrative cinema is the natural form of film. The final assumption is the idea that ‘cinema only truly appeared when it discovered its mission of telling stories.’ (Metz C. 1974) These assumptions all encompass the idea that narrative is the end form of film. In this essay I am going to discuss Tom Gunning’s theory of The Cinema of Attractions and the differences between them and narratively driven films.

In the period, the newly implemented technological elements and unique stylistic choices present “the context of moviegoing as [a] special event,” which contributed to the cultivation of an “aggressive relationship” with the spectator. Wilder also spectacularizes his film through its genre subversion and bawdy humor. However, in his references to more serious themes, such as gender, he engages the newly developing “sophisticated spectator,” capable of distinguishing and appreciating the technological features of films, the issues tackled within narratives, and the implied breeches of the Production Code, such as when Osgood “pinche[s]” Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon) behind the closed doors of an elevator.

This essay will discuss both the Cinema of Attractions and Narrative Cinema and their origins in order to better understand the differences found between them in regards to the criteria to follow. This essay will highlight the role that the spectator plays, and the temporality that both the Cinema of Attractions and Narrative Cinema exhibit.

1) To what does the term ‘event sequence film’ refer, and where and why was this

In the words of Gay McAuley, “for an activity to be regarded as a performance, it must involve the live presence of the performers and those witnessing it…” (McAuley, 2009, cited in Schechner, 2013, pp.38). This statement recognises the importance of both the actor and the audience for something to truly function as a performance. In addition, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones highlights the significance of the theatrical space and how it can influence an audience stating that “on entering a theatre of any kind, a spectator walks into a specific space, one that is designed to produce a certain reaction or series of responses” (Llewellyn-Jones, 2002, pp.3). The relationship between actor, audience and theatrical space is no less important today than it was at the time of theatre during the Spanish Golden Age and the creation of Commedia dell’arte in Italy. Despite being very close geographically with theatre thriving for both in the same era, sources that explore the social, cultural and historical context of these countries and the theatre styles will bring to light the similarities and differences. This essay will analyse the staging, the behaviour of the audience as well as the challenges the actors faced, and how this directly influenced the relationship between actor, audience and theatrical space.

Though emerging from disparate circumstances, styles, and techniques, Raúl Ruiz’s 1977 experimental short-film Colloque de Chiens and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 groundbreaking experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera find common ground in their strategic use of motion and stasis. Ruiz’s Colloque de Chiens is a film that is the product of its circumstances. Made on an extremely low budget during a strike in the production of Ruiz’s 1978 film The Suspended Vocation, the film is an experiment in delivering a convoluted story through an extremely limited means—still images. Vertov’s Man with a Movie camera, in contrast, is an experiment in pushing film technology to its limits. Lacking a plot, the filmic techniques of the film are both a

This film analysis will delineate the diverse directorial decisions of The French New Wave cinema movement, and how they have been utilised and developed to challenge and subvert the typical Hollywood filmmaking conventions and techniques of the 1950s and 60s Hollywood cinema, in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Hollywood produced films of the time used a very limited variation in film techniques such as camera, acting, mise-en-scene, editing and sound. This can be mainly attributed to the low innovative thought of creative and expressive camera movements, angles, etc… due to technological hindrances. In particular, this film analysis will de-construct the filmmaking elements of the revelatory French New Wave movement in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows ending scene (01:34:42 – 01:39:32) portraying the main character Antoine Doinel’s escape from juvie and trek to the bespoken beach.

“If Georges Méliès was the first to ‘push the cinema toward the theatrical way,’ as he claimed, then Edwin S. Porter was the first to push the cinema

In service of this argument, the essay unfolds in three parts. The first section sketches an appropriate framework for understanding how cinema marshals and moves viewers by engaging them in a fully embodied experience.4 The second section offers a brief overview of the film's plot before turning to an analysis of its triptych narrative and affective development. The third and final section considers the methodological, critical, and theoretical implications suggested by the preceding analysis.

Like paracinema, camp’s sensibilities are often very ironic and are inclined to infatuation with the “artifice and excess of obsolescent cinema.” However, camp associates a film’s artifice to a stylization of exaggeration – it is art that values an object when it “cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’,” often due to the object’s failure at having a constant serious tone. In addition, camp is aware of how an object has a “double sense,” but it takes it no further than the superficial difference of the object’s figurative purpose and its artificial state. Paracinema’s approach is to understand how a text’s artifice is indicative of the profilmic and/or extratextual aspects that surround the filmic object itself. This is often shown in a film’s “stylistic and thematic deviance,” usually a systematic occurrence when a film fails to abide by other institutions’ “dominant codes of cinematic representation.” In particular, non-diegetic features (e.g. anachronisms, histrionic acting, inaccurate special effects) are taken in alongside the film’s main narrative and used by the paracinematic viewer to examine “a field of structures within the culture as a whole” and to evaluate a range of contextual issues film as a socially and historically

The release of Gordon Hollingshead and Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer in 1927 marked the new age of synchronised sound in cinema. The feature film was a huge success at the box office and it ushered in the era David Bordwell describes as ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’; Bordwell and two other film theorists (Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson) conducted a formalist analysis of 100 randomly selected Hollywood films from the years 1917 to 1960 in order to fully define this movement. Their results yielded that most Hollywood made films during that era were centred on, or followed, specific blueprints that formed the finished product. Through this analysis of Hollywood films the theorists were able to establish stylised conventions and modes of