The Job of a Film Director Essay

Rarely has a film impacted an audience and held the test of time as the film Gone with the Wind. I have always been curious if director, Victor Fleming and producer, David O. Selznick and screenplay writer, Sidney Howard knew what they were creating a masterpiece and how this film would have such an enormous impact on audiences for years to come. Interestingly enough there were some who thought the film should not be made, as Irving Thalberg said to Louis B. Meyer in 1936, “Forget it Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel” (Ten Films that Shook the World).

In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.

In Thinking Like A Director: A Practical Handbook, Michael Bloom explains the importance of research and how a director should conduct his or her research for a play. Bloom states that “it’s the director’s responsibility to unearth all versions and, in consultation with the producer, determine which to use” (18). I think it would be important for a director to be familiar of multiple versions of a play instead of one. If there are multiple versions of a play, a director could read each of them to determine which text they would prefer to use for his or her production. Reading each version could also give a director additional knowledge of the play. Having access to different versions of the text could also make the director aware of the advantages

What were Edwin S. Porter's significant contributions to the development of early narrative film? In what sense did Porter build upon the innovations of contemporaneous filmmakers, and for what purposes?

Auteur Theory is based on three premises, the first being technique, the second being personal style, and the third being interior meaning. Furthermore, there is no specific order in which these three aspects must be presented or weighted with regard to a film. An Auteur must give films a distinctive quality thus exerting a personal creative vision and interjecting it into the his or her films.

The director is responsible for overseeing creative aspects of a film. They develop the vision for a film and carry the vision out, deciding how the film should look. The director may also be heavily involved in the writing and editing of the film, as well as managing the script into a sequence of shots, coordinating the actors in the film and supervising musical aspects. The Auteur Theory suggests that films contain certain characteristics or ‘signatures’ that reflect the director’s individual style and give a film its personal and unique stamp. Hayao Miyazaki is one such auteur whose entertaining plots, compelling characters

The movie I chose to watch is Courageous. The precipitating event in this movie is the car accident that takes the life of Emily Mitchell. Her father, Adam Mitchell, and the rest of her family are traumatized by the sudden death of their 9 year old daughter/sister. In thinking about information that would be gained in the first contact with Adam Mitchell, one thing that stands out about his previous state of mind/functioning is that he was somewhat uninvolved with his children, taking them for granted. This fact can also be a trigger for how he processes this event, causing a crisis for him as he realized his

Article Three – Author: David Bordwell / Title of Article: The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film

​Released in 1988 by director Giuseppe Tomatore, “Cinema Paradiso” follows the life of a young boy in Italy who dreams of being a filmmaker. The road the boy, who eventually becomes a famous Italian film director named Salvatore Di Vita, takes to reach his goal is difficult and includes many sacrifices and trade-offs. Today, the film is widely regarded as one of the most popular foreign films ever to be released in the United States. Given that foreign films are fairly common in America, it is fair to consider why “Cinema Paradiso” received such critical acclaim, as well as relative mainstream popularity. “Cinema Paradiso” received critical and popular praise because the film includes several timeless themes

a powerful weapon, and that was the weapon of being inferior to a race that had

Direct Cinema The term 'direct cinema' was coined by American director Albert Maysles, to describe the style of documentary that he and his contemporaries were making in the 1960s as a result of a lightweight, portable 16mm camera and high quality lightweight audio recorders becoming available. The introduction of these, together with film-stock which was sensitive enough to give a good quality close-up monochrome picture under most lighting conditions (Including hand-held lights) led to a revolution in Documentary filmmaking, allowing film crews to be much more flexible. Gone were the days of bulky, virtually immobile 35mm cameras; now manufacturers improved their 16mm stock and accepted it

With this short but very interesting and informative class I have just scratched the surface of the what it takes to make a full fleged film. It takes much more than I had presumed to make a movie in Hollywood. The number of people that it takes to make a minute of a movie let alone the entire movie was astonishing to me. There are many things that it takes to start making a movie but without an idea of some sort there is no movie to be made.

Every so often a movie is released with such tense anticipation and glamorous visual art that the public is drawn to this dramatic rendition of life in the theatre. For even just two hours or so, you are put into a different lifestyle. Action, drama or comedy it may be. We are thrust into a different way of thinking. We are forced to learn the characters thoughts and feelings. The hard work and artistic skill that goes into these magnificent films is not an easy thing to mimic. Out of the thousands of movies released worldwide each year only a handful are truly worthy of the label film art. Most of the great movies are either produced by a multi million dollar

My entire life I have been fascinated with film and commercials. As a kid, I would stop what I was doing to watch a commercial. This has not changed through the years. My goal in life is to work in the film industry and work with video. This may have developed from my brother’s short term love for the video arts. Like most little brothers I followed in his footsteps through a lot of things and most of them would not stick. As I grew older I developed my own different ideals and likes. But, video just stuck with me. Even if film production doesn’t work out I have always had a childlike excitement for fighting fires. Being the person to save the day is something that everybody wants to do, but not everyone peruses this dangerous career.

The film industry has continuously changed since its inception due to rapid technology advancements. Camera technology has been a key factor that has influenced the growth of filmmaking. The first motion picture in the world was produced in the early 1880s, and the first public screening occurred ten years later. It didn’t take long for the quality of films to improve as new filmmaking equipment emerged. Ever since the first movie was produced, the film industry has been continuously changing in response to emerging filmmaking technology. Introduction of digital photography and digital data storage along with the development of internet significantly influenced the film industry (Barsam, 2015). These technologies contributed