Suspense and Resolution in the Films of D.W. Griffith

Suspense and Resolution in the Films of D.W. Griffith PDF Author: George Pavlou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527523993
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book offers a significant and original contribution to studies on D.W. Griffith and film, through a systematic analysis of the director’s chase scenes, which create suspense and resolution in his films. The predominance of the emphasis of building suspense differs in the various stages of his chase scenes. The primary source of material discussed here is Griffith’s films after 1913 when he left the Biograph Company. Griffith’s post-Biograph films are more complete and representative of his techniques than his earlier films, which were subject to financial constraints while he was still innovating and developing his cinematic techniques. Most of his films used in this analysis were provided by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The purpose of this study is to determine a definition of a Griffithian chase scene in terms of his editing techniques. Categories are established, defining specific tools. This is done by determining and documenting consistencies, comparisons, and specific patterns occurring in his chase scenes that generally do not occur in his general editing. Griffith’s basic mechanics in editing are filmic time and space, parallel action, referential crosscutting, and decomposition. A major finding in this book is that Griffith’s chase scenes are the most important part of his films in terms of suspense and resolution. His chase scenes are complex, unique and sometimes even unpredictable. As such, this is an important new work on D.W. Griffith, and will be of interest to scholars and others interested in both the director and film, and will also be an asset to libraries and bookstores.

Suspense and Resolution in the Films of D.W. Griffith

Suspense and Resolution in the Films of D.W. Griffith PDF Author: George Pavlou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527523993
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a significant and original contribution to studies on D.W. Griffith and film, through a systematic analysis of the director’s chase scenes, which create suspense and resolution in his films. The predominance of the emphasis of building suspense differs in the various stages of his chase scenes. The primary source of material discussed here is Griffith’s films after 1913 when he left the Biograph Company. Griffith’s post-Biograph films are more complete and representative of his techniques than his earlier films, which were subject to financial constraints while he was still innovating and developing his cinematic techniques. Most of his films used in this analysis were provided by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The purpose of this study is to determine a definition of a Griffithian chase scene in terms of his editing techniques. Categories are established, defining specific tools. This is done by determining and documenting consistencies, comparisons, and specific patterns occurring in his chase scenes that generally do not occur in his general editing. Griffith’s basic mechanics in editing are filmic time and space, parallel action, referential crosscutting, and decomposition. A major finding in this book is that Griffith’s chase scenes are the most important part of his films in terms of suspense and resolution. His chase scenes are complex, unique and sometimes even unpredictable. As such, this is an important new work on D.W. Griffith, and will be of interest to scholars and others interested in both the director and film, and will also be an asset to libraries and bookstores.

The Real Gaze

The Real Gaze PDF Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791480364
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Winner of the 2008 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis The Real Gaze develops a new theory of the cinema by rethinking the concept of the gaze, which has long been central in film theory. Historically film scholars have located the gaze on the side of the spectator; however, Todd McGowan positions it within the filmic image, where it has the radical potential to disrupt the spectator's sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology. This book demonstrates several distinct cinematic forms that vary in terms of how the gaze functions within the films. Through a detailed investigation of directors such as Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Federico Fellini, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and David Lynch, McGowan explores the political, cultural, and existential ramifications of these differing roles of the gaze.

D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation

D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation PDF Author: Melvyn Stokes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198044364
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film. This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.

A Companion to D. W. Griffith

A Companion to D. W. Griffith PDF Author: Charles Keil
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118341252
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
The most comprehensive volume on one of the most controversial directors in American film history A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers an exhaustive look at the first acknowledged auteur of the cinema and provides an authoritative account of the director’s life, work, and lasting filmic legacy. The text explores how Griffith’s style and status advanced along with cinema’s own development during the years when narrative became the dominant mode, when the short gave way to the feature, and when film became the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment. Griffith was at the centre of each of these changes: though a contested figure, he remains vital to any understanding of how cinema moved from nickelodeon fixture to a national pastime, playing a significant role in the cultural ethos of America. With the renewed interest in Griffith’s contributions to the film industry, A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers a scholarly look at a career that spanned more than 25 years. The editor, a leading scholar on D.W. Griffith, and the expert contributors collectively offer a unique account of one of the monumental figures in film studies. Presents the most authoritative, complete account of the director’s life, work, and lasting legacy Builds on the recent resurgence in the director’s scholarly and popular reputation Edited by a leading authority on D.W. Griffith, who has published extensively on this controversial director Offers the most up-to-date, singularly comprehensive volume on one of the monumental figures in film studies

D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film

D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film PDF Author: Tom Gunning
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252063664
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The legendary filmmaker D. W. Griffith directed nearly 200 films during 1908 and 1909, his first years with the Biograph Company. While those one-reel films are a testament to Griffith's inspired genius as a director, they also reflect a fundamental shift in film style from "cheap amusements" to movie storytelling complete with characters and narrative impetus. In this comprehensive historical investigation, drawing on films preserved by the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Tom Gunning reveals that the remarkable cinematic changes between 1900 and 1915 were a response to the radical reorganization within the film industry and the evolving role of film in American society. The Motion Picture Patents Company, the newly formed Film Trust, had major economic aspirations. The newly emerging industry's quest for a middle-class audience triggered Griffith's early experiments in film editing and imagery. His unique solutions permanently shaped American narrative film.

Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac PDF Author: Tami Williams
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096363
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory. In Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, Tami Williams makes unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints to produce the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. Williams's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director’s work of the 1920s, Williams examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women’s studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.

Thinking in Pictures

Thinking in Pictures PDF Author: Joyce E. Jesionowski
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520318528
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Film Theory

Film Theory PDF Author: Philip Simpson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415259736
Category : Cinematography
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This major new collection identifies the critical and theoretical concepts which have been most significant in the study of film and presents a historical and intellectual context for the material examined.

D.W. Griffith and the Narrator-system

D.W. Griffith and the Narrator-system PDF Author: Tom Gunning
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 698

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Book Description


Engaging Characters

Engaging Characters PDF Author: Murray Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198871074
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience. In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.