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About the CD-ROM
The CD-ROM that goes with Film, Form, and Culture is an attempt to solve a major problem of all books on film: How do you use material from films-clips, sequences, quotations-to demonstrate specific problems? Quotation is the biggest problem in writing about film and teaching it. A textbook on literature can make use of quotations or entire poems or stories to illustrate its material. A film book is restricted to stills made from moving images. The stills in Film, Form, and Culture have been made directly from the films they illustrate and are more useful than publicity stills, which are often made outside of the film itself. But they do not move.
The Film, Form, and Culture CD-ROM solves the problem. It makes use of digitized film clips, organized into specific topics in an interactive design. Basic structural and perceptual issues of film, which are addressed in the first two chapters of the book and referred to throughout, are expanded upon by means of interactive visual analysis: editing and montage; the components of mise-en-scène-lighting, shot composition, camera movement; point of view; the use of music.
The CD-ROM is a supplement to the text but can be used separately as a tool for teaching basic cinematic terms and concepts. Ideally, every student should have access to it, using it at home or in the library. It can also be used in class if you have access to a multimedia computer and a projection panel, an LCD projector, or a large enough monitor.
The clips used in the CD-ROM are limited by copyright. Therefore, films are used in the CD-ROM that are not always the same as those referred to in the text. This becomes an advantage because it broadens the range of material you have to reference to.
Structure of the CD-ROM
The table of contents allows the reader to choose a main chapter head to go to. It is available at the beginning of the program and from any part in it by clicking on the "Head" icon. The table of contents lists the major topics: Introduction, Continuity Cutting, The Long Take, Montage, Point of View, Mise-en-scène, Lighting, Camera Movement, and Music. Within each chapter are subtopics: a main analysis section, a "define" section, and a comparison section. The reader can move between the sections or follow the definitions and analyses in linear order. All the parts of the main section are visible by clicking on the Spotlight icon.
There is a Glossary of all the major terms used in the CD-ROM. In each chapter, words defined in the Glossary are in yellow. Clicking on them will take the reader to the definition and back again. For example, when a student comes across a reference to the 180-degree rule, that term will be highlighted and a click will take her to a definition. There is a complete filmography with cast and credits for all the films used in the CD-ROM as well as a section where all the clips can be seen together. The Glossary, Filmography, and Film Clip collection are gathered together in the "Research Tool" area, accessible by clicking the icon that looks like a film can.
The topics in the CD-ROM can be looked at one after the other. Starting with an analysis of continuity, conventional editing, and the standard structure of a dialogue sequence and the over-the-shoulder shot, the student can move to chapters on the long take (in which editing is minimally used) and then to montage, theorized by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in which editing becomes a formal, visible structure of meaning.
The CD is constructed throughout with many clearly labeled subsections that help the student to explore levels of meaning and to perform intricate analyses. The chapters on Continuity Editing and The Long Take use examples from Paul Schrader's 1991 film, Light Sleeper, Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941), and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Because the CD-ROM is also structured as a hypertext, there are various directions the student can go as he is pursuing this line in this chapter and elsewhere. For example, Light Sleeper, a film made by a director very aware of film history, alludes to another film, Pickpocket, made in 1959 by the French director Robert Bresson. I have place a digitized clip from the end of Light Sleeper next to one by Pickpocket in order to demonstrate the concept of "intertextuality," the ability of one text to embrace, allude to, or borrow the form and structure of another. In the Continuity chapter, there is a section called "Discover." Here the student will find a definition of intertextuality and the examples from the two films.
Discussion of continuity editing also suggests other approaches. So, just as in the textbook, where comparisons are made between films that follow basic Hollywood convention and films that don't, the reader of the CD-ROM can find alternatives to the standard practices of the Classical style. On the CD, the major example of an alternative cutting style happens to come from the same sequence of Light Sleeper. This allows for an interesting contrast of styles within the same film and can be found in the "Unconventional Cutting in Light Sleeper" section of the Continuity Cutting chapter.
The discussion of Welles and the long take focuses on part of one key sequence in Citizen Kane, analyzing it through a variety of means, including animated lines that help the student define the ways Welles uses cinematic space to tell his story.
The Point of View chapter is an attempt to demonstrate a difficult concept in film analysis that defines who sees what during the progression of a film narrative. The difficulty in explaining point of view comes from the fact that few films are told entirely in the first or third person. A film narrative may seem to be omniscient, told from the outside, from a neutral perspective. But, in fact, all films switch continually between first- and third-person perspectives, usually through reaction and point-of-view shots, in which we see what a character sees as well as the character's reactions. By analysis of key sequences from films as various as Broken Blossoms, Meet John Doe, and Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) the reader is taken through a variety of explanations of how the eye is led through a film's narrative.
The Montage chapter offers rich analysis and comparison. The student can walk through the basic principles of montage, as defined by Sergei Eisenstein, and even build what Eisenstein called a montage cell for a self-made example. A comparison is drawn with a U.S. documentary film from the thirties, Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains. Here, as in other sections of the CD-ROM, a film sequence is broken down shot by shot. Descriptive text accompanies each image, which is enhanced with arrows placed in the frame to demonstrate the structural properties being analyzed.
The chapter on Mise-en-scène elaborates, through close visual analysis of sequences from D.W. Grifftith's Broken Blossoms, Hitchcock's Vertigo and Rear Window, and Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), how filmmakers develop and mold visual space to elaborate their narrative, create a fictive geography, and speak more about the characters and events than is suggested in the dialogue. The reader is asked to enter the spaces of these films, stop the action, and understand the complexities of framing and the relationships of characters to one another within the composition. A variety of interactive methods puts the student in close contact with the meaning of a complex term.
Chapters on lighting and the camera demonstrate the ways images are lit and color is used to achieve maximum dramatic and narrative effect. Camera movements and image size (such as closeups and wide shots) are demonstrated in order to provide students with examples of basic visual strategies that they can then apply to many other films.
Eisenstein figures prominently again in a chapter on film music. In an essay, Eisenstein did an intense analysis of a sequence from his film Alexander Nevsky, which was scored by the great Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. Eisenstein went so far as to create an elaborate chart that compared the images from the film with the musical score and both with abstract drawings of the dynamic relationships between the visuals and the music. This chart has intrigued film scholars with its intricate and complex connections between what is seen and what is heard. I have reproduced the chart and linked it with the sequences from the film, so that the frames that Eisenstein placed in relation to the music actually move as they do in the film itself, and I have animated with colored lines the relationships between image and sound. The result clarifies what Eisenstein had in mind and indicates that movie music and the images it accompanies are more complex than we've thought.
In all the chapters and examples in the CD-ROM, the accent is on analysis of the ways film images work. Students may move through it from beginning to end or click on specific chapters or specific sections within those chapters. As the instructor, you may find that the examples offered in the CD-ROM suggest other films to use that will extend the examples. You may wish to show your class the entire film from which the examples are taken in the CD-ROM. You will certainly want to embellish and even expand on the entries in the Glossary. Together with the text, the CD-ROM responds to most of the basic issues in an introductory course and can be used as a self-teaching component in any course in which a basic knowledge of film structure is required.
Questions and topics suggested by the CD-ROM: