storytelling in cinema

2

2

VISUAL ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENT

Total Possible Points: 25

Due Date: Friday, July 19, at 11:59pm Assignment Goals:

· To apply your knowledge of the stylistic aspects of film, including mise-en- scene, cinematography, editing, and sound.

· To describe how the choice and use of those stylistic aspects align with a filmmaker’s construction of meaning in a film.

Assignment Overview

For this paper, you will watch the entire feature film The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) and then analyze one specific scene of the film, explaining how the elements of film style create meaning in this scene. The stylistic elements will include sound, editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scene.

Tammy Scene" from THE LONG DAY CLOSES

https://youtu.be/dOBrvXMU06w?si=eWJxekny23sez2Kl&t=67

start at 1:07 till end

IMPORTANT NOTE: You are required to analyze the “Tammy” scene of the film. If you elect to use a different scene of the film for your shot breakdown and analytical paper, you will fail the assignment without any opportunity to resubmit it for credit.

Part 1: Shot by Shot Breakdown (5 points)

In preparation for your analysis, you will identify the stylistic elements of each shot in the scene. (There are no more than 6 shots.) Please include detailed information about all of the following elements:

Mise-en-Scene: Describe any distinctive aspects of setting, costume, make-up, props, color, lighting, arrangement of characters/objects, movement of characters/objects.

· Cinematography, including the following: o Camera Distance: Extreme Close Up (ECU), Close-up (CU), Medium Close- up

(MCU), Medium Shot (MS), Medium Long Shot (MLS), Long shot (ELS),

Extreme Long Shot (ELS) o Camera Angle: straight-on, high angle, low angle, overhead, or canted o Camera Movement: pan, tilt, tracking shot, or crane shot

· Misc: distinctive lighting, unusual compositions, camera height, depth of field, rack focus, zoom, etc.

Duration of shots: How long each shot lasts

Editing Transitions from one shot to the next (described as specifically as possible): fade, dissolve, wipe, match-on-action, graphic match, etc.

Type and Quality of Sound: speech, music, noise

Source of Sound: on-screen, off-screen, voiceover. If on-screen, state source. If off- screen, state if diegetic or non-diegetic

A Shot Breakdown Table for this assignment is included in the "Complete the Assignments" section of Module 6. You are required to use this shot breakdown table format. The first three rows have been filled in with information about the imaginary film "Manic Max" to give you a sense of how to use and complete the form. Just delete these three rows before turning in your assignment.

Part 2: Analysis Paper (minimum of 1500 words, double-spaced (20 points)

In this section you will analyze and discuss the elements of film style that you’ve just broken down in this same scene. Using the information gained from your shot breakdown, construct an argument for how aspects of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound function separately and in relation each other in this specific scene to convey a specific theme or major concern of the film.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

IMPORTANT GUIDELINES

Thesis Statement

Be sure that your opening paragraph includes a thesis statement that clearly indicates all of the following:

The subject that you are writing on.

Your specific position regarding this subject (what you will be proving or demonstrating in your paper).

The method or strategy that you will use in order to defend your position.

Your thesis statement should directly relate to the matter of how the specific aspects of style in this scene of the film accomplish a specific purpose in relation to the remainder of the film. A sample thesis statement might be the following:

“The ‘Tammy’s in Love’ scene from The Long Day Closes integrates a specific elements of mise- en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound to accentuate the central protagonist’s feelings of

, a theme that is developed in the remainder of the film.”

Strategies for Organizing Your Visual Analysis Paper

I ask you to prepare a breakdown of the stylistic elements in each shot of the scene so that you can gather specific information about each shot, store it in an organized way, reflect upon it, and begin to see patterns. In this way, you start to understand and appreciate the choices that a filmmaker makes--for example, why the filmmaker had decided to use a tracking shot rather than a pan in one scene.

Once you have completed your shot breakdown, you will have quite a bit of "evidence" to draw from. Your next step is to think about how specific categories of style (sound, editing, etc.) create meaning by themselves, and also in relation to one another. Reflecting upon this will lead you to formulate a thesis statement, an assertion about how choices in mise- en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound help to suggest, develop or support a specific theme.

After writing an introductory paragraph with a focused thesis statement, it sometimes seems logical to proceed by devoting a body paragraph to the discussion of each shot. In this way, 5 shots = 5 paragraphs. There are two problems with this approach. First, limiting the discussion within a paragraph to the elements of one shot doesn't really provide you with much of a unifying message or theme for that paragraph. Second, talking about the film shot by shot usually results in focusing too intently upon describing what's going on in the shot (for example, "the filmmaker uses a tracking shot to scan the room, then zooms in on one character, then there's a cut to another room where the walls are painted blue, then we hear what sounds like hummingbirds on the soundtrack ... ") instead of analyzing and explaining how specific aspects of style (editing, cinematography, etc. create thematic meaning.

I would encourage you to consider a different strategy for organizing your paper. Once you have a thesis statement, you have something to demonstrate about how the aspects of style support or develop a theme. Instead of proceeding shot by shot, try proceeding aspect by aspect: one paragraph on mise-en-scene, the next paragraph on cinematography, the next on sound (in a specific order that makes sense to you, and that presents the material best for the reader). In this way, you'll avoid having to retell the plot of the scene (just assume that your intended reader has already seen the film), and you can focus on the analysis. You'll also find it easier to come up with a clear topic sentence for each of your body paragraphs--a sentence that indicates the specific idea or theme that you will be discussing in the remainder of that paragraph, and that also links back to your thesis statement. Let's say that the thesis statement of a paper is something like the following:

Through the use of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound, the narrative consistently limits our perception of the world to the experience of the central protagonist in order to give us a sense of claustrophobia.

We could construct the topic sentence for the paragraph on sound as follows:

The use of internal, subjective sound throughout the scene accentuates the sense that the audience remains inside the head of the main character, able to perceive the world only as the character perceives it.

A topic sentence such as this one would lead the reader to anticipate that in he rest of the paragraph the writer would analyze and discuss how subjective sound accomplishes this.

Organizing your paper in this way is actually easier, and it also becomes easier to make transitions between paragraphs.

Grading Rubric

Your visual analysis paper (including the shot breakdown) will be graded on the basis of a number of factors. These are described in the “Visual Analysis Rubric” document, which is available in the Assignments section of the course website. Please review this rubric carefully.

Due Date

The assignment (the shot breakdown plus the analytical paper) is due on Friday, July 19 at 11:59pm, via the course Submission Dropbox. The assignment must be submitted as a Word file (or two separate Word files--one for the shot breakdown chart, and another for the paper). Do not submit PDF files. Late assignments will be accepted until Monday, July 22 at 11:59pm, with one point deducted for each day late.

Important Distinctions Between Related Aspects of Film Style

Cinematography: Pan vs. Tracking Shot

It is sometimes easy to confuse these two types of camera movement.

A pan occurs when the camera mounted on any device (such as a human shoulder or a tripod) swivels. Imagine a classroom with ten students spaced evenly, standing in a row against the blackboard at the front of the room, and the camera placed six feet back from this row of students at the midpoint of the row. If you execute a pan shot in this space, the camera actually moves in an arc formation, and as the camera moves, it will appear that some students are closer to the camera than others. If the camera were to continue to move in this pan shot, it would create a full circular movement (known as a 360-degree pan). Try this with the camera on your cell phone to get a clear sense of how space looks when a camera pans it.

In this same space, imagine now a set a set of tracks set up parallel to the row of students, and the camera mounted on a device attached to this set of tracks. As the device (let’s say a wagon or a cart) moves, the camera scans the row of students, but it maintains the same distance from each student as it moves across the room. This is an example of a tracking shot. Here it is not the camera itself that is moving, but instead the device upon which the camera is mounted.

Accordingly, a stationary video camera held by a woman in the passenger seat of a car (pointed outside the window) as the car is moving will “automatically” create a tracking shot.

In the scene of Fear Eats the Soul in which Emmi announces to her family that Ali is her husband, the camera movement scanning the row of dumbfounded faces of Emmi’s family is a tracking shot rather than a pan. We know this because the camera runs parallel to the family members (who are arranged in a straight line).

For more information about pans and tracking shot, review the related PowerPoint slides in the Module 4 lesson on cinematography. Also, consult the Cinematography Terminology sheet in Module 4, and the material pertaining to these shots in your Film/Art textbook.

Editing and Shot Transitions: Fade-Out, Fade-In, and Dissolve

Here’s how you distinguish two frequently used shot transitions: the fade and the dissolve:

In the case of a fade, the shot either gradually transitions to total darkness (in a fade-

out) or gradually transitions from total darkness to an illuminated image (in a fade-in). If you have two successive shots in which Shot A is a fade-out and Shot B is a fade-in, there is never a time in which the image of Shot A and the image of Shot B are visible at the same time. One image disappears completely before the next image becomes visible.

In the dissolve, before the fade-out of the image in shot A is complete (that is, before the screen is filled with total darkness), the image in Shot B begins to fade-in, such that momentarily the images of both shots are superimposed and visible to us at the same time, and we have the sense that one image is “on top” of the other, and that one image is gradually replacing the other.

For more information about these shot transitions, please review the PowerPoint slides of the Module 5 lesson. Also, consult the Editing Terminology sheet in Module 5, and the material on these shot transitions in your Film/Art textbook.