Introduction to Film

Gloria C. Obiniana

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 LAGUNA UNIVERSITY

Vision

Laguna University shall be a socially responsive educational institution of

choice providing holistically developed individuals in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Mission

Laguna University is committed to produce academically prepared and

technically skilled individuals who are socially and morally upright.

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Course Code: MCM 07

Course Description:
History and principles of films; film as art, as medium of
communication and as popular culture.

Course Intended Learning Outcomes (CILO):

At the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. Recognize formal elements; they acquire and apply tools (terminology,
methods) to carry out rigorous formal analysis of film
2. Develop general conclusions by synthesizing specific cases and by
utilizing film-studies methods.
3. Compose convincing written arguments backed by evidence from films
and secondary sources.

Course Requirements:

Class Standing 60%

Major Exams 40%

Periodic Grade 100%

Prelim Grade 60% Class Standing + 40% Prelim Exam

Midterm Grade 30% Prelim Grade + 70% (60% Midterm Class
Standing + 40% Midterm Exam)

Final Grade 30% Midterm Grade + 70% (60% Final Class

Standing + 40% Final Exam)

Note: Components of Class Standing are reflected in the OBTLP

and Grading Sheets.

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 Table of Contents

Module 1: What is a Film?

Introduction 6
Learning Objectives 6
Lesson 1. World History of Film 7
Lesson 2. Phonograph 10
Lesson 3. Méliès and Porter 15
Assessment Task 1 18
Summary 19
References 19

Module 2: Early Growth of Film Industry

Introduction 20
Learning Objectives 20
Lesson 1: Rise of the Feature 21
Lesson 2. Hollywood 22
Lesson 3. The Art of the Silent Film 23
Lesson 4. MPAA: Combating Censorship 24
Assessment Task 2 25
Summary 26
References 26

Module 3: Film Language

Introduction 27
Learning Objectives 27
Lesson 1: Semiotics 28
Lesson 2. Narrative 30
Assessment Task 3 31
Summary 31
References 32

LIST OF FIGURES

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Figure Description Page
1.1 The Passion of Joan of Arc 7
1.2 Eadweard Muybridge 9
1.3 Kinetograph 11
1.4 Kinetoscope 12
1.5 Vitascope 14
1.6 Voyage dans la Lune 16

MODULE 1
What is a Film?
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 Introduction

A film, also known as a "movie" or a "motion picture," is a series of moving

images shown on a screen, usually with sound, that make up a story. The movie itself is a
film, and you can also use the word to mean the photographic strip of plastic that runs
through a camera and captures the film's images (Vocabulary.com Dictionary).

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this module, students should be able to:

1. Critically interpret films and clearly express those interpretations orally

and in writing.
2. Demonstrate knowledge of the historical development and cultural impact
of film as an art form.
3. Demonstrate a familiarity with the collaborative processes through which
films are constructed.

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Lesson 1. World History of Film (Skar, 2001)

History of film, also called history of the motion picture, history of cinema from the
19th century to the present. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Figure 1.1) is part of the history of
the motion picture.

Figure 1.1 The Passion of Joan of Arc

Movie poster for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928; English-language version of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc),
directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsc-03512)
(https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture)

Early Years, 1830–1910

The illusion of films is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of

vision and the phi phenomenon. The first of these causes the brain to retain images cast
upon the retina of the eye for a fraction of a second beyond their disappearance from the
field of sight, while the latter creates apparent movement between images when they

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succeed one another rapidly. Together these phenomena permit the succession of still
frames on a film strip to represent continuous movement when projected at the proper
speed (traditionally 16 frames per second for silent films and 24 frames per second for
sound films). Before the invention of photography, a variety of optical toys exploited this
effect by mounting successive phase drawings of things in motion on the face of a twirling
disk (the phenakistoscope, c. 1832) or inside a rotating drum (the zoetrope, c. 1834). Then,
in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, perfected the positive
photographic process known as daguerreotype, and that same year the English
scientist William Henry Fox Talbot successfully demonstrated a negative photographic
process that theoretically allowed unlimited positive prints to be produced from each
negative. As photography was innovated and refined over the next few decades, it became
possible to replace the phase drawings in the early optical toys and devices with individually
posed phase photographs, a practice that was widely and popularly carried out.

There would be no true motion pictures, however, until live action could be
photographed spontaneously and simultaneously. This required a reduction in exposure
time from the hour or so necessary for the pioneer photographic processes to the one-
hundredth (and, ultimately, one-thousandth) of a second achieved in 1870. It also required
the development of the technology of series photography by the
British American photographer Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1877 (Figure 1.2).
During that time, Muybridge was employed by Gov. Leland Stanford of California,
a zealous racehorse breeder, to prove that at some point in its gallop a running horse lifts all
four hooves off the ground at once. Conventions of 19th-century illustration suggested
otherwise, and the movement itself occurred too rapidly for perception by the naked eye, so
Muybridge experimented with multiple cameras to take successive photographs of horses in
motion. Finally, in 1877, he set up a battery of 12 cameras along a Sacramento racecourse
with wires stretched across the track to operate their shutters. As a horse strode down the
track, its hooves tripped each shutter individually to expose a successive photograph of the
gallop, confirming Stanford’s belief. When Muybridge later mounted these images on a
rotating disk and projected them on a screen through a magic lantern, they produced a
“moving picture” of the horse at full gallop as it had actually occurred in life.

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 Figure 1.2. Eadweard Muybridge
One photograph of a series taken by Eadweard Muybridge of a running horse.
Courtesy of the British Film Institute, London
(https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture)

The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey took the first series photographs with a
single instrument in 1882; once again the impetus was the analysis of motion too rapid for
perception by the human eye. Marey invented the chronophotographic gun,
a camera shaped like a rifle that recorded 12 successive photographs per second, in order
to study the movement of birds in flight. These images were imprinted on a rotating glass
plate (later, paper roll film), and Marey subsequently attempted to project them. Like
Muybridge, however, Marey was interested in deconstructing movement rather than
synthesizing it, and he did not carry his experiments much beyond the realm of high-speed,
or instantaneous, series photography. Muybridge and Marey, in fact, conducted their work in
the spirit of scientific inquiry; they both extended and elaborated existing technologies in
order to probe and analyze events that occurred beyond the threshold of human perception.
Those who came after would return their discoveries to the realm of normal human vision
and exploit them for profit.

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 In 1887 in Newark, New Jersey, an Episcopalian minister named Hannibal
Goodwin developed the idea of using celluloid as a base for photographic emulsions. The
inventor and industrialist George Eastman, who had earlier experimented with sensitized
paper rolls for still photography, began manufacturing celluloid roll film in 1889 at his plant in
Rochester, New York. This event was crucial to the development of cinematography: series
photography such as Marey’s chronophotographs could employ glass plates or paper strip
film because it recorded events of short duration in a relatively small number of images, but
cinematography would inevitably find its subjects in longer, more complicated events,
requiring thousands of images and therefore just the kind of flexible but durable recording
medium represented by celluloid. It remained for someone to combine the principles
embodied in the apparatuses of Muybridge and Marey with celluloid strip film to arrive at a
viable motion-picture camera.

Such a device was created by French-born inventor Louis Le Prince in the late
1880s. He shot several short films in Leeds, England, in 1888, and the following year he
began using the newly invented celluloid film. He was scheduled to show his work in New
York City in 1890, but he disappeared while traveling in France. The exhibition never
occurred, and Le Prince’s contribution to cinema remained little known for decades. Instead
it was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, working in the West Orange, New Jersey,
laboratories of the Edison Company, who created what was widely regarded as the first
motion-picture camera.

Lesson 2. Phonograph (Edison and the Lumière brothers, n.d.)

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and it quickly became the most
popular home-entertainment device of the century. Seeking to provide a
visual accompaniment to the phonograph, Edison commissioned Dickson, a young
laboratory assistant, to invent a motion-picture camera in 1888. Building upon the work of
Muybridge and Marey, Dickson combined the two final essentials of motion-picture recording
and viewing technology. These were a device, adapted from the escapement mechanism of
a clock, to ensure the intermittent but regular motion of the film strip through the camera and
a regularly perforated celluloid film strip to ensure precise synchronization between the film

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strip and the shutter. Dickson’s camera, the Kinetograph, initially imprinted up to 50 feet (15
metres) of celluloid film at the rate of about 40 frames per second (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3. Kinetograph

The Kinetograph, a motion-picture camera developed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Thomas Edison
from 1888. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Si
(https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture)

Dickson was not the only person who had been tackling the problem of recording
and reproducing moving images. Inventors throughout the world had been trying for years to
devise working motion-picture machines. In fact, several European inventors, including the
Englishman William Friese-Greene, applied for patents on various cameras, projectors, and
camera-projector combinations contemporaneously or even before Edison and his
associates did.
Because Edison had originally conceived of motion pictures as an adjunct to his
phonograph, he did not commission the invention of a projector to accompany the
Kinetograph. Rather, he had Dickson design a type of peep-show viewing device called
the Kinetoscope (Figure 1.4), in which a continuous 47-foot (14-metre) film loop ran on
spools between an incandescent lamp and a shutter for individual viewing. Starting in 1894,
Kinetoscopes were marketed commercially through the firm of Raff and Gammon for $250 to
$300 apiece. The Edison Company established its own Kinetograph studio (a single-room
building called the “Black Maria” that rotated on tracks to follow the sun) in West
Orange, New Jersey, to supply films for the Kinetoscopes that Raff and Gammon were
installing in penny arcades, hotel lobbies, amusement parks, and other such semipublic

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places. In April of that year the first Kinetoscope parlour was opened in a converted
storefront in New York City. The parlour charged 25 cents for admission to a bank of five
machines.

Figure 1.4. Kinetoscope

Kinetoscope, invented by Thomas Edison and William Dickson in 1891.
The Bettmann Archive (https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture)

The syndicate of Maguire and Baucus acquired the foreign rights to the Kinetoscope
in 1894 and began to market the machines. Edison opted not to file for international patents
on either his camera or his viewing device, and, as a result, the machines were widely and
legally copied throughout Europe, where they were modified and improved far beyond the
American originals. In fact, it was a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris that inspired the Lumière
brothers, Auguste and Louis, to invent the first commercially viable projector.
Their cinématographe, which functioned as a camera and printer as well as a projector, ran
at the economical speed of 16 frames per second. It was given its first commercial
demonstration on December 28, 1895.

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 Unlike the Kinetograph, which was battery-driven and weighed more than 1,000
pounds (453 kg), the cinématographe was hand-cranked, lightweight (less than 20 pounds
[9 kg]), and relatively portable. This naturally affected the kinds of films that were made with
each machine: Edison films initially featured material such as circus or vaudeville acts that
could be taken into a small studio to perform before an inert camera, while early Lumière
films were mainly documentary views, or “actualities,” shot outdoors on location. In both
cases, however, the films themselves were composed of a single unedited shot
emphasizing lifelike movement; they contained little or no narrative content. (After a few
years design changes in the machines made it possible for Edison and the Lumières to
shoot the same kinds of subjects.) In general, Lumière technology became the European
standard during the early era, and, because the Lumières sent their cameramen all over the
world in search of exotic subjects, the cinématographe became the founding instrument of
distant cinemas in Russia, Australia, and Japan.

In the United States the Kinetoscope installation business had reached the saturation
point by the summer of 1895, although it was still quite profitable for Edison as a supplier of
films. Raff and Gammon persuaded Edison to buy the rights to a state-of-the-art projector,
developed by Thomas Armat of Washington, D.C., which incorporated a
superior intermittent movement mechanism and a loop-forming device (known as
the Latham loop, after its earliest promoters, Grey Latham and Otway Latham) to reduce film
breakage, and in early 1896 Edison began to manufacture and market this machine as his
own invention. Given its first public demonstration on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s
Music Hall in New York City, the Edison Vitascope brought projection to the United States
and established the format for American film exhibition for the next several years. It also
encouraged the activities of such successful Edison rivals as the American Mutoscope and
Biograph Company, which was formed in 1896 to exploit the Mutoscope peep-show device
and the American Biograph camera and projector patented by W.K.L. Dickson in 1896.
During this time, which has been characterized as the “novelty period,” emphasis fell on the
projection device itself, and films achieved their main popularity as self-contained vaudeville
attractions. Vaudeville houses, locked in intense competition at the turn of the century,
headlined the name of the machines rather than the films (e.g., “The Vitascope—Edison’s
Latest Marvel,” (Figure 1.5) “The Amazing Cinématographe”). The producer, or
manufacturer, supplied projectors along with an operator and a program of shorts. These
films, whether they were Edison-style theatrical variety shorts or Lumière-style actualities,

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were perceived by their original audiences not as motion pictures in the modern sense of the
term but as “animated photographs” or “living pictures,” emphasizing their continuity with
more familiar media of the time.

Figure 1.5. Vitascope

Advertisement for Thomas Edison's Vitascope.
Metropolitan Print Company/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-05943)
(https://images.search.yahoo.com/)

During the novelty period, the film industry was autonomous and unitary, with
production companies leasing a complete film service of projector, operator, and shorts to
the vaudeville market as a single, self-contained act. Starting about 1897, however,
manufacturers began to sell both projectors and films to itinerant exhibitors who traveled
with their programs from one temporary location (vaudeville theatres, fairgrounds, circus
tents, lyceums) to another as the novelty of their films wore off at a given site. This new
mode of screening by circuit marked the first separation of exhibition from production and
gave the exhibitors a large measure of control over early film form, since they were
responsible for arranging the one-shot films purchased from the producers into audience-

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pleasing programs. The putting together of these programs—which often involved narration,
sound effects, and music—was in effect a primitive form of editing, so that it is possible to
regard the itinerant projectionists working between 1896 and 1904 as the earliest directors
of motion pictures. Several of them, notably Edwin S. Porter, were, in fact, hired as directors
by production companies after the industry stabilized in the first decade of the 20th century.

By encouraging the practice of peripatetic exhibition, the American producers’ policy

of outright sales inhibited the development of permanent film theatres in the United States
until nearly a decade after their appearance in Europe, where England and France had
taken an early lead in both production and exhibition. Britain’s first projector, the
theatrograph (later the animatograph), had been demonstrated in 1896 by the scientific-
instrument maker Robert W. Paul. In 1899 Paul formed his own production company for the
manufacture of actualities and trick films, and until 1905 Paul’s Animatograph Works, Ltd.,
was England’s largest producer, turning out an average of 50 films per year. Between 1896
and 1898, two Brighton photographers, George Albert Smith and James Williamson,
constructed their own motion-picture cameras and began producing trick films featuring
superimpositions (The Corsican Brothers, 1897) and interpolated close-ups (Grandma’s
Reading Glass, 1900; The Big Swallow, 1901). Smith subsequently developed the first
commercially successful photographic colour process (Kinemacolor, c. 1906–08, with
Charles Urban), while Williamson experimented with parallel editing as early as 1900 ( Attack
on a Chinese Mission Station) and became a pioneer of the chase film ( Stop Thief!,
1901; Fire!, 1901). Both Smith and Williamson had built studios at Brighton by 1902 and,
with their associates, came to be known as members of the “Brighton school,” although they
did not represent a coherent movement. Another important early British filmmaker was Cecil
Hepworth, whose Rescued by Rover (1905) is regarded by many historians as the most
skillfully edited narrative produced before the Biograph shorts of D.W. Griffith.

Lesson 3. Méliès and Porter (Britannica, n.d.)

The shift in consciousness away from films as animated photographs to films as

stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of the century and is most evident
in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès was a professional magician
who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the cinématographe; when the

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Lumières refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph projector from Paul in 1896
and reversed its mechanical principles to design his own camera. The following year he
organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-enclosed studio on the
grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed, photographed, and acted in
more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.

Initially Méliès used stop-motion photography (the camera and action are stopped
while something is added to or removed from the scene; then filming and action are
continued) to make one-shot “trick” films in which objects disappeared and reappeared or
transformed themselves into other objects entirely. These films were widely imitated by
producers in England and the United States. Soon, however, Méliès began to experiment
with brief multiscene films, such as L’Affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair, 1899), his first,
which followed the logic of linear temporality to establish causal sequences and tell simple
stories. By 1902 he had produced the influential 30-scene narrative Le Voyage dans la
Lune (A Trip to the Moon) as shown in Figure 1.6. Adapted from a novel by Jules Verne, it
was nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet [251 metres], or 14 minutes).

Figure 1.6. Voyage dans la Lune

(https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/Melies-and-Porter)

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 The first film to achieve international distribution (mainly through piracy), Le Voyage
dans la Lune was an enormous popular success. It helped to make Star Film one of the
world’s largest producers (an American branch was opened in 1903) and to establish the
fiction film as the cinema’s mainstream product. In both respects Méliès dethroned the
Lumières’ cinema of actuality. Despite his innovations, Méliès’s productions remained
essentially filmed stage plays. He conceived them quite literally as successions of living
pictures or, as he termed them, “artificially arranged scenes.” From his earliest trick films
through his last successful fantasy, La Conquête du pole (“The Conquest of the Pole,”
1912), Méliès treated the frame of the film as the proscenium arch of a theatre stage, never
once moving his camera or changing its position within a scene. He ultimately lost his
audience in the late 1910s to filmmakers with more sophisticated narrative techniques.

The origination of many such techniques is closely associated with the work of Edwin
S. Porter, a freelance projectionist and engineer who joined the Edison Company in 1900 as
production head of its new skylight studio on East 21st Street in New York City. For the next
few years, he served as director-cameraman for much of Edison’s output, starting with
simple one-shot films (Kansas Saloon Smashers, 1901) and progressing rapidly to trick films
(The Finish of Bridget McKeen, 1901) and short multiscene narratives based on political
cartoons and contemporary events ( Sampson-Schley Controversy, 1901; Execution of
Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison , 1901). Porter also filmed the extraordinary Pan-
American Exposition by Night (1901), which used time-lapse photography to produce a
circular panorama of the exposition’s electrical illumination, and the 10-scene Jack and the
Beanstalk (1902), a narrative that simulates the sequencing of lantern slides to achieve a
logical, if elliptical, spatial continuity.

It was probably Porter’s experience as a projectionist at the Eden Musée theatre in

1898 that ultimately led him in the early 1900s to the practice of continuity editing. The
process of selecting one-shot films and arranging them into a 15-minute program for screen
presentation was very much like that of constructing a single film out of a series of separate
shots. Porter, by his own admission, was also influenced by other filmmakers—especially
Méliès, whose Le Voyage dans la Lune he came to know well in the process of duplicating it
for illegal distribution by Edison in October 1902. Years later Porter claimed that the Méliès

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film had given him the notion of “telling a story in continuity form,” which resulted in The Life
of an American Fireman (about 400 feet [122 metres], or six minutes, produced in late 1902
and released in January 1903). This film, which was also influenced by James
Williamson’s Fire!, combined archival footage with staged scenes to create a nine-shot
narrative of a dramatic rescue from a burning building. It was for years the subject of
controversy because in a later version the last two scenes were intercut, or crosscut, into a
14-shot parallel sequence. It is now generally believed that in the earliest version of the film
these scenes, which repeat the same rescue operation from an interior and exterior point of
view, were shown in their entirety, one after the other. This repetition, or overlapping
continuity, which owes much to magic lantern shows, clearly defines the spatial relationships
between scenes but leaves temporal relationships underdeveloped and, to modern
sensibilities, confused. Contemporary audiences, however, were conditioned by lantern
slide projections and even comic strips; they understood a sequence of motion-picture shots
to be a series of individual moving photographs, each of which was self-contained within its
frame. Spatial relationships were clear in such earlier narrative forms because their only
medium was space.

Assessment Task 1

Summarize the world history of film in a short video clip using any available
materials, example old film strips, old camera, etc. (Using your smart phones,
Indicate your creative title)

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 Summary

No one person invented cinema. However, in 1891 the Edison Company

successfully demonstrated a prototype of the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a
time to view moving pictures. (Britannica, n.d.).

The first public Kinetoscope demonstration took place in 1893. By 1894 the
Kinetoscope was a commercial success, with public parlors established around the world
(Britannica, n.d.).

The first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience were the Lumière
brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France. They used a device of their own making, the
Cinématographe, which was a camera, a projector and a film printer all in one (Britannica,
n.d.).

References

Skar, Robert (2001). A World History of Film, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,

https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/very-short-history-of-
cinema

Film (n.d.). in Vocabulary.com Dictionary). https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/film.

Edison and the Lumier brothers (n.d.) https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-

picture/Edison-and-the-Lumiere-brothers.

Britannica. (n.d.). Méliès and Porter. https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-

picture/Melies-and-Porter.

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 MODULE 2
Early Growth of the Film Industry

Introduction

The movie industry as we know it today originated in the early 19th century through a
series of technological developments: the creation of photography, the discovery of the
illusion of motion by combining individual still images, and the study of human and animal
locomotion. The history presented here begins at the culmination of these technological
developments, where the idea of the motion picture as an entertainment industry first
emerged (University of Minnesota, n.d.).

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this module, the student should be able to:

1. Identify key points in the development of the motion picture industry.

2. Identify key developments of the motion picture industry and technology.

3. Identify influential films in movie history.

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Lesson 1. The Rise of the Feature (Sklar, 2001)

In the Rise of the Feature age of films, Theaters were still running single-reel films,

which came at a standard length of 1,000 feet, allowing for about 16 minutes of playing time.

However, companies began to import multiple-reel films from European producers around

1907, and the format gained popular acceptance in the United States in 1912 with Louis

Mercanton’s highly successful Queen Elizabeth, a three-and-a-half reel “feature,” starring

the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. As exibitors began to show more features—as the

multiple-reel film came to be called—they discovered a number of advantages over the

single-reel short. For one thing, audiences saw these longer films as special events and

were willing to pay more for admission, and because of the popularity of the feature

narratives, features generally experienced longer runs in theaters than their single-reel
predecessors. “Pre World-War I US Cinema,” Motion Pictures: The Silent Feature: 1910-

27, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_4.html#0009. Additionally, the feature

film gained popularity among the middle classes, who saw its length as analogous to the

more “respectable” entertainment of live theater.“Pre World-War I US Cinema,” Motion

Pictures: The Silent Feature: 1910-

27, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_4.html#0009. Following the example of
the French film d’art, U.S. feature producers often took their material from sources that

would appeal to a wealthier and better educated audience, such as histories, literature, and

stage productions.David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American
Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135, 144.

As it turns out, the feature film was one factor that brought about the eventual

downfall of the MPPC. The inflexible structuring of the Trust’s exhibition and distribution

system made the organization resistant to change. When movie studio, and Trust member,

Vitagraph began to release features like A Tale of Two Cities (1911) and Uncle Tom’s

Cabin (1910), the Trust forced it to exhibit the films serially in single-reel showings to keep
with industry standards. The MPPC also underestimated the appeal of the star system, a

trend that began when producers chose famous stage actors like Mary Pickford and James

21
O’Neill to play the leading roles in their productions and to grace their advertising posters.

David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 140. Because of the MPPC’s inflexibility, independent

companies were the only ones able to capitalize on two important trends that were to

become film’s future: single-reel features and star power. Today, few people would

recognize names like Vitagraph or Biograph, but the independents that outlasted them—

Universal, Goldwyn (which would later merge with Metro and Mayer), Fox (later 20th
Century Fox), and Paramount (the later version of the Lasky Corporation)—have become
household names.

Lesson 2. Hollywood (University of Minnesota, n.d.)

As movie going increased in popularity among the middle class, and as the feature
films began keeping audiences in their seats for longer periods of time, exhibitors found a

need to create more comfortable and richly decorated theater spaces to attract their

audiences. These “dream palaces,” so called because of their often lavish embellishments

of marble, brass, guilding, and cut glass, not only came to replace the nickelodeon theater,

but also created the demand that would lead to the Hollywood studio system. Some
producers realized that the growing demand for new work could only be met if the films were

produced on a regular, year-round system. However, this was impractical with the current

system that often relied on outdoor filming and was predominately based in Chicago and
New York—two cities whose weather conditions prevented outdoor filming for a significant

portion of the year. Different companies attempted filming in warmer locations such as
Florida, Texas, and Cuba, but the place where producers eventually found the most success

was a small, industrial suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood.

Hollywood proved to be an ideal location for a number of reasons. Not only was the

climate temperate and sunny year-round, but land was plentiful and cheap, and the location

allowed close access to a number of diverse topographies: mountains, lakes, desert, coasts,
and forests. By 1915, more than 60 percent of U.S. film production was centered in

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Hollywood.Britannica Online. s.v. “History of the Motion

Picture.” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/394161/history-of-the-motion picture

Lesson 3. The Art of the Silent Film (University of Minnesota, n.d.)

While the development of narrative film was largely driven by commercial factors, it is
also important to acknowledge the role of individual artists who turned it into a medium of
personal expression. The motion picture of the silent era was generally simplistic in nature;
acted in overly animated movements to engage the eye; and accompanied by live music,
played by musicians in the theater, and written titles to create a mood and to narrate a story.
Within the confines of this medium, one filmmaker in particular emerged to transform
the silent film into an art and to unlock its potential as a medium of serious expression and
persuasion. D. W. Griffith, who entered the film industry as an actor in 1907, quickly moved
to a directing role in which he worked closely with his camera crew to experiment with shots,
angles, and editing techniques that could heighten the emotional intensity of his scenes. He
found that by practicing parallel editing, in which a film alternates between two or more
scenes of action, he could create an illusion of simultaneity. He could then heighten the
tension of the film’s drama by alternating between cuts more and more rapidly until the
scenes of action converged. Griffith used this technique to great effect in his controversial
film The Birth of a Nation, which will be discussed in greater detail later on in this chapter.
Other techniques that Griffith employed to new effect included panning shots, through which
he was able to establish a sense of scene and to engage his audience more fully in the
experience of the film, and tracking shots, or shots that traveled with the movement of a
scene,“Griffith,” Motion
Pictures, http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_6.html#0011. which allowed the
audience—through the eye of the camera—to participate in the film’s action.

Lesson 4. Combatting Censorship (University of Minnesota, n.d.)

As film became an increasingly lucrative U.S. industry, prominent industry figures like
D. W. Griffith, slapstick comedian/director Charlie Chaplin, and actors Mary Pickford and

Douglas Fairbanks grew extremely wealthy and influential. Public attitudes toward stars and

23
toward some stars’ extravagant lifestyles were divided, much as they are today: On the one

hand, these celebrities were idolized and imitated in popular culture, yet at the same time,
they were criticized for representing a threat, on and off screen, to traditional morals and

social order. And much as it does today, the news media liked to sensationalize the lives of

celebrities to sell stories. Comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who worked alongside future

icons Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was at the center of one of the biggest scandals of

the silent era. When Arbuckle hosted a marathon party over Labor Day weekend in 1921,
one of his guests, model Virginia Rapp, was rushed to the hospital, where she later died.
Reports of a drunken orgy, rape, and murder surfaced. Following World War I, the United

States was in the middle of significant social reforms, such as Prohibition. Many feared that

movies and their stars could threaten the moral order of the country. Because of the nature

of the crime and the celebrity involved, these fears became inexplicably tied to the Artbuckle
case. “Post World War I US Cinema,” Motion Pictures,
http://www.uv.es/EBRIT/macro/macro_5004_39_10.html#0015. Even though autopsy

reports ruled that Rapp had died from causes for which Arbuckle could not be blamed, the

comedian was tried (and acquitted) for manslaughter, and his career was ruined.

The Arbuckle affair and a series of other scandals only increased public fears about
Hollywood’s impact. In response to this perceived threat, state and local governments

increasingly tried to censor the content of films that depicted crime, violence, and sexually

explicit material. Deciding that they needed to protect themselves from government
censorship and to foster a more favorable public image, the major Hollywood studios

organized in 1922 to form an association they called the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributers of America (later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA).

Among other things, the MPAA instituted a code of self-censorship for the motion picture

industry. Today, the MPAA operates by a voluntary rating system, which means producers

can voluntarily submit a film for review, which is designed to alert viewers to the age-

appropriateness of a film, while still protecting the filmmakers’ artistic freedom. Motion

Picture Association of America, “History of the MPAA,” http://www.mpaa.org/about/history.

24
 Assessment Task 2

Identify four films that you would consider to be representative of major

developments in the industry and in film as a medium that were outlined in this
section. Imagine you are using these films to explain movie history to a friend.

Provide a detailed explanation of why each of these films represents

significant changes in attitudes, technology, or trends and situate each in the

overall context of film’s development. Consider the following questions:

1. How did this movie influence the film industry?

2. What has been the lasting impact of this movie on the film industry?

3. How was the film industry and technology different before this film?

Summary

The film industry has seen extraordinary transformations, some driven by the artistic
visions of individual participants, some by commercial necessity, and still others by accident.
The history of the cinema is complex, and for every important innovator and movement
listed here, others have been left out. Nonetheless, after reading this section you will
understand the broad arc of the development of a medium that has captured the
imaginations of audiences worldwide for over a century (University of Minnesota, n.d.).

25
 References

Sklar, R. (2001). History of Film.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/394161/history-of-the-motion picture.

The Credits. (n.d.). http://www.mpaa.org/about/history.

University of Minnesota. (n.d.). The Art of the Silent Film.

https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/8-2-the-history-of-movies/.

26
 MODULE 3
Film Language

Introduction

The study of film is a way of understanding more strongly about a movie or even its
directors or producers. Some schools and colleges are teaching them at the start of the
modern century, at the era of the motion picture. The technical quality of the film may seem
confusing, film studies exist to help clear the confusion-it helps us understand the art of the
film. The modernization of film at the end of the nineteenth century gave birth to a whole
array of film producers and directors the educational abstract generations followed after that
(Pärn, 2012)
.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this module, students should be able to:

1. identify vocabulary terms related to films

2. use vocabulary correctly to discuss film previews
3. participate in a film about going to the movies by reading an assigned role in English

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Lesson 1. Semiotics (Pärn, 2012)

Film semiotics is the study of how these visual and auditory units function to

construct the meaning we attribute to cinematic texts. Film-makers and audiences share an

understanding of the sign systems (the codes and conventions) that allow film to

communicate meanings beyond what is seen or heard.

The founder of semiotics of cinema, Christian Metz set as the aim of his project to go

to the bottom of the metaphor of language that had been used widely for describing cinema

in film theory, yet without taking into account the knowledge about language that had

accumulated in linguistics. Thus the goal of early semiotics of cinema was to go beyond

figural analogy and bring together the two domains of knowledge; knowledge about cinema

and knowledge about language. The development of metaphor of language of cinema into

semiotic model of language of cinema sheds light to semiotic modelling as methodological

tool. Firstly the metaphor of language of cinema itself- either pre-theoretical or theoretical-

can be seen as an attempt to make sense of novel phenomena through analogy with

something already familiar. This stage resulted in ontological theories of language of

cinema. Refining this rough analogy into the object of study meant acknowledging the

difference between cinema as experienced and cinema as object of knowledge, arriving

thereby at methodological theories of cinema that use semiotic modelling as a means for

constructing the object of study.

Semiotics: The study of signs. It has its origins in the work of Ferdinand de
Saussure, a Swiss linguist who was the fi rst to identify some of the basic principles that

apply to any sign-based system. Sign: An object, quality or event whose presence or

occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else.

Visual abbreviation
Anything the eye or ear picks up on, whatever we single out for attention and draw a specific

meaning from, is functioning as a sign. It stands for something that contributes to our overall

understanding. Film is the art of visual abbreviation. Film-makers use smiles and scars,

badges and beards, to tell the audience more than they can be explicitly shown or told. The

28
audience sees meaning in them because it is a movie – and they have been deliberately

placed there for a reason. A movie is a matrix of interrelated signs erected by the fi lm-

maker to guide the audience on their journey.

The two sides of the sign

The first basic insight of semiotics is that a sign has two parts:

the physical and the psychological

1. The physical part is the ‘sign-as-object’, the tangible thing we see or hear, such as a

metal road sign, the tear in the heroine’s eye or the words ‘Go for your gun.’ This is

called ‘the signifier’ – the external stimulus.

2. The psychological part is the ‘sign-as-concept’, the reaction to the object, the mental

picture or idea it provokes in the mind. This is called ‘the signified’ – the internal

response to the signifier. The signifier is what we perceive of the sign, while the

signified is the actual meaning the sign has for us. This distinction between the thing

used to communicate (tears) and the thing communicated (sadness), has important

implications for fi lm-makers who are trying to effect a precise response in their

audience. It is crucial to find the perfect stimulus for the state you want to create in

the viewer. The difficulty lies in the fact that the sign has one signifier, but many

potential signified. The signifier is ‘out there’, fixed and publically shared, whereas

the signified is a unique response determined by a range of personal factors. We all

interpret things differently according to experience or mood. What is more, tears can
be a sign of many things – sorrow, fear, frustration, relief, gratitude, happiness, or a

mixture of these. It follows that the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary.

There is no natural bond between the sign-as-perceived and the sign-as-understood.

If one character hands another a single red rose the meaning is clear. Yet there is no

inherent connection between a garden shrub and romantic love. The link is entirely

due to convention – creating an efficient shorthand for quite complex notions that

would otherwise require an awful lot of words. In fact, by bypassing language the

image creates an emotional attachment to the screen.

29
Denotation and Connotation
A further important distinction exists between two dimensions of meaning – two ‘levels of

signification’:

1. Denotation: the primary direct ‘given’ meaning the sign has – e.g. a military uniform

and insignia will denote a particular class or rank (private, sergeant, captain, general

and so on).

2. Connotation: the secondary indirect meaning derived from what the sign ‘suggests’ –

for example, military uniforms may connote valor, manliness, oppression, conformity
and so on – as the result of collective cultural attitudes or unique personal

associations. Both levels of meaning clearly operate in the still from The Birth of a

Nation (opposite). Everyone will recognize a hectic battlefield scene and many will

recognize the uniform of an officer in the Southern Confederate army during the

American Civil War. This is the factually based denotative meaning. However, the

connotations it has, the ideas it evokes, will vary enormously according to the

viewer’s attitudes to war in general and that war in particular. This leads to another

central insight of film semiotics: meaning does not reside in the fi lm like some buried

treasure awaiting discovery. Meaning is the result of the interaction between the fi lm

and the audience – it is a fluctuating process only partially at the fi lm-maker’s

command. Nevertheless, it is his or her task to exert maximum possible control – to

anticipate the range of likely connotations and nudge the audience in the desired

direction.

Lesson 2. Narrative (Cohn, 2015)

The first thing to be considered in film analysis and production is the complexity of

the overarching narrative structure. This implies that narrative is about stories. On one level

it is, but narrative analysis is about much more than that. Narrative analysis is the study of

the specifics of communication as it relates to structure – the details of the language that

film uses. As if that didn’t sound complex enough, narrative is further complicated by its

30
relationship to the real world. Film has its own specific language and as such is

unconnected to reality in the way we might assume it is. However, as an audience, we have

to believe that what we are seeing is real. It is the complexity of the relationship of narrative

elements to narrative wholes and the relationship of both of these to the ‘real world’ that

makes narrative so fiendish for analysis and complex for fi lm-makers. Either way, you need

to understand your medium.

Assessment Task 3

Identify a film that gets your attention. Watch it again and understand it based on
different perceptions that you made upon reading the language of a film. List down
the things that you noticed and understand.

Example:

1. Burning picture – (your understanding or the things that it is symbolizing,

based on the story)

Summary

Film language is actually made up of many different languages all subsumed into
one medium. Film can co-opt into itself all the other arts – photography, painting, theatre,
music, architecture, dance and of course, the spoken word. Everything can find its way into
a movie – large or small, natural or fantastic, beautiful or grotesque (Pärn, 2012).

31
References

Rozario, Ronnie. (2020). The study of Film and its critical approaches.

Pärn, Katre. (2012). Language of Cinema and Semiotic Modelling. Chinese Semiotic
Studies. 6. 10.1515/css-2012-0123.

ESL Film Lesson Plan.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/esl-film-lesson-plan.html

Branigan, E. (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film. London/New York : Routledge,

325 pp.https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cine/1994-v4-n3-cine1502289/1001045ar.pdf

Neil Cohn (2015). How to analyze visual narratives: A tutorial in Visual Narrative Grammar

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2736.3286.

32