Film, form and culture/ Kolker, Robert P.

Image and reality
Images, the real, and history 9 '
The "truth" of the image 10
Natural BorrT Killers and the objectivity of the image 15
The urge to represent "reality" J7
Perspective and the pleasures of tricking the eye 17
Photography and reality 19
Manipulation of the image 21
Reality as image 22
From the photographic to the cinematic image 23
Moving images 23
Acknowledgments 26
Further reading 26
Suggestions for further viewing 27
Note 27
Formal structures: how films tell their stories
The image, the world, and the film studio 29
From image to narrative 29
The economics of the image 32
The system develops: Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin 33
The growth of corporate filmmaking 35
The classical Hollywood style 36
Casablanca 36
Entertainment and invisibility 39
Fabricating the image 39
The whole and its parts 45
Making the parts invisible 47
Story, plot, and narration 48
Jaws 48
Convention and consciousness 50
Further reading 51
Suggestions fpr further viewing 52
Note 52 ;
The building blocks of film I: the shot
The shot 53
The long take 53
The Magnificent Ambersons 54
Touch of Evil 55
Rope, Russian Ark, and Birdman 55
Goodfeiias 56
How composition works 57
Composition in early cinema 58
D. W. Griffith 58 ,
The Uncfranging Sea 58
The Musketeers of Pig Alley 61
The size of the frame 61
Wide screen 62
Anamorptic and "flat" wide-screen processes 63
Loss of standards 64
The studios and the shot 65
Mise-en-scene 66
Lighting 67
Color 69
Vertigo 71
Red Desert 73
The mise-en-scene of German Expressionism 73
Expressionist mise-en-scene in the United States 74
Orson Welles and the reinvention of mise-en-scene 75
Deep focus and the long take 76
Citizen Kane 76
The Hitchcock mise-en-scene 81
Psycho 81
Working against the rules 81
Further reading 84
Suggestions for further viewing 84
Notes 84
The building blocks of film II: the cut
Editing and the classic Hollywood style 85
The Great Train Robbery 87
The development of continuity cutting 89
Griffith and cutting 90
The Lonedale Operator 90
2001: A Space Odyssey 92
Shot/reverse shot 92
Point of view 95
Sight lines 95
The 180-degree rule 96
Psycho and the shot/reverse shot. 97
Convention, culture, resistance 99
Gender 102
Coding 102
Responses to conventional cutting 103
Eisensteinian montage 104
Battleship Patemkin 105
Eisenstein and Oliver Stone 107
The narrative of the classical style 107
Working creatively within and against conventions 108
Further reading 109
Suggestions for further viewing 109
Notes 110
The storytellers of film I
Collaboration as creativity 113 -
Creative craftspeople 114 >
Cinematographer 114 ^
Editor 116
Production designer 117
Special effects and CGI 119
Sound designers 122
Composer 123
Screenwriter 126
Producer 129
Further reading 131
Suggestions for further viewing 132
Notes 133
The storytellers of film II: acting
Methods of performance 135
Delsarte 136
The Method 137
Cultures of acting 139
How screen acting works; the gaze and the gesture 142
Eyes Wide Shut and Vertigo 142
Celebrity 146
Further reading 146
Suggestions for further viewing 147
Notes 147
The storytellers of film Ml: the director
The producer as director 149
European origins of the auteur 150
France and the French New Wave 150
The auteur theory 151
Andrew Sarris and the three principles: competence, style, vision 151
Robert Altman 156
Martin Scorsese 157
Stanley Kubrick 163
Alfred Hitchcock 165
Women auteurs 167
Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber 167
Dorothy Arzner 168
Ida Lupino 169
Women filmmakers today 171
Kathryn Bigelow 171
African American filmmakers 173
Spike Lee 173
Tyler Perry 174'
Julie DasLt 174
Auteurism today 176
Christopher Nolan 176
What Is the director?. 178
Further reading' 179
Suggestions for-further viewing 180
Notes 180
International cinema
Early influences 181
Neorealism 182
Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City 183
Neorealism's influence 186
Italian cinema after neorealism 187
Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni 187
Bernardo Bertolucci 189
The New Wave 190
Franqois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard 191
The new German cinema 194
Wim Wenders 194
Werner Herzog 195
Rainer Werner Fassbinder 197
Chantal Akerman 199
Jeanne Dielman 199
Film in Asia 200
Japan and Yasujiro Ozu 200
Hong Kong and Wong Kar-wai 202
Bollywood 203
Satyagraha 203
The Lunchbox 204
European cinema today 205
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne 205
Michael Haneke 205 r
Film culture 208 '
Further reading 209
Suggestions for further viewing 209
Notes 210
The stories told by film 1
The stories we want to see 213
It's a Wonderful Life 213
Closure 214
Dominant fictions 214
Narrative constraints 215
Censorship 216
Genre 217
Subgenres 2-17
Generic origins 218
Generic patterns: the gangster flim 220
Genre and narrative economy 222
Documentary 223
Newsreels and television 223
Early masters of the documentary 224
Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub 224
Robert Flaherty 225 ■■
Pare Lorentz 226
Leni Riefenstahl 228
John Grierson and the British documentary movement 229
World War II 230
Cinema verite 231
David and Albert Maysles 231
Michael Moore 232
Errol Morris 233
The genres of fiction films 234
The Western 235
The Western landscape 235
The obstacle to westward expansion 236
The Western star and the Western director 236
Stagecoach 237
Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence 238
The Searchers 239
The Western after the 1950s 240
The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller 240
Science fiction and horror 242
Fritz Lang's Metropolis 243
Science fiction in the 1950s and beyond 243
The Day the Earth Stood Still 244
The Thing from Another World 245
Forbidden Planet 245
Alien, Blade Runner, and Dark City lAl
2001: A Space Odyssey 249
The post-apocalyptic world and zombies 250
Further reading 252
Suggestions for further viewing 253
Notes 255
10 The stories told by film II
Film noir 257
Expressionist roots of noir 258
Hard-boiled fiction 258
The Maltese Falcon 259
Murder, My ^eet. Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street 259
Anthony Marin 261
Noir's climax 262 ;
In a Lonely Plpce 252
The Wrong Man 263
Kiss Me Deadly 263
Touch of Evil 264
Noir's rebirth 265
Melodrama 266
Broken Blossoms 267
Now, Voyager 271
Casablanca 275
Contemporary melodrama 276
The Fault in Our Stars 276
Flight 276
Brokeback Mountain 276
One genre, two countries, three directors 278
All That Fteaven Allows, All: Fear Eats the Soul, Far From Fleaven 278
The filmmakers 278
Rainer Werner Fassbinder 278
Douglas Sirk 278
Todd Haynes 279
The common thread 280
All That Heaven Allows and Far From Heaven 280
Race 282
Gender 283
All: Fear Eats the Soul 285
The influence of Bertolt Brecht 286
The gaze 287
Fassbinder's narrative 288
Happiness is not always fun 289
Genre resilience 289
Further reading 290
Suggestions for further viewing ,290
Notes 291 ^
11 Film as cultural practice
Film in the realm of culture 293
Culture as text 294
Subcultures 295
Media and cultures 295
The new Web 298
Theories of culture 299
The Frankfurt school 299 ■
The critique of American popular culture 300
High culture, masscult, and midcult 301
Walter Benjamin and the age of-mechanical reproduction 302
The aura of state intervention 304
The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies 305
Reception and negotiation 306 c
Judgment and values 307
Intertextuality and postmodernism 308
Cultural criticism applied to Vertigo and This is 40 309
The cultural-technological mix: film, television, digital 310
Judd Apatow and the digital 312
The actor's persona: James Stewart and the Apatow boys and women 312
James Stewart 312
The Apatow stock company 313
Vertigo and the culture of the 1950s 315
The Kinsey Reports 316
This is 40 and the culture of the early 2000s 317
The vulnerable male in film 319
Film, form, and culture 321
Modernity, modernism, the postmodern 323
Formal structures 324
Conclusion 325