![]() ![]() The meaning and effect come both from the content of shots, namely a knife flashing across the screen at different angles towards Marion Crane, and from the editing of the shots, which produces a series of short shots that juxtapose the knife and Marion with their different directions of movement. The scene is not shot and edited in a continuous, linear style. The shower scene from Psycho uses a formalist strategy of montage editing. Eisenstein wrote of the editing of shots: 'he juxtaposition of these partial details in a given montage construction calls to life and forces into the light that general quality in which each detail has participated and which binds together all the details into a whole' (Eisenstein, 1942, p. He produced meaning from a dialectical process between shots, by producing associations from shots, by using symbolic shots, all of which requires the viewer to make sense of what is seen, to think through a sequence. Eisenstein was not content to merely show us what happened on the Odessa Steps instead he expressed the meaning of the events through the choice of shot content and the way he edited the shots together. The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin consists of montage editing. We have already looked at examples which can be described as formalist in the work of Eisenstein and Hitchcock. Primary importance is attached to the filmic process, and it is suggested that film can never fully record reality anyway, if only because it is two-dimensional compared to reality's three dimensions. For the formalists, film should not merely record and imitate what is before the camera, but should produce its own meanings. ![]() The available film techniques are of central importance - use of camera, lighting, editing. Between 18 the films of the Lumière brothers aimed to record scenes from everyday life, while Méliès used film as an expressive medium that centred on the importance of mise en scène in the construction of fantasy.įormalism emphasizes film's potential as an expressive medium. Although the debate between these perspectives may not have really taken off until the 1930s, there has always been a division in the ways in which the medium has been used. The theorization behind realism gained strength during the 1930s and its later proponents included André Bazin and Siegfried Kra-cauer. Formalism began to take on coherence in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and its two key theorists were Sergei Eisenstein and Rudolf Arnheim. Each has a particular view of what film should be for and how it can achieve its purpose. Two perspectives that are closely linked to the topic of film form are formalism and realism. ![]()
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