In modern times, the concentration of media ownership has become the dominant model today. This results in an unaccountable level of influence that corporations yield over the control and dissemination of information.
The result of the market competition is that one super corporation monopolizes everything. If the super corporation is efficient, monopolies do exist and should exist. Monopoly profits are the driving force for innovation. That is what drives capitalism as a whole. The market economy is a kind of cruel economy; only the efficient organization form can exist. The dominant mode of centralized monopoly is actually the efficient use of the allocation of resources. However, there is a degree of uniformity in the control of information. However, this kind of monopolistic mode of communication is of great contribution to the range and quality of communication.
Even though the large allocation of resources is a concentrated mode, but thanks to new technological innovations, allowing more individuals to have the opportunity to create and realize their dreams.
Like in side by side, this film discusses the impact of technological innovation from four aspects: Science, Art, Digital, and Cinema. Moreover, technological innovation reshuffle the original resource allocation.
As mentioned in the film, Digital cameras are the new aesthetic that was coming to the cinema, and at the same time we are going to mourn the loss of film. One hundred years of photochemical film making, right now, it reached a kind of threshold of tipping point. Because that digital now can make it look like film that film is inherently better. Just we like the way it looks better, which seems kind of arbitrary that we were used to. Also, digital gives us more scope to be creative. Technology pushes art and art to push technology. It is definitely a technological revolution, and it is changing people’s attitudes to watching the movie. Young people are used to watching movies on their phones and laptops, sharing with their friends on the Internet. This shifting on watching movies. It is also becoming much larger virtually. Mural space was definitely spaced virtually. So they are watching movies together in this sort of virtual world. And that will be inevitable.
This technological innovation made it less expensive to make films. Moreover, It becomes a cheap way for us to tell our stories about ourselves. It takes this art format out of where fighting environment and a lot more people to make art.
Film did not die out; it remained a medium beloved by many artists and photographers. However, as a wide range of shooting media, the digital camera is a technological advance that brings us more possibilities. Moreover, make the picture vision technology in rapid progress. Inevitably, commercial films bring eye-catching stunts without content. But I want to conclude with a quote from side by side,
Everything comes down to one thing. If you do something with your heart if you do something convince us to feel about it. It doesn’t matter what you using.
The auteur was the individual who clearly left the mark of his/her personality upon the largely impersonal assembly-line mode of production methods practiced by the motion picture studios. They became distinctive artists with discernible personal styles and thematic/visual preoccupations. They left the key thing is that a recognizable imprint is left on a body of films.
Shirley – Visions of Reality is an impressive cinematic recreation of Hopper cognoscenti’s images and moods; it more controversially puts the American realist’s work in a social, political, and cultural context. Thirteen works by popular American painter Edward Hopper spring to life in this experimental Austrian tour-de-force. In Shirley, Visions of Reality, Austrian filmmaker, architect, and experimental artist Gustav Deutsch scores a remarkable success in reproducing 13 of Hopper’s most famous oil paintings on film, setting off his own meticulous production design with this film’s brilliant lighting and scene design.
In the auteur theory, the three premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circles as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning.
In terms of technology, We first meet Shirley aboard a train reading a book from Emily Dickinson’s poems. The painting re-creates Hopper’s 1965 “Chair Car,” and it introduces several motifs that Deutsch favors throughout the film: incredible colors, strong diagonals, bright lighting, huge empty windows promising a larger world outside the confines of one’s own life. The next scene is “Hotel Room” sets in Paris in 1931, where our heroine contemplates her return to New York after a European holiday. Though the set ably captures the cramped atmosphere of the painting, in this case it is a less slavish imitation. The space is rationalized somewhat by shifting the window to another wall, and so on. Deutsch’s careful analysis of Hopper’s approach to his subjects contributes to the illusion of seeing a movie-size painting as much as the lighting and set design. Often, for instance, the fixed camera has a very voyeuristic feel in observing the girl in her underwear, much like the p.o.v. of a film audience. Not surprisingly (also given that Shirley is supposed to be a professional actress who has worked with groups like the Living Theater), a number of works refer directly to theater and the movies, like “New York Movie” in which we find Shirley “playing the role” (her words) of the bored blonde usherette. In “Intermission”, she watches a romantic French movie. “Hotel Lobby” has her reading a Thornton Wilder play in New Haven being directed by Elia Kazan, in which she is to play the part of a maid. In a later tableau, she will be devastated by the news that Kazan has turned in Communist friends to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
It’s a stretch to set Hopper’s dreamlike images, frozen between past and present, in a precise historical context, yet each is preceded by a radio newscaster reading the headlines. So pass the Depression, Mussolini and Hitler, the Cold War, Korea, JFK, and Martin Luther King, all the way to Vietnam. Though Shirley herself remains timeless and unaging, her earnest interest in the social, political, and cultural issues of the day reminds us she is a reflective New York intellectual riding the crest of avant-garde thought, However, outdated some of her ideas may seem today. The curious time warp she lives in creates a strange sense of tension in the quiet film. Therefore in this movie, whether it’s fixed camera language or the perfect scene design, including extensions to installation art exhibitions, experimental videos. It’s a whole new artistic endeavor.
The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value – the personal style. Gustav Deutsch is also an architect and experimental artist. To make his first live-action film Shirley, he went to the American museum to observe Hopper’s original painting and recorded the most accurate color values, which gave rise to the gorgeous colors and lighting in the film. There is no doubt that Shirley is a very personal style of film and subject matter. The starting point of Shirley is the field of visual art. The film was just a medium that he used. Shirley is the result of cooperation in the fields of painting, architecture, music, and the process of visualization painting.
Although in his interview with Jacques Aumont, he said: “The filmic shot – in the sense that Bazin spoke of it – has a responsibility to the world. The image only has a responsibility to the image…The majority create images, but these images are immediately placed in a world of images – and these young people live in a world of images, in which the passages from image to image are easier and more accentuated, but the passage from image to the world is less pertinent…You can imagine a situation where the reference to the world will become an improbable option, a distant possibility, not very interesting in and of itself.”
Gustav Deutsch also talked in his interview about the way images are used in his films,
The pictures were there. But only the pictures and not the context. Through the montage I create contexts of meaning and try to track down something that was not originally intended by the filmmakers. It was about telling new stories, that approach is Shirley – Visions of Realitynot so far. I also tell “other” stories with Hopper’s pictures. I neither follow his often recited and perhaps also overrated attitudes about the loneliness and misery of the big cities. My aim was to take the pictures and use a figure (in Edward Hopper’s mostly a woman) to tell thirty years of American history, namely the time that coincides with the creation of the pictures: in the mirror of this person and through them Eyes of that person. So I can also bring in things that are not shown in the pictures. What is fascinating about Hopper is that his protagonists experience or observe something that they do not share with us because it is not represented. Many of the women portrayed look out of the window, see something, react to something that we don’t know what it is and of course I can make it up. I can bring it in through this woman’s tone or inner monologue.
However, there is no doubt that Gustav Deutsch was a creative director in the use of the relationship between image and photography. Filtering history through the double lens of a contemporary painter’s viewpoint and a filmmaker’s re-interpretation of that viewpoint, in essence, Deutsch’s creation is a unique interdisciplinary art project presented as a feature film.
The third and ultimate of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. In Shirley, in addition to the perfect and impeccable visual art, there are hidden social views and historical information. When thirteen of Hopper’s paintings have been selected and reproduced as three-dimensional scenes in the film, these scenes tell the story of a woman whose thoughts, emotions, and contemplations let us observe an era in American history. We glimpse through Shirley’s inner monologues and sparse lines to her partner, who remains silent throughout the movie, and the minor and major events in her life; we witness her playing the role of a bored blonde usherette in a movie, taking up menial jobs to secure her livelihood, retiring to the countryside and so on. In order to place each scene within a historical context, a radio news-broadcast precedes each scene depicting the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, Korea, JFK, and Martin Luther King all the way to Vietnam. Deutsch further clutters the canvas by positing his central figure as an actress, called Shirley, who waltzes agelessly through New York Movie and other deathless frames. But if she’s a figure out of time, that only makes Shirley’s socio-political musings more irrelevant. Even if this bad writing were better-read, it would still ruin the contemplative mood of the originals. A few stabs at period music work better than anything in the script. However, it’s not the meaning or the history we love about Hopper; it’s the silence. The people in his paintings are forever among thoughts.
In the end, the director designs a sense of coherence to the beginning. Shirley waits in the car seat, reading a book, and tells the audience with the narration of the whole inner monologue that all that happens is Shirley’s idea in her head, or her memory of the past, or all that she has read in the book. Overall, Shirley – Visions of Reality is undoubtedly Gustav Deutsch’s desire and attempt for artistic innovation.
Film images not only gave spectators a subjective perceptual experience of viewing a “reality,” but they also provided a film experience that gave meaning and expression to ways of seeing and interpreting a cultural discourse.
Glory was directed by well-known Oscar-winning director Edward Zwick, based on real events from the Civil War. The film features a white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, as the first person to tell the story of how he led a group of black soldiers to the front lines during the Civil War.
Robert Gould Shaw is a real figure in history. Shaw was born in Boston to a wealthy, abolitionist family. The movie takes him to write a few letters to his parents as a clue, connecting the whole story. We can get his value judgment through letters through what he saw and what he thought let we can know about blacks’ situation in the military during this War.
In the film, Shaw returns to Boston after his first war experience and is given command of the 54th at a party. However, The sequence is moving and dramatic-and wholly invented. Shaw was not offered the command of the 54th at the party. He received the offer in a letter from the governor when he was camped in Maryland with his unit shortly after Antietam. Initially, he refused the command y return mail, and when the offer came in a second letter, he refused it again. Obviously dismayed by his son’s action, Shaw’s father, a well known Abolitionist, travelled to Maryland and spent some time alone with Robert. There is no record of father and son’s conversations, but immediately after his father’s visit, the younger man agreed to take charge of organizing and training the 54th. This party in Boston is the only glimpse we have of Shaw’s upper-class background, something which helps to underline the great nature of his sacrifice (he is a volunteer).
Film narratives are politically committed and involved in a cultural “politics of representation.” The American Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves, racial equality, freedom, dignity, and other politically correct words expressed in this film have been vividly reflected. However, the director does not just seem to want to interpret these. We see a more human choice. In the face of temptation, that is to choose to go along with the bad or stick to the original heart, in the face of human is to choose to take care of friends or adhere to principles, in the face of danger is to wait silently or sacrifice ego. These enlighten us on what we pursue, what we cling to, and what we defend.
What touched me most was the Fort Wagner war near the end of the film, but Shaw said firmly, “There is more to fighting than rest, That is charter. There is strength of heart.” He probably knew the final result of the battle, and before he went to the battlefield, he handed a stack of letters to the reporter with no lingering thoughts: “If I shall fall, remember what you see here.” Then he let go of his horse and stood calmly at the head of the line, leading his men in the orderly march towards the enemy’s fire. Unfortunately, the thrilling battle ended with more than half of the 54 regiments dead and wounded. Fort Wagner was ultimately not captured, even with the support of subsequent troops.
Nevertheless, there is more to this War than that. As word of their bravery spread, Congress at last authorized the raising of black troops throughout the Union. Over 180,000 volunteered. President Lincoln credited these men of color with helping turn the tide of the War. Like the final image of the film as Black and White soldiers are shovelled together into a mass grave (as they were historically) and the two main characters (chief antagonists) – Shaw and Trip, the Black Nationalist -roll in death into each other’s arms. Insofar as it is meant to suggest Black-White reconciliation, this visual metaphor is debatable. But it is one that, like the larger argument, clearly draws and comments upon the ongoing discourse about both the Civil War and race relations in America.
White and black, they fought for freedom, dignity, honor, and finally died in War. It was a glorious page in the Civil War, reflecting the glorious history of the men of color’s struggle for his rights.
Tim Burton’s films’ innocence is at odds with the world, as the tenderness of flowers can blossom even in the darkest places. Including this 1994 black and white film, Ed Wood. Tim Burton is the man who saw Ed Wood as a genius: full of passion, unflinching, unafraid of reality, and eventually the king of bad movies.
Ed Wood may be extreme, pouring everything he had into a career for which he had no talent, simply because he liked it. Pure love. Like the movie career he loves, he has been living in his own false dreams, trying to bring the dream into reality, but repeatedly rejected by people. This is not a story of an inspirational life, but about the ups and downs of a dreamer. I believe that Tim Burton’s appreciation of Ed Wood also comes from his respect for his pure love for movies. Cause there are fewer and fewer pure things these days. That is why, despite all the bad movies, Ed Wood’s movies command respect.
Making Ed Wood is not an easy task, with live-action biographies, retracing the Hollywood environment of the last century, and struggles with dreams and reality. The combination of complex elements is not conducive to the outstanding thematic nature of the film. The balance may be the most critical, but Tim Burton clearly does not want to make a boring live-action biopic.
For many years, Tim Burton has been showing people his face with a gothic mask, constructing his enchanted supernatural world into a unique film language system. So we have the honor of seeing Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Also see the character of different and strange characters flash in the movie. And in his weird coat hidden the ideal fairytale doctrine, mixed with the reality of human warmth, variety. Ed Wood, the only real character in all his films, but reflects his fairytale-like soul. Tim Burton’s shot of Ed Wood actually has three fatal attractions.
First, he was the king of bad movies. And second, he was as obsessed with vampires as Tim Burton was. Third, he Shared Tim Burton’s admiration for Orson Welles. If you’re thinking of Ed Wood as a biopic, you are probably misreading what Tim Burton was really doing with this film. Ed Wood is just an entry point. What he wants us to see is still his self-love and expression. Ed Wood is more like a coming-of-age film of his own. It’s only when we consider Ed Wood and Tim Burton as one and the same that we can really appreciate the beauty of this film.
In Tim Burton’s view, Ed Wood and Himself and Orson Welles is a man who loves and dreams of movies. He praises Ed Wood and makes an indirect satire on Hollywood capitalism. Although we know that such a reality cannot be changed, the dream lives in people’s hearts forever. In Ed Wood, Tim Burton inspires not only himself but all dreamers.
That’s right. Don’t take it too seriously. We’re all doing great work.
The setting of the characters injects a distinct value into the film——family. Including Frank Slade, Charlie Simms, or George Willis, everyone here has their own family, and their personalities and attitudes were all deeply influenced by their families. George Willis looked great was all because of his rich father. When something happened, he was like a dog with its tail between the legs, the previous bossing attitude around him completely disappeared, only hiding in dad’s pocket to protect himself; Charlie Simms’s broken and low-income family made him know the hardships of life so that he would work harder than other people. He was stronger and more valuable than he looked, and he was an unpolished gem. And Frank Slade had a large family with people who cared about him and people who hated him, and their love and condemnation both affected him to some extent. During Thanksgiving, Frank broke into his eldest brother’s house, which created a typical family conflict. Communication barriers and lack of expressing their feelings were the leading causes of the final breakup, which is also the crux of most families’ conflicts.
The film reduces the infiltration of life’s pain to a choice of life; this is just a simplification. It doesn’t make it easy. ‘There are two kinds of people in this world,’ Mr. Frank says. ‘Those who take responsibility for everything they happen to, and those who find a backer to them for support.’ That was the choice Charlie had made between betraying his “friend” for a bright future or accepting the consequences of keeping his mouth shut.
Many people were puzzled that Charlie would sacrifice his future to protect a few people who were not his friends at all. In fact, no matter what choice he made, there was a reason for it. This is the contradiction between two “different choices.” This conflict between two different versions of “correctness” is the most painful choice in reality. That is the choice Charlie has to face. However, there is a subtle difference between the two choices: whether he chose to protect his interests or stuck to his principles. It was understandable that George faced his father’s pressure to reveal his friend, but his choice was for his own good, which made him feel ashamed to face Charlie. Although Charlie’s choice seemed too stubborn and meaningless, he did not choose to protect his interests. To some extent, he would rather sacrifice his own interests to protect others than to protect himself. That is why he deserved a credit, and that is why Frank spoke up. This spirit of sacrificing one’s interests to protect others is what Frank called “the right path,” and it was Charlie’s “road to principle, the road to personality.” While it is impossible to get everything right, at least make sure you do not sacrifice others for yourself. That is what it takes to be a leader.
Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 13-14: “Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many Enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, And only a few find it.” Charlie chose the Narrow Gate, which many people did not want to go; it was the right way, which was hard to insist.
In Score A Film Music Documentary, It talked about Hollywood music makers, organized the importance of music to films and summarized the history of Music in Hollywood, with emphasis on the technological changes in the past 20 years or so, and explained “how music has changed the language of films,” and the addition of modern electronic music to the soundtrack.
The soundtrack has long been regarded as a foil and a service to the picture, but it is as important as the film itself. When the filmmakers were done with the shooting and the clever editing, as an output to express the director’s inner voice, the soundtrack enables the audience to feel the director’s inner journey. The soundtrack is the composer’s understanding and re-creation of the script and the director’s intention and enables people to extend their perception of the film’s picture. The soundtrack is the heartbeat and soul of the film, and it can convey a level beyond the quality of the picture. Moreover, great movie music can make movies sublime. Most of the time, it’s all about a few things that you want to remember, like a certain tune, like a liking for The Shire, Harry’s Wondrous World, Harry Potter and his around Diagon Alley, the Star Wars theme. Okay, you already know it’s Star Wars.
Music does not exist in terms of professional science and technology. You can touch the piano, the guitar, the violin, but you can’t really touch the music. Music is just a different flow of air. All music is providing a molecular structure. But the music creates a huge emotion for the audience. And it has to match the music and the picture properly, so the music matches the picture of the movie and guides our eyes to move up and down.
You have to use music to complement the picture, to set off without stealing the show. When a scene changes direction, you usually feel like there needs to be a soundtrack, which will help you get more involved in the scene. You will spend a lot of time getting involved in the play.
Early music was really used to mask the noise of the projector. Silent film is not silent. It uses organ music, the sound of the music to bring the silent film alive. King Kong’s score was the first to use orchestral music in a film, and the first truly large score. A solid display of the power of music in the film.
And in horror movies. The melodies of those crazy loops feel like an inevitable disaster is about to happen. You notice the murder, and you notice the process. You get into a killer mentality. The sound of terror, at the moment, is powerful enough to make you believe the violence you see. Worse than what actually happened in the scene.
Anything could be music
Later came the age of synthesizers. Today’s music is more experimental and freer. The director invited artists who had never thought of making music to make the audience feel the authenticity of the music. Today, technology enables all composers to be producers.
Introduction to Film Studies 