Cinema
The cinema (abbreviation of cinematographer or cinematography) is the technique and art of creating and projecting footage (as the early movies). Etymologically, the word "cinematography" was a neologism created at the end of the 19th century and composed from two Greek words: on the one hand kiné, which means "movement" (see, among others, "kinetic », «kinetics», «kinesis», «cinematheque»); and on the other γραφóς (graphs). With this, an attempt was made to define the concept of «Moving Image».
When talking about the birth of cinema, the date of December 28, 1895 is taken as a reference, in which the first films made by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière were shown to the public, in the memorable session held at the Salon Indian from the Grand Café in Paris.
Since then it has undergone a series of changes in various ways. On the one hand, cinematography technology has evolved a lot, from its beginnings with the silent films of the Lumière brothers to the digital cinema of the 21st century. . On the other hand, cinematographic language has evolved, including the conventions of the genre, and thus different cinematographic genres have emerged. Third, it has evolved with society, leading to the development of different film movements.
As a way of narrating stories or events, cinema is an art, and commonly, considering the six arts of the classical world, it is called the "seventh art". However, due to the diversity of films and the freedom of creation, it is difficult to define what cinema is today. However, television creations that deal with narrative, editing, scriptwriting, and that in most cases consider the director as the true author, are considered artistic manifestations, or art cinema (art cinema). On the other hand, documentary or journalistic creation is classified according to its genre. Despite this, and due to the participation in documentaries and journalistic films of personnel with their own, unique and possibly artistic vision (directors, photographers and cameramen, among others), it is very difficult to define the artistic quality of a film production.
The film industry has become a major business in places like Hollywood (California, United States) and Bollywood (Mumbai, India).
The Moving Horse (1872)
In 1872, a controversy pitted horse fanciers in California against each other. Leland Stanford, ex-governor of the State and powerful president of the Central Pacific Railway, and a group of his friends maintained that there was a moment, during the long trot or gallop, when the horse did not rest any hoof on the ground. Another group, which included James Keene, president of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, claimed otherwise.
Eadweard Muybridge ended that controversy with this sequence of images that showed "The horse in motion" one of the predecessors of motion capture
History
The history of cinema began with the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. They showed the idea of movement through successive drawings. Over time, in Asia, games of light and shadow began to be carried out, which consisted of projecting shadows on the white surface of a cloth by means of lights behind the backs of the spectators. In turn, this invention inspired the creation of the "Magic Lantern" in the 17th century. An optical device that was based on a box that captured images from the outside and projected them inside to then work in reverse.
Later, in Great Britain (19th century) along with the industrial revolution came new inventions such as the steam engine, the light bulb, the new transports and among all of them photography. During this time the first camera obscura made by Charles and Jacques Vincent Louis Chevalier in Paris was invented. Later the Kinetoscope was invented, the creation of Thomas Edison. This device consisted of capturing moving images to later translate them into a tape. The Kinetoscope was what inspired the Lumière brothers since they both wanted to reflect moving images, so they got a kinetoscope and with it they created their own device, the cinematograph. Its mechanism was based on a rotating disc that put a tape to run at 16 frames per second.
On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers publicly projected the departure of workers from a French factory in Lyon, the demolition of a wall, the arrival of a train and a ship leaving the port. The success of this invention it was immediate, not only in France, but also throughout Europe and North America, where Thomas Edison had already recorded numerous scenes that one viewer at a time could view through a kinetoscope.
In one year, the Lumière brothers created more than ten films, marked by the absence of actors and natural sets, brevity, the absence of editing and the fixed position of the camera. However, Alice Guy was the first person to be a filmmaker, the founder of narrative cinema and cultural narration, surpassing the demonstration cinema of the Lumière brothers and laying the foundations of what in the future has been considered fiction. She was also the first person who managed to support herself financially through this profession. Her first film -and therefore, the first film in the history of cinema- was The Cabbage Fairy ( La Fée aux Choux , 1896). She made many more films, including Sage-femme de première classe (1902) and La Esméralda (1905). After Guy's success, Georges Méliès decided to enter this profession. He made films with fantastic stories and sets, such as "Faust" and "Barba Azul" (1901), he developed new cinematographic techniques, especially with Journey to the Moon (1902) and with Journey through the Impossible (1904), applying the theatrical technique in front of the camera and creating the first special effects and filmed science fiction.
From then on, cinematography only improved and great directors such as Murnau, Erich von Stroheim and Charles Chaplin emerged. In the United States, adventure films were made, such as those of Douglas Fairbanks and romantic dramas such as those of Valentino. However, the most beautiful ones were the result of the American comic school born from Mack Sennett's comedy, based on slapsticks and on the stereotyping of social figures such as the policeman or the fat man, the miser and the mustachioed bourgeois.
Here we especially remember Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In 1927, the first film with sound The Jazz Singer was released, after which cinema as it was known ceased to exist and a language in which the expressiveness of segments that were contrasted and put together, a greater continuity of the story and greater plot fluidity prevailed. That same year dubbing appeared.
In 1935, Rouben Mamoulian's Vanity Fair (Becky Sharp) was filmed in Technicolor; although artistically, color reached its fullness with Gone with the Wind (1939).
The first public projection of digital cinema in Europe was held in Paris, on February 2, 2000, using MEMS (DLP (Digital Light Processing) CINEMA) developed by Texas Instruments.
Cinema and literature
Cinema is a relatively new art, and to configure itself it has been based on other arts. One of them is literature.
The way of narrating
From a narrative point of view, it can be said that cinema has known two stages: the one before and the one after Griffith. The latter, as the father of cinematographic language as we understand it today, understood that cinema was something that could be used to tell stories and that the model for telling these stories should not be found in the theater (as Méliès proposed), but in the literary form that Griffith and some of his contemporaries considered the most complete narrative form: the nineteenth-century novel, that is, the nineteenth-century novel.
Something curious happened, and that is that the intellectuals of that time applauded a narrative that, if it had been a novel, they would have rejected. This situation occurred because the intellectuals understood, perhaps intuitively, that the form did not matter so much, but what was expressed: "an art of the image, without great dependence on the pretext on which it was based" [p. 16]
Thus, starting with Griffith, cinema becomes a narrative language structured in accordance with the narrative form of the 19th century, as opposed to the succession of scenes distributed according to the laws of space that are governed by for the scene of a theater that was previously.
The new language allowed for the possibility of different shots, such as later camera movement and depth of field. During the era of the avant-garde, an attempt was made to break with this literary tradition that Griffith had marked through other means, making films that were either non-narrative or only through the relationship of images, apart from the fictional narration.
Much later, it was seen that cinema not only referred to literature through its narration, but could also reinvent it, rediscover it. An example would be Nicholas Ray, who in his We can't go to home again (1972) inserted written phrases that are transformed: first by changing some letters for others until converting the words into others. This refers to a literary tradition that focuses on puns, tongue twisters, substitution of words for their synonyms, etc.
In the same way, the idea of ambiguity began to be implanted in films, starting from novels written by Faulkner or belonging to the literary stage of Henry James. Thus, the directors gradually abandoned expressionism and its forms to show an image for what it was; To quote the philosopher Parmenides: "What is, is, and what is not, is not and cannot become." However, there was some ambiguity in the images because why does the subject behave in one way instead of another? In this way, all (or most) of the sequences became something called “dead times”.
From the novel to the script
Novel and film use different tools: novels use words to narrate, and films use images. So where does the adaptation begin and where the creation of something new?
You have to understand that words, by themselves, make texts, not novels; Images make movies, not film stories. What makes a novel or a film story is its ability to organize reality (verbally or visually) in narrative scenes/sequences; the ability to narrate is essential for a work, whether filmic or literary.
Now, when adapting a literary work, there can be two types of problems: disagreement with the language and disagreement with the aesthetic result.
Problems of equivalence with language occur when a literary work does not follow the narrative model of the nineteenth-century novel that Griffith institutionalized, based on Dickens's narration, and therefore does not have a correlation with cinematographic language. These cases are not frequent, but when they do occur, they require the invention of said correlation. Avant-garde cinema was the only one that considered and tried to solve this problem, but these projects have become rarities that do not change the course of production or manage to become a parallel current.
The problems of equivalence of the aesthetic result occurred mainly because the cinema was in constant evolution: it had to discover and evolve its language in order to be equal to the other arts of narrating or representing, at the same time that it had to carry out technical discoveries with those who can achieve expressiveness (sound, movement, depth, realism, etc.).
However, each language, literary or visual, has its own peculiarities and characteristics that make an exact parallelism between the two incompatible. So, it all comes down to staging. The images have the virtue of being able to transmit all kinds of concepts: values, emotions, references (to literary descriptions, for example) and the very narrative plot that they narrate. No other medium can convey the same things as an image.
Here is the quid of the matter: an equivalence in the aesthetic result is asking an image to produce the same effect on the viewer that words would do on the reader. To make a film adaptation, it is not necessary to replicate the same literary resources, but to achieve with your own an effect similar to that of the original literary work (since it will not always be the same). This is the basic principle for an adequate film adaptation, regardless of its fidelity: the best adaptations are not always the most faithful; It all comes down to the director's approach and treatment.
Filmmaking
Filmmaking, in the audiovisual field, is the process by which a video is created. Usually, in industrially produced cinema, five stages of production can be distinguished: development, pre-production, shooting, post-production and distribution. The realization supposes taking decisions both at an artistic and productive level, and the limitation is only given by the available means (budget available and equipment available).
The technical team is made up of:
- Production
The film producer is in charge of the organizational and technical aspects of making a film, it could be said that he is responsible for turning the idea into a film. He is in charge of hiring personnel, financing the work and contacting distributors for the dissemination of the work. If his task is limited to some specific aspects of the technical or creative process, he is called "co-producer".
The production director, executive producer, location manager and production assistant are also part of the area.
- Direction
The film director is the professional who directs the filming of a film, the one responsible for the staging, giving guidelines to the actors and the technical team, making all the creative decisions, following their particular style or vision, supervising the sets and costumes, and all other functions necessary to carry out the shooting.
The assistant director, the so-called script or continuist, and the digital image technician (dit cine) also form part of the area.
- Guion
The screenwriter is the person in charge of preparing the script, whether it is an original story, an adaptation of a previous script or another literary work. Many writers have become scriptwriters for their own literary works; Within the cinematographic script, the literary or cinematographic script is distinguished, which narrates the film in terms of image (descriptions) and sound (effects and dialogue), and is divided into acts and scenes. It is necessary to distinguish the literary script from the technical script, which adds to the previous one a series of technical indications (shot size, camera movements, etc.) that serve the technical team in their work and which, unlike the literary script, is usually prepared by the director, not the writer.
Other writers (co-writers) can also collaborate with the scriptwriter or have dialogue writers who are specialized in writing dialogue.
The role of the scriptwriter is very important, since their work is the basis of the entire project, if the script is good, the director can make an excellent film, but if it is deficient, even though the director has many resources, the film will remain empty.
- Sound
During filming, those in charge of the cinematographic sound are the sound technician and the microphone operators. In post-production, the sound editor, the composer of the incidental music and the sound effects (foley) and dubbing artists are added to generate the original soundtrack. Sound is a fundamental part of cinema since the perception of sound in cinema includes: vibrations interpreted by the brain through the auditory system (origin, intensity, tonality, materials, space, etc.), aesthetic sound qualities such as textures and frequencies, and psychological sound qualities (suggestive, pleasant, disturbing or annoying). Sound stimuli are also handled. Sound is very important because it extends the limits of the screen, solves narrative problems, unites the montage, influences the viewer unconsciously and transmits stories and emotions.
- Photography
The cinematographer is the person who determines how the film is going to be seen, that is to say, he is the one who determines, based on the demands of the director and the story, the visual aspects of the film; the framing, the lighting, the optics to use, etc. He is responsible for the entire visual part of the film, also from a conceptual point of view, determining the general tonality of the image and the optical atmosphere of the film.
The photography team is the largest and is made up, in addition to the director of photography, the cameraman, the first assistant camera or focus puller, the second assistant camera, the negative loader, the gaffer or head of electricians, electricians or light operators, grip or traveling or dolly operators, camera stabilizers (steady cam) and other assistants or apprentices.
- Amount
Cinematographic montage is the technique of assembling the successive shots recorded on the photographic film to model them in their narrative, dramaturgical and, specifically, rhythmic form in order to build audiovisual phrases: scenes and sequences. It consists of choosing (once the film has been shot), ordering and uniting a selection of recorded shots, according to a certain idea and dynamic, based on the script, the director's idea and the editor's contribution. The editor synchronizes the image with the sound (a task normally entrusted to the assistant editor). View the daily shots alongside the director and key crew members (the cinematographer, thus overseeing his own work).
Today, many films are edited on video, and later that editing serves as a reference for cutting and splicing the negative, which was initially based on celluloid, and was later replaced by acetate and polyester, given the high danger of the first. The preparation of these daily shots takes place every day throughout the filming of the film. Post-production is the moment in which the editor has gathered all the necessary material to complete a first cut of the film. After the director and producer approve the final cut, a specialized sound editor corrects possible problems with it. If necessary, the sound editor records the dialogues in a recording studio, while the actors see the corresponding image on projection. This process is known as dubbing. Sound editors assemble the recordings and sometimes create new sounds (sound effects) to intensify the dramatic power of a scene. While the soundtrack is being prepared, the editor also supervises the optical effects and the titles that are going to be incorporated into the film. One of the final steps is the preparation and mixing of the different soundtracks in a single master, first magnetic, which will contain the dialogues, music, direct sound and sound effects, synchronized with the image and appropriate to the volume of each band. Mixing without dialogue makes dubbing possible for film distribution in other languages.
- Camera Operator
He is in charge of making and carrying out all the camera movements that are necessary to adapt to the script under the direction of the director.
- Art (Production Design)
The artistic area can have one art director or several, if necessary. In the case of more than one, these are coordinated by a production designer, who is in charge of the general aesthetics of the film. These directors will have assistants and specific managers, such as set designers, wardrobe managers, dressmakers, make-up artists, hairdressers, props and other additional members such as painters, carpenters or builders. Specialists in the visual and optical effects that are carried out during the shooting, as well as other effects carried out during the post-production phase, also depend on this area.
- Stunts
Doble is the person in charge of safeguarding the integrity of the actor who does not have the necessary skills to carry out risk scenes. These are physically and mentally prepared, they are capable people used to doing risky activities when filming scenes in movies.
- Figure Guion
The storyboard is used to define the sequences, as well as the variations of shots, gestures and positions of the actors, in each of the scenes before shooting it; in it we see the complete film as if it were a comic. In addition, this element is essential for the good understanding of the technical team towards what is going to be shot, including notes with the difficulties of some shots or things to take into account.
In the creation of a storyboard, the characters and the background can be portrayed only through silhouettes, but always emphasizing the important elements in the action such as arrows to indicate camera movement or actors, or the expression of an actor in a certain plane to take care of even the smallest detail and the production is excellent.
- Distribution and exhibition
Distributors, generally companies independent of the production companies, buy the rights to be shown in movie theaters, or for broadcast on television, and sell the rights to the film to exhibitors (individuals or chains of exhibitors), television, video stores or other establishments where videotapes are sold. They are also in charge of publicity and promotion of the films, making the necessary copies for the exhibition and controlling the figures of income and expenses. The producer gives the distributor a percentage of the film's income, which usually amounts to 50%. In addition, the distributor deducts from the producer's profits the amount of the copies of the film.
Secondary markets are those that provide additional income, which was not the initial objective of production. These markets include a diversity of objects: toys with the name of the movie characters (especially in the case of cartoons), T-shirts, publication of the script, short films about the incidents of the shooting (how it was done or making of) and recordings on disc, cassette or compact of the original soundtrack. The producers will look for well-known composers to whom they assign the rights of the phonographic distribution of their music.
- Band of dialogue
It is the one on which the dialogue of the film is recorded, with special effects, in which all kinds of environmental sounds have been mounted that surround the actions (such as crickets, traffic, birds, etc.)
Film genres
In film theory, genres are a way of classifying films into groups. Each genre is made up of films that share certain similarities, be it in their style, their subject matter, their intention, their way of production, or the audience they are aimed at.
According to its form of production and its intention, it is possible to distinguish genres such as the following:
Commercial cinema: These are films created by the film industry aimed at the general public and with the generation of economic benefits as their main objective. Most of the films shown in movie theaters belong to this category, and some of them are promoted through large advertising campaigns.
Independent film: An independent film is a low-budget film made by small production companies. An independent film is not made by the big studios.
Animated cinema: Animated cinema is the one in which animation techniques are mainly used. Live-action cinema records real images in continuous motion, breaking them down into a discrete number of images per second. In animated cinema there is no real movement to be recorded, but rather the images are produced individually and one by one (by means of drawings, models, objects and other multiple techniques, such as Stop Motion), in such a way that when they are projected consecutively the illusion of movement In other words, while real-image cinema analyzes and breaks down a real movement, in animated cinema a non-existent movement is constructed in reality.
Documentary cinema: Documentary cinema is the one that bases its work on images taken from reality. Documentary is generally confused with reportage, the former being eminently a cinematographic genre, closely linked to the origins of cinema, and the latter a television genre.
Docufiction, a hybrid between documentary and fiction, is a genre practiced since the first documentary, which has been renewed since the late fifties.
Experimental cinema: Experimental cinema is one that uses a more artistic means of expression, forgetting the classic audiovisual language, breaking the barriers of strictly structured narrative cinema and using the resources to express and suggest emotions, experiences, feelings, using plastic or rhythmic effects, linked to the treatment of image or sound.
Auteur cinema: The concept of auteur cinema was coined by the critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma to refer to a certain type of cinema in which the director has a leading role in making all decisions, and where all the staging obeys their intentions. Films made based on their own script and outside of the pressures and limitations implied by the cinema of the big commercial studios are usually called this way, which allows them greater freedom when it comes to expressing their feelings and concerns in the film. movie. However, great directors in the industry, such as Alfred Hitchcock, can also be considered "authors" of their films. It is defined according to its scope of application and reception, since it is not usually a cinema linked to the industry, and it is not aimed at a broad audience but rather a specific one, and shares an a priori interest in products that are outside the classical canons. An important subgenre could be abstract cinema.
Environmental cinema: Cinema has not only brought man into contact with nature in various cases, but it has also been, and continues to be on occasions, an active militant in the fight for the defense enviroment. In addition, cinema has been, since its inception, the strongest means of transmitting knowledge and cultures, providing viewers with infinite possibilities of meeting landscapes, nature, places and customs.
The movie business
Historically, a movie earned its income by renting the rights to a theater, and in turn, the theater owner charged admission to everyone who wanted to see the movie.
With the proceeds from those tickets, that theater owner paid:
- Staff costs, cleaning, light, etc.
- Local promotion (in posters and local newspapers): 50/50 is paid with the production house.
- Cuota agreed with the producer of the film, which is normally variable and depends on the success of the film but may be between 30 to 70 percent of the entry price.
- The rest kept it for profit.
That's how it worked until the advent of TV. With television, the production house, at the same time distributing the rights, agrees with the TV channel to rent your film for a price and conditions:
- The film may be transmitted for an agreed period, usually from three to five years for a total price.
- It limits the number of times that in that period the TV channel will be able to repeat the transmission of the same film, usually between two and five times, maximum, not Burn the movie.
Soon after, new forms of exhibition or transmission appeared, such as:
- Vision payment (pay-per-view): this window is usually opened at six months of the premiere, for a few months.
- Pay TV channels, Showtime or HBO type: the window opens a year, for a year.
- Below comes the networks or large TV chains, whose window opens at two years, usually for three more.
- TV channel syndication: this is grouping of TV stations that only cover a local, non-national area. This window is open when the big chains are finished and is constantly being renovated with different distributors. Normal is a contract for five or seven years. At its expiration, these same rights are sold again to another or to the same, for many years and so on.
- Sales of videos, VHS, Betamax, etc: with sales both to video stores to rent and to individuals. The window opens at six months of the premiere with sales to distributors that place them in different stores. At the end of the contract, another new distributor is sought to continue with those video sales. These subsequent videos are at prices much cheaper than the initials.
Currently, there are almost no video sales anymore. It went to DVD or Blu-Ray, but the system is exactly the same. There is also income derived from streaming, either over the Internet or through specialized TV channels. In addition, there is some income from merchandising, whether it is the sale of any object, garment, design or use of a brand that appears in the film.
Finally, the film industry has also managed to generate exceptional sources of business. For example, amusement parks, such as Disneyland or Warner Park. It can also generate a new form of tourism, as is the case with Game of Thrones: crowds of fans are drawn to real places that appear in the series. These cases occur when reaching a high level of notoriety, but they are rare.
In each previous step, there is a part that the production house keeps, which is the one with which it pays the production costs and obtains its profit, although after distributing part of that income either with actors/directors/producers through contracts of royalties. The unions are also paid what are called residuals, who, in turn, distribute them among their syndicates in such a way that someone who worked on a film, even with a short presence of one scene, continues to earning from that film twenty or thirty years later every time it appears on TV in any country. These residuals for unions occur in the United States, not necessarily the same in other countries.
Film theory
The theory of cinema is based on the principle of continuous sequences of photographs, that is, cinema tries to represent photography in a continuous sequence to show movement without interruptions.
Classic cinema has a style that emphasizes the continuity and comprehensibility of the film. It usually has strong, consistent characters throughout the movie and a plot with a happy ending. Modern cinema does not emphasize these characteristics, on the contrary, it rejects classical cinema and its style; and tries to break all that style and all the conventions of it. Different directors use variant modes of the modern style.
Film Formats
Cinema was born in the XIX century as the achievement of a long chain of inventions and discoveries around photography. The spell that caused the projection of Chinese shadows or drawings of distant countries by means of magic lamps joined the advances in photography. As a mass phenomenon, we can talk about the birth of cinema with the Lumière brothers. But we must not forget that what they did was perfect Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope. And that there were many other inventions that revolved around how to capture movement.
Thomas Alva Edison was also the creator of the quintessential film format, 35 mm, on a cellulose nitrate support. This format and those of greater width became those for professional use, although there were many others used by filmmakers or by television itself: 16 mm, 9.5 mm, Super 8, etc.
The widescreen format appears in Hollywood in the late 1920s, in various shorts and informational films. Its premiere coincides with the boom in 3-dimensional films and the use of red and blue stereoscopic lenses (anaglyph), released in 1915.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, studios were forced to use smaller widescreen formats to lower their costs, but it was not until the early 1950s, with the overwhelming advent of television, that studies returned to using higher aspect ratios. In 1953, the FOX network launched one of the most popular widescreen format creation processes between 1953 and 1967: Cinemascope, the predecessor of the system we know today as Panavision, the most widely used today. The legacy that survives to this day is the wide or panoramic screen.
Awards
In the world of cinema there are several prestigious awards recognized worldwide.
One of the most valued awards are the Oscars.
At the Grammy Awards there are also several categories dedicated to film musicals, such as the Grammy Award for Best Music Video and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Film.
Contenido relacionado
Music sheet
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Chinatown (film)