William McBride - Stylized Moments: Turning Film Style Into Meaning

William McBride

Copyright 2013 William McBride

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Contents

invention of photography

violent gaze

Heisenberg Principle

Hollywood & psychoanalysis

hermeneutics

storyboard

production design

shot/reverse shot

suture

German expressionism

key light

fill light

graphic match

insert shot

lap-dissolve

combining lap dissolve & graphic match

contiguity

faux raccord

diegetic/non-diegetic sound

crane shot

choker close-up

fourth wall

dramatic aside

montage

pan & tilt

global image patterns

zoom in/push in/track in/truck in & out

zoom

B-Movies

intentional fallacy

focus

intention

mistakes

jump cut

mise-en-abyme

structuralism

Caddyshack (Ramis1980)

Im Alright

the rules of decent society

comedic tone

cartoon & ethnic characters

pool or the pond

just say no & just say clock

colored boys!

unstylized & stylized slo-mo

the sincerest form of flattery

an improbable ending

Maltese Falcon (Huston1940/Hammett 1930)

pirates!

youve got brains! yes you have!

samuel spade, confidential investigator

you kill me!

dont bogart me

Stagecoach (Ford 1939/HilcoxStage to Lordsburg 1937)

monument valley

ugh!

social drama

I watched you with that baby

rear projection & the stunt double

aces & eights

the shoot-out

Notorious (Hitchcock 1946)

camera self reflexivity

hard boiled language

split point of view

rear projection

stylized props

morning after scene shot-by-shot analysis

canted angle

180-degree rotation

lap dissolve close-up global image pattern

long zoom

merging shadows

rapid montage

bedroom confession shot-by-shot analysis

Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958)

cue the maestro

repetition compulsion

musical sting

the vertigo shotthe stylized moment parexcellence

title sequence

the ever-widening circle

womb/tomb global image patterns

endings

stylized poses of unfreedom and death

narrative closure

the god shot

dreaming in color: a shot-by-shot analysis of thenightmare sequence

the arbitrariness of color analysis

filters

blue/green screen

POV shot

split perspective

authorial camera

Not I (Beckett 1972/Davies1975)

stage to screen

I know it when I see it

the use of force

extremity of human meat

Death of a Salesman (Miller1949/Schlondorff 1986)

square or rectangular

the vertigo shot & tomb-like global imagepattern

the American dialectical: christianity vs.capitalism

boston flashbacks

coming of age

one last kiss

trapped

fired!

free and clear

whats in a name?

chip off the old block

Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(Albee 1962/Nichols 1966)

swerving to avoid a porcupine

unpacking a title

using art

spatial relationships

dragon lady

walpurgisnacht

violence! violence!

the languorous fall of the house of George

taking it outside

driving into a large tree

acting

Dutchman (Jones 1964/Harvey1966)

heaped in modern myth

bet you cant eat just one

my Christ! my Christ!

thank you for your support

the Flora Cameron gambit

cinematic deaths

chopsticks in crisis

Miss Julie(Strindberg 1888/Figgis1999)

the first shall be last

kill me too!you, who can slaughter an innocentbird!

soundtrack, distortion & split screen ballet

one countess in a big dark room/met a footman andher doom

ascending & descending dreams

Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976)

copycat violence & high school shooters

art/life interpenetration

didactic art & aesthetic distance

impressionism

stylized dichotomous soundtrack

compromised closure

faux raccord

the cameo & the seduction

passenger watching silhouette shot-by-shot & theconnecting pan shot

the god shot as global image pattern

Scorseses American Bandstand

the pan to emptiness

process shot

jump cut double take

marine training as method acting

countercultural wars

intentional fallacy

Life Lessons (Scorsese 1989)

the aesthetic gaze

the iris effect

a whiter shade of Paulette

soundtrack

the lascivious artist

its a frame

there are two kinds of people in the world

how does It feel?

conquistador

mirror in the bathroom

i can do anything

russian roulette

cameos

bolero

Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986)

opening and closing montages

film noir inside a film noir

Chekhovs dictum

the ear of Denmark

garden hose and artery conceptually matched

industrial soundscapes

two primal scenes

booth and Lincoln

the voyeur caught in the act

slow motion or over cranking

shock cut/lightning mix

shifting tone

beneath the surface/various vegetation shots

stairs lead to knowledge and danger

three beer analysis

masochisms theatricality

pop songs turned upside down

authorial distance

the throwaway test

the tyranny of the ending

soft or shallow focus

rack focus

deep focus

two diseases

I began studying films in an unassuming way, Isuppose, at an early age as an avid viewer of the New York areaWOR-TVs Million Dollar Movie. In the 1960s the station wouldplay and replay a single film five nights a week (mostly RKOreleasesthe stations owner), providing me a pre-VHS/DVDopportunity to inexpensively view a film repeatedly at home. Sometitles were classics like Gone With The Windand Citizen Kane, while others were boyhoodfavorites such as The Al Jolson Story (Green1946) and the Japanese monster movie King Kongvs.Godzilla. What I most absorbed from this repeated viewingpractice, beyond an unschooled taste for some of the principles inWalter Benjamins Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, wasa sense of the unstoppable, predictable unfolding of time in films(commercial interruptions became part of that flow), an inevitable,ritual-like clockwork whose dramatic principles I later came toidentify and admire in the work of Samuel Beckett. And I never lostmy pleasure for putting popular films right up there alongside theclassics. In fact to establish this populist principle of goingagainst the grain of University art film/foreign film studies, Ibegin each semester of my large lecture hall film class with aserious stylistic study of Harold Ramis 1980 cult comedy classic