Friday, July 25, 2008
journal
Journal: Students must post an entry following each weekly screening. Entries should be more than opinion based reactions and must include reflection based on historical and cultural analysis from the text, assigned readings or other sources. Specific references, quotes, and notes to support positions are expected.
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6 comments:
So our posts should be in the form of a comment?
comment or new post-
new posts obviously are easier to peruse-
less drilling down.
you be the judge.
g.
Its hard to believe that the film A Corner in Wheat was produced almost 100 years ago. Let alone that D W Griffith made over 500 films in his time. It was interesting because all other early cinema didn't really try to tell a story, everything in film had been used for scientific discovery, studying the human body and motion. Although Porter and Edison's film in 1903, The Great Train Robbery, was more impressive with use of cinematography (special effects,cut aways, inserts) , Griffith's comparison of social class, juxtaposing rich and poor, was something that nobody in that time had ever seen before. I enjoyed watching this, mostly because I was trying to imagine what it was like for the first audience to view it.
Also the Melie films are mind boggling. Such high intensive editing on an arcade camera is unbelievable. These three films really seem to have been the much needed exploration of filmmaking that the film industry needed.
When we first started watching this, I thought it was some kind of joke. I had known in the back of my head that this is very important, as the dawn of the new moving-picture aspect of media we still use today, but I had a rough time comparing it to what I was and still am used to seeing. That being said, I have learned a great deal about early film from this course, Film Appreciation and other sources, which has begun to shape my understanding of why this breakthrough meant so much. The silent films we've seen, such as the Great Train Robbery and A Corner in Wheat served to test the limits of a growing yet still new field. For the time period in which they were created, this was awe-inspiring. Something of the same effect would happen if modern movies were to use holograms or some other unexpected technology. Overall, these films were fun to watch. I hope I can appreciate them more as time goes on.
The Great Train Robbery is an epic movie if you take away the fact that you've already seen movies like "Fight Club", "Star Wars", or any other movie that we grew up watching. Why? Because Porter & Edison set a lot of precedents with that movie. For one thing, it was the first western flick created and you can understand that the western genre owes some debt to The Great Train Robbery. Although the plot not being as intricate as something like "The Dark Knight", it was still the first major motion picture with a plot. There were props, panning of the camera, costumes, shots on moving vehicles, overdubbing video, hand drawn color, etc., etc. So as you can imagine, this movie was very popular for its time. If Richard Dawkins were in our film class he would say that the movie transmitted a lot of its "memes" to future productions. Once this standard was set, imitation was not difficult and more techniques would be built off of the foundations that Edison & Porter laid down. If you must know, my opinion of the movie is that it rocks. I especially liked the moral at the end which was that if you steal money from trains, you will get caught.
-Nick-
Ummm 2 questions, I couldn't post as a new post, but it's all the same. The other, what is the deal with the time zone, no biggie just curious.
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