Episode 1 – Birth of the Cinema
Introduction
- Saving Private Ryan (1998) dir. Steven Spielberg
- Three Colors: Blue (1993) dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski
- cinema is an empathy machine
- Casablanca (1942) dir. Michael Curtiz
- romantic films are in a rush
- The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
- A calm scene with a break in the story
- Odd Man Out (1947) dir. Carol Reed
- Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
- Taxi Driver (1976) dir. Martin Scorsese
- A character looking into bubbles are seeing their troubles
- The French Connection (1971) dir. William Friedkin
1895-1918: The World Discovers a New Art Form or Birth of the Cinema
- Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888) dir. Louis Le Prince
- The Kiss (1896 film) (a.k.a. May Irwin Kiss) (1896) dir. William Heise
- Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) dir. Louis Lumière
- Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) dir. Louis Lumière
- Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894-1896 ?) dir. William Kennedy Dickson or William Heise
- Sandow (1894) dir. William Kennedy Dickson
- What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (1901) dir. George S. Flemingand Edwin S. Porter
- Cendrillon (1899) dir. Georges Méliès
- innovation by accident
- Le voyage dans la lune (1902) dir. Georges Méliès
- La lune à un mètre (1898) dir. Georges Méliès
- The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) dir. George Albert Smith
- Shoah (1985) dir. Claude Lanzmann
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) dir. Stanley Kubrick
- Phantom shot
- The Sick Kitten (1903) dir. George Albert Smith
- First close up
- October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) dir. Sergei Eisenstein
- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) dir. Sergio Leone
- The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) dir. Enoch J. Rector
- Birth of widescreen
1903-1918: The Thrill Becomes Story or The Hollywood Dream
- Life of an American Fireman (1903) dir. Edwin S. Porter
- First street action, then the same action from the inside (continuity editing)
- recut to fragment the scenes
- Sherlock Jr. (1924) dir. Buster Keaton
- Double exposure
- Cuts
- The Horse that Bolted (1907) dir. Charles Pathé
- cutting back and forth (parallel editing)
- The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (a.k.a. The Assassination of the Duc de Guise) (1908) dir. Charles le Bargy and André Calmettes
- reverse angle shot (camera in the action)
- Vivre sa vie (1962) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
- Those Awful Hats (1909) dir. D. W. Griffith
- The Mended Lute (1909) dir. D. W. Griffith
- The actor being filmed rather than the set
- The Abyss (1910) dir. Urban Gad
- Stage Struck (1925) dir. Allan Dwan
- The Mysterious X (1914) dir. Benjamin Christensen
- Well edited
- Dream was drawn on film
- Häxan (1922) dir. Benjamin Christensen
- Multiple light sources
- Complex effects
- Ingeborg Holm (1913) dir. Victor Sjöström
- Naturalism and grace
- The Phantom Carriage (1921) dir. Victor Sjöström
- Multi-layered (stories within stories, moods within moods)
- Blue tinted lights
- re-exposes film to make a ghostly effect
- Shanghai Express (1932) dir. Josef von Sternberg
- Actress dressed in black feathers, framed in a train window, and covered with shadows
- The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) dir. Charles Tait
- filmed outdoors
- head-on framing
- The Squaw Man (1914) dir. Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille
- Shots made it look like the actors were looking at each other
- The camera has to stay on the same side of a 180 degree line
- The Empire Strikes Back (1980) dir. Irvin Kershner
- 180 degree rule used during dialogue
- Falling Leaves (1912) dir. Alice Guy-Blaché
- Suspense (1913) dir. Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber
- sideways POV shot
- Split screen to show three characters
- Reveals police chasing through the mirror
- The Wind (1928) dir. Victor Sjöström
- Sand “Blasts the visual image”
- Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908) dir. J. Searle Dawley
- The House with Closed Shutters (1910) dir. D. W. Griffith
- Stagey
- Way Down East (1920) dir. D. W. Griffith
- The delicacy of the actress’s performance matches the delicacy of the lighting
- Small unplanned details that move us
- Orphans of the Storm (1921) dir. D. W. Griffith
- Haloed imagery
- The Birth of a Nation (1915) dir. D. W. Griffith
- mixed the epic with the intimate
- Rebirth of a Nation (2007) dir. DJ Spooky
- Played with the scenes of Birth of a Nation
- Cabiria (1914) dir. Giovanni Pastrone
- Dolly shots
- Shooting elephants to suggest scale
- Intolerance (1916) dir. D. W. Griffith
- Violent scenes were tinted blue
- Jumped between storylines
- Asking people to understand the meaning of the sequence
- Souls on the Road (a.k.a. Rojo No Reikan) (1921) dir. Minoru Murata
- Two separate storylines that come together at the end