Film terms
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vinnettalfred on June 9, 2012
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Christianity and Film terms
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54 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Aesthetic distance | Viewers' ability to distinguish between an artistic reality and external reality; the audience realizes that the events are from a film; opposite of willing suspension of disbelief |
| Allegory | A symbolic technique in which stylized characters and situations represent obvious ideas (obvious ideas include Justice, Death, Religion, and Society) |
| Allusion | a reference to an event, person, or work of art, usually well known |
| Angle | the camera's angle of view relative to the subject being photographed |
| Archetype | an original model or type after which similar things are patterned; can be well-known story patterns, universal experiences, or personality types for many movies (includes myths, fairy tales, genres, cultural heroes, and basic cycles of life and nature) |
| Art director | person who designs and oversees the construction of sets for a movie, and sometimes its interior decoration and overall visual style |
| Auteur theory | Theory of film that emphasizes the director as the major creator of film art, stamping the material with his/her own personal version, style, and thematic obsessions; can be used to relate a film to others by the same director |
| Avent-garde | those minority artists whose works are characterized by an unconventional daring and by obscure, controversial, or highly personal ideas. |
| Backlighting | when the lights for a shot derive from the rear of the set, throwing the foreground figures into semidarkness or silhouette; can be used for romantic scenes |
| Cinema verite | (direct cinema) a method of documentary filming that shows reality by showing ordinary people in actual activities without being controlled by a director; they are made with a minimum of equipment |
| Classical paradigm | strong in story, star, and production values; movies in this form are structured narratively, with a clearly defined conflict, complications that intensify to a rising climax, and a resolution that emphasizes formal closure |
| Close-up shot | a detailed view of a person or object (such as the head) |
| Continuity | logic between edited shots that emphasize smooth transitions between them |
| Convention | an implied agreement between the viewer and work of art; in movies, editing is accepted as "logical" even though a viewer's perception of reality is continuous and fragmented |
| Cross-cutting | the alternating shots from two sequences, often in different areas, suggesting that they are taking place at the same time |
| Day-for-night shooting | scenes that are filmed in daytime with special filters to show nighttime scenes instead |
| Editing | the joining of one shot with another |
| Epic | a film genre characterized by bold and sweeping themes, usually in heroic proportions; the tone is dignified, the treatment larger than life (example: the western (for the US)) |
| Establishing shot | usually an extreme long or long shot at the beginning of a scene, providing the viewer with the context of the subsequent closer shots |
| Expressionism | a style of filmmaking emphasizing extreme distortion, lyricism, and artistic self-expression rather than the realistic external details of everyday life |
| Film noir | emphasizing a fatalistic, despairing universe where there is no escape from mean city streets, loneliness, and death; emphasizes low-key and high-contrast lighting, complex compositions, and a strong atmosphere of dread and paranoia (resulted from WWII) |
| Flashback | interrupts the present by a shot representing the past |
| Formalism | style where aesthetic forms take precedence over the subject matter as content; time/space are distorted; emphasis is on the essential symbolic characteristics of objects and people, not necessarily on their superficial appearance; often lyrical, self-consciously heightening their style to call attention to it as a value for its own sake |
| Genre | a recognizable type of movie; a ready-made narrative form (examples: westerns, thrillers, sci-fi movies) |
| Hand-held shot | a shot taken with a moving camera that is often deliberately shaky to suggest documentary footage in an uncontrolled setting; creates a feeling of immediacy and sometimes anxiety or disorientation; usually used in realistic style films |
| High contrast | a style of lighting emphasizing harsh shafts and dramatic streaks of lights and darks (used in thrillers and melodramas) |
| Iconography | the use of a well-known cultural symbol in an artistic representation (example: the cross) |
| Long take | uninterrupted shot in a film which lasts several minutes |
| Long shot | a shot that is the distance between the audience and the stage in a theater |
| Lyrical | a style emphasizing the beauty of the medium and producing an intense outpouring of emotion |
| Metaphor | an implied comparison between two unlike elements; meaningful in a figurative rather than literal sense |
| Minimalism | a style in which cinematic elements are reduced to the barest minimum of information |
| Mise en scene | arrangement of sceneries and properties to represent the place where a play or movie is enacted; placing of objects on stage |
| Montage | The process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole; used to suggest the lapse of time or the passing of events (example: Mary in "Saved" quickly tries on several outfits in a store) |
| Motif | an unobtrusive technique, object, or thematic idea that's repeated throughout a film |
| Negative space | empty or unfilled space in the mise en scene; used to bring out more detailed elements in the shot |
| Overexposure | too much light enters the camera, bleaching out the image; useful for fantasy and nightmare scenes |
| Pan | (panorama) horizontal movement of the camera |
| Point of view shot | any shot that is taken from the vantage point of a character in the film, showing what the character sees |
| Production values | the box-office appeal of the physical mounting of a film, such as sets, costumes, props, etc. |
| Reaction shot | a cut to a shot of a character's reaction to the contents of the preceding shot |
| Realism | a style that attempts to duplicate the look of objective reality as it's commonly perceived, with emphasis on authentic locations and details, long shots, lengthy takes, and a minimum of distorting techniques |
| Rite of passage | narratives that focus on key phases on a person's life, when an individual passes from one stage of development to another (examples: adolescence to adulthood, innocence to experience, and middle age to old age) |
| Rough cut | crudely edited footage of a movie before the editor tights up the slackness between shots (a kind of rough draft) |
| Shot | those images that are recorded continuously from the time the camera starts to the time it stops |
| Soft focus | the blurring out of focus of all except one desired distance range; can also refer to a glamorizing technique to soften the sharpness of definition (used to hide facial wrinkles of actors) |
| Special effects | supernatural settings, events, and images that are created by computer and digital technology; known as F/X |
| Storyboard | previsualization technique in which shots are sketched in advance and in sequence, like a comic strip, thus allowing the filmmaker to outline the mise en scene and construct the editing continuity before production begins |
| Subtext | Themes and ideas that arise as a result of the issues and story, but not necessarily at the most obvious level; independent of the language of a text |
| Symbol | figurative device in which an object, event, or cinematic technique has significance beyond its literal meaning |
| Take | variation of a specific shot; final shot is often selected from a number of possible takes |
| Thematic montage | type of editing in which separate shots are linked together not by their literal continuity in reality but by symbolic association; most commonly used in documentaries, in which shots are connected in accordance to the filmmaker's thesis |
| Voice-over | A form of narration in which an off-screen voice comments on the thoughts or memories of the characters |
| Willing suspension of disbelief | allows the audience to attain a detached view of the real world and to become more involved in the movie world; opposite of aesthetic distance |
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