CIN 101 VERIFIED STUDY GUIDE
A Study in Choreography for Camera - Answers - d. Maya Deren, US, 1945
Rage Net - Answers - d. Stan Brakhage, US, 1988
medium - Answers - The intervening substance through which impressions are
conveyed to the senses or a force that acts on objects at a distance: radio
communication needs no physical medium between the two stations.
Medium Specificity - Answers - An aesthetic approach—critical and practical—that
seeks to emphasize what is unique to a given artistic medium, and thereby, what
distinguishes that medium from every other artistic medium.
Style is, in this way, determined by the limits and the possibilities of a given medium.
What a film looks like--how it is shot, edited, lit, performed--will depend entirely on what
film, as a material object, permits and alone can yield.
To ask a medium-specific question is to ask, for example, what film can do that a
painting or a novel cannot? What is unique to sculpture? What can it do that no other
artistic medium can?
"A horse, for instance, leaps a barrier. With our eye, we judge his effort synthetically. A
grain of wheat sprouts; it is synthetically, again, that we judge its growth. Cinema, by
decomposing movement, makes us see, analytically, the beauty of the leap in a series
of minor rhythms which accomplish the major rhythm, and, if we look at the sprouting
grain, thanks to film we will no longer have only the synthesis of the movement of its
growth, but the psychology of this movement. We feel, visually, the painful effort a stalk
expends coming out of the ground and blooming. The cinema makes us spectators of
its bursts toward light and air, by capturing its unconscious, instinctive, and mechanical
movements." - Answers - Germaine Dulac, "Visual and Anti-Visual Films" 1928
"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the
constant force that makes for muddlement." So Henry James on the task of the moral
imagination. We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision
are our besetting vices. Responsible lucidity can be wrested from that darkness only by
painful, vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. Our highest and hardest task is
to make ourselves people "on whom nothing is lost." - Answers - Martha Nussbaum,
"Literature and Moral Imagination"
Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna - Answers - d. Chantal Akerman, France, 1974
Signifier - Answers - what is materially presented to a viewer—an object, a person, or a
combination of them
, Signified - Answers - The meaning that the viewer supplies to the signifier
Sign - Answers - What comes of the relation of a signifier to a signified
Style - Answers - The particular way a filmmaker makes use of cinematic signifiers
Close-up - Answers - Nichols: "Close-ups fill the screen with an object or figure of
significance, typically the face, but the shot is also used for important objects such as a
key, knife, or letter. The shot leaves no room for doubt where the viewer's attention
should be directed."
Medium long shot - Answers - the body is visible from the ankles or knees up
Medium Shot - Answers - presents the human figure from the waist up
Semiotics - Answers - study of communication (verbal, nonverbal, visual or aural)
Sign as defined by semiotics - Answers - the smallest meaningful unit of
communication.
Referent - Answers - what a sign refers to outside the language in which it appears.
the referent is the actual "thing" used in the photo/film. (External reality).
Syntagmic axis - Answers - the actual arrangement of the chosen signs
The aperture of the lens and the shutter speed of the camera - Answers - determine
how much light enters the camera
The aperture is also used to - Answers - control depth of field, the span of distance from
the camera over which the image remains in sharp focus
Rack focus - Answers - the practice of shifting from one plane of focus to another
rapidly during a shot
Any lens can be racked to bring objects at different distances from the camera into
focus
Mise-en-scene - Answers - Arrangement of what appears in front of the camera
open frame - Answers - Any shot that gives the sense that it is part of a much wider field
of potential action rather than an enclosed, formally balanced composition
closed frame - Answers - a shot that gives the sense that it is entirely self-sufficient and
composed to represent a specific world where action takes place inside the boundaries
of the shot
A Study in Choreography for Camera - Answers - d. Maya Deren, US, 1945
Rage Net - Answers - d. Stan Brakhage, US, 1988
medium - Answers - The intervening substance through which impressions are
conveyed to the senses or a force that acts on objects at a distance: radio
communication needs no physical medium between the two stations.
Medium Specificity - Answers - An aesthetic approach—critical and practical—that
seeks to emphasize what is unique to a given artistic medium, and thereby, what
distinguishes that medium from every other artistic medium.
Style is, in this way, determined by the limits and the possibilities of a given medium.
What a film looks like--how it is shot, edited, lit, performed--will depend entirely on what
film, as a material object, permits and alone can yield.
To ask a medium-specific question is to ask, for example, what film can do that a
painting or a novel cannot? What is unique to sculpture? What can it do that no other
artistic medium can?
"A horse, for instance, leaps a barrier. With our eye, we judge his effort synthetically. A
grain of wheat sprouts; it is synthetically, again, that we judge its growth. Cinema, by
decomposing movement, makes us see, analytically, the beauty of the leap in a series
of minor rhythms which accomplish the major rhythm, and, if we look at the sprouting
grain, thanks to film we will no longer have only the synthesis of the movement of its
growth, but the psychology of this movement. We feel, visually, the painful effort a stalk
expends coming out of the ground and blooming. The cinema makes us spectators of
its bursts toward light and air, by capturing its unconscious, instinctive, and mechanical
movements." - Answers - Germaine Dulac, "Visual and Anti-Visual Films" 1928
"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the
constant force that makes for muddlement." So Henry James on the task of the moral
imagination. We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision
are our besetting vices. Responsible lucidity can be wrested from that darkness only by
painful, vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. Our highest and hardest task is
to make ourselves people "on whom nothing is lost." - Answers - Martha Nussbaum,
"Literature and Moral Imagination"
Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna - Answers - d. Chantal Akerman, France, 1974
Signifier - Answers - what is materially presented to a viewer—an object, a person, or a
combination of them
, Signified - Answers - The meaning that the viewer supplies to the signifier
Sign - Answers - What comes of the relation of a signifier to a signified
Style - Answers - The particular way a filmmaker makes use of cinematic signifiers
Close-up - Answers - Nichols: "Close-ups fill the screen with an object or figure of
significance, typically the face, but the shot is also used for important objects such as a
key, knife, or letter. The shot leaves no room for doubt where the viewer's attention
should be directed."
Medium long shot - Answers - the body is visible from the ankles or knees up
Medium Shot - Answers - presents the human figure from the waist up
Semiotics - Answers - study of communication (verbal, nonverbal, visual or aural)
Sign as defined by semiotics - Answers - the smallest meaningful unit of
communication.
Referent - Answers - what a sign refers to outside the language in which it appears.
the referent is the actual "thing" used in the photo/film. (External reality).
Syntagmic axis - Answers - the actual arrangement of the chosen signs
The aperture of the lens and the shutter speed of the camera - Answers - determine
how much light enters the camera
The aperture is also used to - Answers - control depth of field, the span of distance from
the camera over which the image remains in sharp focus
Rack focus - Answers - the practice of shifting from one plane of focus to another
rapidly during a shot
Any lens can be racked to bring objects at different distances from the camera into
focus
Mise-en-scene - Answers - Arrangement of what appears in front of the camera
open frame - Answers - Any shot that gives the sense that it is part of a much wider field
of potential action rather than an enclosed, formally balanced composition
closed frame - Answers - a shot that gives the sense that it is entirely self-sufficient and
composed to represent a specific world where action takes place inside the boundaries
of the shot
