Makeup is applied to transform actor F. Murray Abraham into Salieri in the 1984 film Amadeus (Photo: ShotOnSet!)
Watching a filmed story is a complex act involving sensations, emotions, and ideas. From its birth, film absorbed photography, painting, theater, drama, fiction, poetry, sculpture, architecture, dance, and music. Add to these a moving camera, instantaneous shifts in space and time, and complex interactions of words, sounds, and images, and film becomes a unique art form.
Jack Jorgens, professor emertius in the department of literature at American University, looks at scenes from some of the best screen works, asking what constitutes style in film and how cinematic expression works. He explores how the images and sounds that wash over viewers are chosen, written, designed, shaped, and performed.
Featured Topic
Realism and Expressionism
Contrast the traditional storytelling, realistic historic settings, and “invisible” camerawork and editing of Downton Abbey—all suited to its subject—with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a dictionary of modernist cinema in which flashbacks, shifting points of view, and virtuoso shooting and editing capture the brash contradictions of the central character.
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