Press Play Video Blog

Watch: Akira Kurosawa’s Love of Movement: A Video Essay

Tony Zhou has looked at Kurosawa before, as when he examined the Japanese director’s use of geometry in a crucial scene from ‘The Bad Sleep Well.’ In this piece, he takes a more wide-ranging look at the director’s work to show how, in films from ‘Throne of Blood’ to ‘The Hidden Fortress’ to ‘Ran,’ movement is essential to every Kurosawan frame. Zhou’s central idea is that Kurosawa unifies motion and emotion, so that one force speaks through another–and proposes that superior films follow suit, across the board. At one point, Zhou even uses this idea to critique one of the many mediocre scenes in The Avengers, indicating that if we judged the scene by movement alone, without knowing anything about the story, we wouldn’t know what was going on–whereas in Kurosawa, movement tells the story as well as the dialogue.

Watch: Who’s Your Favorite Movie Hamlet?

Many people have portrayed Hamlet: actors ranging from Kenneth Branagh to Kevin Kline to Ethan Hawke have tried their hand at inhabiting Shakespeare’s moody Dane. It’s not a role, though, that anyone can really claim ownership of–paradoxically, the qualities that make Hamlet a human character, namely indecisiveness and an enduring tendency to stare into the abyss of the self–are the exact qualities that make the role impossible to play without interpretation that leaves out some element of the character. My personal favorite Hamlet is Ethan Hawke’s, in Michael Almereyda’s marvelous modernized adaptation; Hawke gets at Hamlet’s weakness and simultaneous rage growing out of that weakness with memorable intensity and absorption. This piece, one of many on YouTube from the too-self-deprecatingly named JoBlo Movie Trailers which weaves different movie interpretations of Hamlet together with the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy, takes us on a grand tour of one of Shakespeare’s most bottomless creations.

Watch: What Do David O. Russell’s Characters All Have in Common?

A character in a David O. Russell film cannot
be easily described in a few words. Russell’s characters tend to
possess a variety of contradicting qualities that spin and twist
throughout the duration of the film. It started in 1994 with the
quirky, baby-faced pre-med student who just so happens to have an
incestuous relationship with his mother (Spanking the Monkey). There’s
also the romantic and volatile mental patient who wants nothing more
than companionship (Silver Linings Playbook). And let’s not forget the
pudgy, comb-over-sporting con artist with a heart of gold (American
Hustle). With all of Russell’s characters, we often witness a turbulent
assortment of emotions, ranging from one end of the spectrum to
the other–we see greed and sympathy, violence and tenderness,
neurosis and confidence. These characters are clearly not simple,
but ironically enough, they usually have one simple desire. And while
these characters may seem to be unlikeable on paper, in spite of their
tedious and often aggravating complexities, we cannot help but like
them. Here is a look at David O. Russell’s unpredictable characters
from 1996’s Flirting with Disaster to 2013’s American Hustle.

Films used:
Flirting with Disaster (1996)
Three Kings (1999)
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
The Fighter (2010)
Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
American Hustle (2013)

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

Watch: That Famous ‘Jaws” Beach Scene, Shot by Shot by Shot

These days, a movie about an aggressive shark would have an uphill climb in theaters. The shark would have to have a special talent. Or "daddy issues." Or, more likely, the menace would have to be a storm of sharks (‘Sharknado,’ anyone?). In the mid-1970s, though, one shark with sharp teeth and tremendous rage was enough to terrify audiences in the unforgettable milestone film ‘Jaws.’ That, and the masterful cinematography of Steven Spielberg. Proving with great exactitude and considerable energy and enthusiasm that the "close reading" of a film can be a fascinating activity, Julian Palmer of 1848 Media breaks down the infamous beach scene from ‘Jaws" here, tracing each shot, each movement, each line of dialogue, and in so doing, showing us why the scene–and the film–have had such a lasting effect on film history. This video is part of an ongoing series, in which the team at 1848 Media will take a near-microscopic look at a scene from a classic film and show us how, exactly, that scene was put together.

Watch: How Are Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and Orson Welles’s ‘Citizen Kane’ Related?

Watch: How Are Scorsese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and Welles’s ‘Citizen Kane’ Related?

Both The Wolf of Wall Street and Citizen Kane show
men accumulating wealth, acquiring mistresses, divorcing their wives
and succumbing to decadence and power. But where Scorsese significantly
differs from Welles’ vision is in the ending. Welles may have lamented
Kane’s loss of innocence by materialising it in a sled, but Scorsese
exposes materialism itself. His film closes with an image of Jordan
Belfort’s captivated audience wishing to learn his secrets of success.
That final image is an unflinching mirror of us, the audience secretly
wishing for our own Belfort-scale wealth.

Steven Benedict is a writer, producer and director of multi-award winning films. He is also a contributor to several shows on Newstalk106. Having lectured for several years in
University College, Dublin, the National College of Art and Design
and the National Film School, he recently graduated with First Class
Honours from the Staffordshire University MSc in Feature Film Production
at FILMBASE.

Watch: What Are the Parts of a Good Film Noir Story?

What exactly is film noir? Is it a movement, a mode, a style, or a
genre? These questions have preoccupied film scholars for decades.
According to filmmaker Paul Schrader, noir began with The
Maltese Falcon and ended with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
He’d add that it was largely
an American movement that applied certain stylistic (high contrast
lighting, voice over narration, non-linear storytelling) and thematic
(existentialism, the cruel mechanizations of fate, amour fou) elements
in genres ranging from melodramas to detective films.
Another film scholar might add that directors like Fritz Lang and Billy
Wilder never described their films as being "noir." They thought they
were making thrillers. Film noir? That’s a term the French critics
applied retroactively.

This video essay series takes the fairly provocative stance that film
noir became a genre. Essentially, in its golden age during the 1940s,
noir was a mode/movement that was superimposed onto other genres. In
the words of genre theorist Rick Altman, genres
can start off as "adjectives"–fragments of the style and theme might
be there, but the genre has yet to fully solidify because the filmmakers
and audiences haven’t quite gotten their heads around it yet. However,
by the time Robert Aldrich was making Kiss
Me Deadly in 1955, the writings of the French critics had made it
stateside (in fact, there’s a picture of him reading Borde and
Chaumeton’s Panorama
du Film Noir on the set of Attack!),
and perhaps the filmmakers and audiences had finally
begun to think of noir as being a noun. When neo-noir flourished in
the 1970s (thanks to filmmakers like Schrader), the movement
emerged–fully formed as a genre–from its black-and-white cocoon.

I write this trajectory into this introduction to the series because I
can imagine that some of my colleagues might have been troubled by a
video essay that calls film noir a genre. I am more than aware of the
history of this debate, and I will cover it in
a subsequent piece (Part I covered semantics, Part II focuses on
genetic syntax, Part III on pragmatics–so the noir genre discussion
will primarily rest there, and Part IV will focus on evolution. There
will be a Part V on international noir, so don’t think
I’ve forgotten about that either!). What I’m attempting to do here is
to craft the video essay equivalent of an encyclopedia entry on film
noir for the undergraduate student with a new episode each month. If
you’re already familiar with the films and the
key debates, you may not find much in the way of "new" knowledge here.
My main audience–at least in terms of an intellectual presentation–is
the uninitiated. I assume the pleasures of the more advanced fans and
scholars of noir will be found in the aesthetics
of the pieces, although maybe they’ll be surprised by a "new"
recommendation. In any case, I hope you enjoy the first part of this
ongoing series, and I look forward to the debate it encourages. Stay
tuned for more!

To watch Part I of this series, click here.

Dr.
Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He
the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition:
Journal of Videographic Film and Moving
Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the
visual essay and all of its forms (co-presented by MediaCommons and Cinema Journal). [in]Transition recently

won an award of distinction in the annual SCMS Anne Friedberg
Innovative Scholarship competition. His publications have appeared inanimation: an interdisciplinary journal, The Black Maria, Flow, In Media Res, Mediascape, Press Play, RogerEbert.com, Senses
of Cinema, Studies in Comics, and a range of academic anthologies. He is currently completing
a manuscript on the overlap between American blockbuster cinema and comic book style.

Watch: What’s Behind the Success of Horror Movies and Blockbusters?

We like to tell ourselves, possibly foolishly, that artworks exist in their own realm, and that they can be created and consumed separately from whatever outer factors might be working on them. Politics is one sphere; the economy is another sphere; and artistic culture is a separate sphere, which can transcend the other spheres, right? Well, this video essay by Socionomics would suggest that that’s wrong, and that the kinds of films produced, and the kinds of films most widely consumed, during a particular period depend highly on the economy, and on the political landscape. During times of economic deprivation, as between 1931-1933, horror films like Dracula, King Kong, and The Mummy were highly popular; ditto for the late 1960s to the 1980s, the era of Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. During an economic boom, such the one from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, companies like Disney could put out Snow White, Pinocchio, and other such films, to see them become huge hits. People crave happiness in films to reflect their own social happiness, just as they crave darkness to reflect their despair. In a bull market, we want adventure films and similar entertainments; in a bear market, we want films that show our inner apprehensive feelings. It’s a not a brand new point, but this piece, actually part of a larger film called History’s Hidden Engine, states it well, and eloquently, with ample clips from old and new sources.

Watch: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Whitney Avalon Stage a Cinderella vs. Belle Rap Battle

It would be wonderful if there were something profound to say about this video of a rap "battle" between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Whitney Avalon, Gellar rendering Cinderella of the eponymous film, Avalon playing Belle of Beauty and the Beast, but, as it happens, there’s not. It’s entertainment. It’s clever. And Gellar raps pretty well.

Watch: 70 Films That Go Inside Characters’ Minds

Cinema
is no stranger to exploring the realms of dreams, memories, and
fantasies. We’ve all been fooled by a strategically placed dream
sequence or been clued into opinion-shifting information via
flashbacks. But visually speaking, how do we know that we are currently
viewing something created in a character’s mind?

Often, the
filmmaker chooses not to employ any visual cues that would suggest
something is not quite what it seems. For instance, David Fincher’s
Gone Girl (2014) presents us with several lie-laced flashbacks that are
visually cohesive with the rest of the film. In doing so, the film uses
manipulation tactics similar to that of Amy Dunne. Christopher Nolan’s
Inception (2010) frequently tricks us into believing that dreams are
realities by not differing from the film’s overall visual look. Nolan
seems to slowly introduce different visual elements as he is ready to
show his hand. The same applies to Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm
Street (1984). Craven often wants us to think that the characters are
awake and experiencing reality when they are actually dreaming. It is
not until it is revealed that the character is in a dream that the look
of the film begins to change. Little by little, aesthetics tend clue us
into the truth. Sometimes a film completely blurs the aesthetic
boundaries of reality and fantasy and we have a rather difficult time
even deciphering what is and is not real. David Lynch is notorious for
hindering the comprehension of his audience in this way.

On
the other hand, sometimes a filmmaker decides to immediately let us know
that we are experiencing something within the mind of a character.
This "aesthetic of the mind" is clearly different from the overall
look of the film and can be expressed in a vast variety of ways. In
regard to flashbacks, there are two major types: a scene
that takes place at a time previous to the rest of the narrative, and a
scene that replicates the memories of a character. The former tends to
use the same aesthetic approach as the rest of the film, while the
latter usually displays visual differences to mimic the perception of a
character. The change could be as simple as the switching from color to
black and white in Spider-Man (2002), or the overly shaky camera
movement in Blue Valentine (2010). While effective, these visuals can
often be misleading as we become overly connected to a character. We
see things only as he or she remembers them, which may or may not be
entirely faithful to the truth. For example, over-saturation can often
fool us into interpreting pleasant realities, while the opposite can
lead us to believe false negativity. The idea of subjectivity is
especially amplified in films like Pulp Fiction (1994), where a flashback
is presented to us in a POV shot.

Dreams and fantasies are a
bit less complicated when it comes to their aesthetic makeup. Since neither of these elements are ever anchored in reality, the
filmmaker has an endless supply of visual tools at his or her disposal.
The changes can range from the simple soft focus used in Ralphie’s
daydream in A Christmas Story (1983), to the CGI filled, vibrantly
colored dream sequence in Shutter Island (2010). Even viewing these
scenes out of context, the viewer would most likely suspect the action
is not taking place in reality. These are the types of scenes being
investigated in this video–the scenes that clearly stand out as
non-reality due to noticeable aesthetic differentiation. These scenes
showcase a few of the infinite visual techniques used to express the
ever powerful and manipulating mind.

Films used (in order of appearance):
American Beauty
American Hustle
Her
The Virgin Suicides
Django Unchained
Batman Begins
Shutter Island
The Shining
Vertigo
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Apocalypse Now
Mulholland Drive
I Heart Huckabees
The Big Lebowski
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fight Club
Noah
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Super
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Requiem for a Dream
Blue Valentine
Dallas Buyers Club
Watchmen
Brokeback Mountain
Silver Linings Playbook
Memento
Gladiator
Bronson
Inception
Blade Runner
Wish I Was Here
The Skeleton Twins
The Machinist
Warm Bodies
Man of Steel
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
It’s Kind of a Funny Story
(500) Days of Summer
Happy Gilmore
Old School
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
This Is the End
The Hangover Part II
Zombieland
Pulp Fiction
Ray
The Crow
The Lovely Bones
The Bourne Ultimatum
Rambo
25th Hour
Kill Bill Vol. 2
The Green Mile
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Amélie
The Butterfly Effect
X-Men 2
Batman Forever
Spider-Man
Tusk
Raising Arizona
Papillon
The Big Lebowski
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
A Christmas Story
The Wizard of Oz

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

Video Essay: What Does It Mean to Be an Auteur?

There will come a time when being an auteur filmmaker will be the norm, rather than the exception. But let’s pause for a second on that word "auteur." Have you ever heard that word used and wondered what it meant? Or, more likely, have you ever thought about a director who had carved out his or her own particular style, which you noticed from film to film, and thought there must be a term for directors like that? This roughly-fifteen-minute video essay from Filmmaker IQ gives a resoundingly clear answer to the question "what is an auteur," which should clear up any confusion on the matter. It also offers up a concise history of the term, which is rooted in French film history. The piece looks at the more conservative films being made in France before World War II, the transformations effected by Francois Truffaut and such critic-director colleagues as Jean-Luc Godard, who embraced and examined director Jean Renoir’s term auteur to support an elevation of the filmmaker-as-artist, and the fierce debate between American critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael over the significance and relevance of the term itself. This piece is a great watch for anyone hoping to bolster their knowledge of film history or, as the case may be, resolve once and for all what the heck an "auteur" is.