Medienkunst/Film

Radulescu

Blockseminar

Montag, 30. Januar bis Samstag, 4. Februar 2017

16-20 Uhr

Montag, 6. bis Dienstag, 14. Februar 2017

10-14 Uhr

Blauer Salon

 

 

Visual grammar, as we know it should not be taken as granted. 

Robert W. Paul's "Come Along, Do!" (1898) was recorded by the history of cinema as the first publicly screened film to feature more than one shot. The first scene happens outside an art exhibition, the second one inside. The characters, after sitting outside on a a bench, enter the exhibition through the main door. As clear as this cut works now, things were different at the time of the original screening: the theater had to hire a man hired whose role was to explain the audience that the space defined by the second shot was the "inside" of the outdoor space defined by the first shot.

If what appears today to us as an obvious space and time continuity was not perceived as natural at the beginning and required training, it is legitimate to ask ourselves how much we can take for granted the many basic articulations of the visual grammar. Is the general shot followed by a close up the absolute mark of a predication? Is the reverse angle shot/cut between two characters talking an indication that they talk to each other in the same time and space? Is the juxtaposition acquiring its meaning from the order of the content only? 

Should the language of cinema be a natural language, it's grammar would be inconspicuous and these questions irrelevant. But cinema language is a recently acquired convention that only works when "spoken" fluently inside its proper context. Many of its rules become obsolete and new ones are constantly established, as cultural contexts change, shift or sediment. 

One clarification: the course is not dealing with film editing, even if matters of editing might arise during the discussions and as a practical result of the work itself. The course will look at cinema as an oriented language. Therefore, it is more about editing meaning than editing film.

 

The course is at its fifth semester. It started by taking projects developed by the students during the Dramaturgy 101 and, at first, trying to examine if some of their articulations actually work. It grew into allowing entire projects to be shot. During the previous two semesters, it expanded even more, by becoming a frame for a production facility. The production mechanisms and roles became inceasingly solid and the project produced in that frame are now counting as pre-diploma and diploma projects.

This semester, Seeing is Believing goes back to its roots: it will take the 12 projects conceived during Dramaturgy 101 and shot on 16mm during the block seminar and discuss the differences between the abstract pre-edit and shooting planning and the actual editing results.