The beginning of this chapter made me chuckle a little. He was talking about making sense of different movies, and how we come to understand the different aspects of a film. All of the examples he gave were from people in other countries. They are not American, so of course they aren't going to understand what we understand. We have grown up with these types of things, and so it's like second nature to us. I wish he would have touched on Americans and how they make sense of movies because I think he would find that we don't have to sit through a class or read something to understand the basis of what the filmmaker was trying to convey.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Foot: Great Films and How to Teach Them
Chapter 2: The Language of Film
The beginning of this chapter made me chuckle a little. He was talking about making sense of different movies, and how we come to understand the different aspects of a film. All of the examples he gave were from people in other countries. They are not American, so of course they aren't going to understand what we understand. We have grown up with these types of things, and so it's like second nature to us. I wish he would have touched on Americans and how they make sense of movies because I think he would find that we don't have to sit through a class or read something to understand the basis of what the filmmaker was trying to convey.
One part I did enjoy was where he talked about signs and referents. "...The signifier is the photographic image-patterns of shade and color on the screen-and the signified is the mental image-what those patterns evoke in our imagination" (Costanzo 18). So technically the signifier and the signified do not always go together; they have to correlate in order for us to see the right image and for us to feel the feeling they intended. He continued to talk about how much work goes into a film, to crop every shot, and make it the feeling they want. This eventually led to his statement, "images evoke assertions; words evoke images" (Costanzo 19). This kind have relates to my first post on the beginning of the book. I talked about how a film shows you what they want you to feel and a book let's you form your own interpretation. He reiterated that thought by his comment on how concrete images are and how flexible words can be.
The beginning of this chapter made me chuckle a little. He was talking about making sense of different movies, and how we come to understand the different aspects of a film. All of the examples he gave were from people in other countries. They are not American, so of course they aren't going to understand what we understand. We have grown up with these types of things, and so it's like second nature to us. I wish he would have touched on Americans and how they make sense of movies because I think he would find that we don't have to sit through a class or read something to understand the basis of what the filmmaker was trying to convey.
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I laughed at this first part as well. In my mass media class, I remember talking about when films were first put on the big screen in America. My teacher told us that one of the first movies was of a train. The people in the theater freaked out when it showed the train coming at them because they had never seen anything like it before. I wish that he would have added that example because it shows that when movies first started even Americans didn't know what to think.
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