Module IV: CINEMA
Introduction
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects. The process of filmmaking has developed into an art form and industry.
Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating – or indoctrinating – citizens. The visual elements of cinema give motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue into the language of the viewer.
Films are made up of a series of individual images called frames. When these images are shown rapidly in succession, a viewer has the illusion that motion is occurring. The viewer cannot see the flickering between frames due to an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Viewers perceive motion due to a psychological effect called beta movement.
The origin of the name "film" comes from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photo-play and flick. A common name for film in the United States is movie, while in Europe the term film is preferred. Additional terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the cinema and the movies.
History
From the Lumiere brothers to the Cohn brothers, and from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the Oscars to the Cannes Film Festival, the story of cinema is at the heart of the media revolution.
It was more than just a new technology. The first glimpse of a movie astonished people in the early 1890s in the US and Europe, when short clips in Nickelodeon parlors were all the rage. Within a decade, the "movie" industry quickly became the most popular art form of the 20th century -- and the most controversial.
Until the 1890s, theater had always been confined to actors on a stage. Parlor toys like flip books the Zoetrope (US), and the Daedalum (England) were the closet anyone could come to having recorded images that could be played over and over. There was some new media flexibility after Daguerre announced the process for photography in 1839, since lectures and dramatic readings could be illustrated by glass photos projected on a theater screen. But glass was far too bulky and fragile to serve in place of film.
One man who did try using glass plates to sequence images was Eadweard Muybridge, a San Francisco photographer. Muybridge was hired by California governor Leland Stanford in 1877 to settle a bet. Stanford had bet that there is a moment when a horse, at a full gallop, completely leaves the ground. Muybridge set up an experiment involving a series of cameras with shutters hooked to trip wires, and helped the governor win the bet.
This was the closest anyone could come to motion pictures at the time, but this soon changed as chemical manufacturers began making celluloid in sheets. George Eastman and other photographers realized that celluloid film could make a small personal cameras possible, and Eastman set up the Kodak company in 1889. Within a few years, inventors in the US and Europe were working on cameras that could quickly advance celluloid film through a shutter, opening and closing 16 times a second, to take a sequence of images. Two major developments were:
- Thomas Edison patented the Kinetoscope system in the United States, and introduced it at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
- At the same time, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, patented the cinématographe system in France.
It's not unusual for inventions to be simultaneous. Radio, television, computer chips and many other inventions emerged from dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of people competing to solve technical problems, as we will see in future chapters.
Era of Experimentation 1800s - 1915
Both Edison and the Lumière brothers originally shot film of less than one minute on small enclosed stages. The very first films shot at studio showed people doing rather ordinary things -- sneezing, dancing, talking. The Lumiere brothers were the first to take the camera outside a studio, shooting film of everyday life in Paris and, soon, around the world. Unlike Edison's "Black Maria" films, these were carefully composed, organized narratives, often shot outdoors as a travelog, to show people what life was like elsewhere.
Originally these short films were shown in parlors with individual "peep show" projectors, which would give a single person one minute's worth of film for a nickle (five US cents). "Nickelodeon" halls quickly spread in Europe and the US, much like video game parlors in the 1980s. But the great profit in movies was quickly seen as showing long feature films to theater audiences. By 1900, projectors had been introduced commercially, and films were being shown in theaters around the world.
The Silent Era
Movies that told a story began to appear in the early 1900s. Many of the early films dealt with familiar topics in a new way (just as many early web pages were content "shoveled" from the print media onto the web). For instance, some of the first long movies involved the life of Moses and Christ, or Jules Verne's book, made into a movie by George Melies called a "Trip to the Moon" These were not revolutionary or controversial topics; but more revolutionary ideas were beginning to occur to emerging filmmakers, such as, Edwin S. Porter who produced The Great Train Robbery in 1903.
Socially conservative people were deeply troubled by the introduction of movies. "The motion picture's curious amalgam of technology, commercial entertainment, art and spectacle set it off as something quite unfamiliar and threatening to the old cultural elite," said historian Daniel Czitrom in "Media and the American Mind." Among these conservatives was Thomas Edison, the man most closely associated with the development of film in America.
Edison controlled most of the patents for movies, and he attempted to control both the business and its cultural impacts. In 1908, Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, also known as the "Edison Trust" (monopoly). The MPPC included competitors like Biograph, Vitagraph, Melies, Pathe and others, but not independent film makers. The MPPC standardized a chaotic industry with copyright, licensing and patent pools, but as a monopoly, they were also able to keep independent film makers from exhibiting in their theaters or using their equipment. The MPCC formed a national censorship board to exclude anything that seemed immoral, and led the national crusade for "moral purification" of movies. Although movies had relatively mild content, even by the standards of the day, the very fact that young people were congregating in dark, crowded nickelodeons instead of churches or lecture halls was alarming to an older generation and advocates of refined culture.
The Edison Trust's attempt to control the business failed. The independents, especially the founders of Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox studios, moved away from the East coast to California, where mild weather and distance from the Edison company allowed feature film expansion. Then too, the dominance of European films ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Finally, the US Justice Dept. joined the independent producers in a lawsuit in 1915, contending that the MPCC was now illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. In the landmark of United States v. Motion Picture Patents Company, 1915, the Supreme Court put a final end to the monopoly.
That same year, 1915, the court eased social conservatives fears in a related case, Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, by ruling that films are not protected by the First Amendment. States were then free to set standards and film censorship boards of their own, and many did. This system of censorship was consolidated in the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which said: "No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it." Under the code, criminals could never win, and partial nudity, steamy sex scenes, and homosexuality were strictly banned. The code survived numerous court challenges until the 1960s, then changed to a rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17) administered by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
As a product of its times, the code did not prohibit narratives encouraging racism or anti-semitism that came to be considered immoral in the later 20th century. The code also made it more difficult for independent filmakers to compete against the big studios, and contributed to the Hollywood domination of international cinema well into the 21st century.
Propaganda Films of the WWII era
The World War II era was considered the "golden age" of propaganda films. While the 1915 US film "Birth of a Nation" and the 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin" were both considered to have strong elements of propaganda.
A propaganda film is defined as one intended to convince viewers of a particular viewpoint, often with deliberately misleading content. Perhaps the classic propaganda film is Lani Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, made to glorify the Nazi Party in 1935.
The Golden Age of Cinema 1930s - 1950s
With sound and color film at their disposal, Hollywood studios were able to pursue new directions in creativity in the 1930s. Each studio had its stars and rising stars of the screen, and Americans flocked to the theaters to see them. It was glorious entertainment but often curbed by the Motion Picture Production Code or other pressures in the industry.
Meanwhile in Europe, filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock were pushing back the envelopes of the Hollywood style.
Cinema in the 1960s
Movies from the 1960s forward both reflected and led a major shift in world culture, away from patriotism and heroics and towards tolerance, introspection and personal growth.
Heroes were more seen as merely mortal. The choices between values were typically depicted in gritty shades of gray instead of in black and white.
War movies, for example, explored personal tragedy and human values more than heroics or the glory of combat. For example, where the 1941 film Sergeant York depicted an unvarnished backwoods hero of World War I, movies like the Bridge over the River Kwai (1957), the Guns of Navarone (1961) or the Dirty Dozen (1967) explored more personal and nuanced themes.
Western genre movies emerged as morality plays that featured anti-heroes, for instance, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963) or Little Big Man (1970).
The horror genre moved from simple mosters attacking from outside to the monsters lurking within apparently ordinary human beings, for instance Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).
And a large number of dramas reflected relatively new social themes, such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Easy Rider (1969).
In some ways this edgier new approach was designed to attract movie audiences and give them something that could not be seen on television. However the same cultural maturity and pessimism also began to be reflected in television programs.
Another factor in the new and more socially daring approach to film was the breakup of vertical integration (studio lot to movie theater ownership) following the 1948 anti-trust case, US v Paramount, which led to more openings for independent film makers and directors.
The modern blockbuster
The demise of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of independent film makers in the "New Hollywood."
With more independence and better cinema effects technology, cutting edge films with more "blockbuster" potential emerged. The best example is Star Wars, which started as a back-lot experiment with new modeling and special effects techniques to bring viewers in closer to the action. It grossed $4.3 billion in the 30 years since the first film was made in 1977.
Animation
Animation is the technique in which each frame of a film is produced individually, whether generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model unit (see claymation and stop motion), and then photographing the result with a special animation camera. When the frames are strung together and the resulting film is viewed at a speed of 16 or more frames per second, there is an illusion of continuous movement (due to the persistence of vision). Generating such a film is very labor intensive and tedious, though the development of computer animation has greatly sped up the process.
Because animation is very time-consuming and often very expensive to produce, the majority of animation for TV and movies comes from professional animation studios. However, the field of independent animation has existed at least since the 1950s, with animation being produced by independent studios (and sometimes by a single person). Several independent animation producers have gone on to enter the professional animation industry.
Limited animation is a way of increasing production and decreasing costs of animation by using "short cuts" in the animation process. This method was pioneered by UPA and popularized by Hanna-Barbera, and adapted by other studios as cartoons moved from movie theaters to television.
Although most animation studios are now using digital technologies in their productions, there is a specific style of animation that depends on film. Cameraless animation, made famous by moviemakers like Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, is painted and drawn directly onto pieces of film, and then run through a projector.
Future state
In the 1990s and 2000s, the development of DVD players, home theater amplification systems with surround sound and subwoofers, and large LCD or plasma screens enabled people to select and view films at home with greatly improved audio and visual reproduction. These new technologies provided audio and visual that in the past only local cinemas had been able to provide: a large, clear widescreen presentation of a film with a full-range, high-quality multi-speaker sound system. Once again industry analysts predicted the demise of the local cinema. Local cinemas will be changing in the 21st century and moving towards digital screens, a new approach which will allow for easier and quicker distribution of films (via satellite or hard disks), a development which may give local theaters a reprieve from their predicted demise. The cinema now faces a new challenge from home video by the likes of a new high definition (HD) format, Blu-ray, which can provide full HD 1080p video playback at near cinema quality. Video formats are gradually catching up with the resolutions and quality that film offers; 1080p in Blu-ray offers a pixel resolution of 1920×1080, a leap from the DVD offering of 720×480 and the 330×480 offered by the first home video standard, VHS. Ultra HD, a future digital video format, will offer a resolution of 7680×4320. However, the nature and structure of film prevents an apples-to-apples comparison with regard to resolution. The resolving power of film, and its ability to capture an image which can later be scanned to a digital format, will ensure that film remains a viable medium for some time to come. Currently the super-16 format is seeing use as a capture medium, with digital scanning and post-production providing good results. Despite advances in digital capture, film still offers unsurpassed ability to capture fine detail beyond what is possible with digital image sensors. A 35 mm film frame, with proper exposure and processing, still offers an equivalent resolution in the range of 500 mega pixels.
Despite the rise of all-new technologies, the development of the home video market and a surge of online copyright infringement, 2007 was a record year in film that showed the highest ever box-office grosses. Many expected film to suffer as a result of the effects listed above but it has flourished, strengthening film studio expectations for the future.
Indian Cinema
India has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world. It was in early 1913 that an Indian film received a public screening. The film was Raja Harischandra. Its director, Dadasaheb Phalke is now remembered through a life-time achievement award bestowed by the film industry in his name. At that point of time it was really hard to arrange somebody to portray the role of females. Among the middle classes, that association of acting with the loss of virtue, female modesty, and respectability has only recently been put into question.
While a number of other film-makers, working in several Indian languages, pioneered the growth and development of Indian cinema, the studio system began to emerge in the early 1930s. Its most successful early film was Devdas (1935), whose director, P.C. Barua also appeared in the lead role. The Prabhat Film Company, established by V. G. Damle, Shantaram, S. Fatehlal, and two other men in 1929, also achieved its first success around this time. Damle and Fatehlal's Sant Tukaram (1936), made in Marathi was the first Indian film to gain international recognition.
While a number of other film-makers, working in several Indian languages, pioneered the growth and development of Indian cinema, the studio system began to emerge in the early 1930s. Its most successful early film was Devdas (1935), whose director, P.C. Barua also appeared in the lead role. The Prabhat Film Company, established by V. G. Damle, Shantaram, S. Fatehlal, and two other men in 1929, also achieved its first success around this time. Damle and Fatehlal's Sant Tukaram (1936), made in Marathi was the first Indian film to gain international recognition.
The social films of V. Shantaram, more than anything else, paved the way for an entire set of directors who took it upon themselves to interrogate not only the institutions of marriage, dowry, and widowhood, but the grave inequities created by caste and class distinctions. Some of the social problems received their most unequivocal expression in Achhut Kanya ("Untouchable Girl", 1936), a film directed by Himanshu Rai of Bombay Talkies. The film portrays the travails of a Harijan girl, played by Devika Rani, and a Brahmin boy, played by Ashok Kumar.
The next noteworthy phase of Hindi cinema is associated with personalities such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, and Guru Dutt. The son of Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor created some of the most admired and memorable films in Hindi cinema.
Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951), Shri 420 (1955), and Jagte Raho (1957) were both commercial and critical successes. Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin, which shows the influence of Italian neo-realism, explored the hard life of the rural peasantry under the harshest conditions. In the meantime, the Hindi cinema had seen the rise of its first acknowledged genius, Guru Dutt, whose films critiqued the conventions of society and deplored the conditions which induce artists to relinquish their inspiration. From Barua's Devdas (1935) to Guru Dutt's Sahib, Bibi aur Gulam,the motif of "predestined love" looms large: to many opponents, a mawkish sentimentality characterizes even the best of the Hindi cinema before the arrival of the new or alternative Indian cinema in the 1970s.
It is without doubt that under the influence of the Bengali film-makers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen, the Indian cinema, not only in Hindi, also began to take a somewhat different turn in the 1970s against the tide of commercial cinema, characterized by song-and-dance routines, insignificant plots, and family dramas. Ghatak went on to serve as Director of the Film and Television School at Pune, from where the first generation of a new breed of Indian film-makers and actors - Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, and Om Puri among the latter was to emerge.
These film-makers, such as Shyam Benegal, Ketan Mehta, Govind Nihalani, and Saeed Mirza, exhibited a different aesthetic and political sensibility and were inclined to explore the caste and class contradictions of Indian society, the nature of oppression suffered by women, the dislocations created by industrialism and the migration from rural to urban areas, the problem of landlessness, the impotency of ordinary democratic and constitutional procedures of redress, and so on.
The well-liked Hindi cinema is characterized by important changes too numerous to receive more than the slightest mention. The song-and-dance routine is now more systematized, more regular in its patterns; the 'other', whether in the shape of the terrorist or the unalterable villain, has a more gloomy presence; the nation-state is more fixated in its demands on our loyalties and curtsy; the Indian Diaspora is a larger presence in the Indian imagination and so on. These are only some considerations: anyone wishing to discover the world of Indian cinema should also replicate on its presence in Indian spaces, its relation to vernacular art forms and mass art.
The Indian film industry, famously known as Bollywood, is the largest in the world, and has major film studios in Mumbai (Bombay), Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Between them, they turn out more than 1000 films a year to hugely appreciative audiences around the world. For nearly 50 years, the Indian cinema has been the central form of entertainment in India, and with its increased visibility and success abroad, it won't be long until the Indian film industry will be well thought-out to be its western counterpart- Hollywood. Mainstream commercial releases, however, continue to dominate the market, and not only in India, but wherever Indian cinema has a large following, whether in much of the British Caribbean, Fiji, East and South Africa, the U.K., United States, Canada, or the Middle East.
Indian Art Cinema
India is well known for its commercial cinema, better known as Bollywood. In addition to commercial cinema, there is also Indian art cinema, known to film critics as "New Indian Cinema" or sometimes "the Indian New Wave" (see the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema). Many people in India plainly call such films as "art films" as opposed to mainstream commercial cinema. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the art film or the parallel cinema was usually government-aided cinema.
Commercial cinema is the most popular form of cinema in India. Ever since its inception the commercial Indian movies have seen huge following. Commercial or popular cinema is made not only in Hindi but also in many other regional languages of East and South India. Let's look at some of the general conventions of commercial films in India. Commercial films, in whatever languages they are made, tend to be quite long (approx three hours), with an interval. Another important feature of commercial cinema in India is music.
Regional Cinema India
India is home to one of the largest film industries in the world. Every year thousands of movies are produced in India. Indian film industry comprises of Hindi films, regional movies and art cinema. The Indian film industry is supported mainly by a vast film-going Indian public, though Indian films have been gaining increasing popularity in the rest of the world, especially in countries with large numbers of emigrant Indians.
Feature Films
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie. The term is also used for feature length, direct-to-video and television movie productions.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, and the British Film Institute all define a feature as a film with a running time of 40 minutes or longer. The Centre National de la Cinématographie in France defines it as a 35 mm film longer than 1,600 metres, which is exactly 58 minutes and 29 seconds for sound films, and the Screen Actors Guild gives a minimum running time of at least 80 minutes. Today, a feature film is usually between 80 and 210 minutes; a children's film is usually between 60 and 120 minutes. An anthology film is a fixed sequence of short subjects with a common theme, combined into a feature film.
The term evolved from when there was a series of short subjects before the main film. The shorts would typically include newsreels, serials, animated cartoons and live-action comedies and documentaries. These types of short films would precede the featured presentation - the film given the most prominent billing and running multiple reels. There was no sudden jump in the running times of films to the present-day definitions of feature-length; the "featured" film on a film program in the early 1910s gradually expanded from two to three to four reels.
Early proto-features had been produced in America and France, but were released in individual scenes, leaving the exhibitor the option of running them together. The American company S. Lubin released a Passion Play in January 1903 in 31 parts, totaling about 60 minutes. The French company Pathé Frères released a different Passion Play, La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ, in May 1903 in 32 parts running about 44 minutes. There were also full-length records of boxing matches, such as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897).
Defined by length, the first dramatic feature film was the Australian 70-minute film The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). Similarly, the first European feature was the 90-minute film L'Enfant prodigue (France, 1907), although that was an unmodified record of a stage play; Europe's first feature adapted directly for the screen, Les Misérables, came from France in 1909. The first Russian feature was Defence of Sevastopol in 1911. The first UK features were the documentary With Our King and Queen Through India (1912), filmed in Kinemacolor, and Oliver Twist (1912). The first American features were a different production of Oliver Twist (1912), From the Manger to the Cross (1912), and Richard III (1912), the latter starring actor Frederick Warde.[12] The first Asian feature was Japan's The Life Story of Tasuke Shiobara (1912), the first Indian feature was Raja Harishchandra (1913), the first South American feature was Brazil's O Crime dos Banhados (1913), and the first African feature was South Africa's Die Voortrekkers (1916). 1913 also saw China's first feature film, Zhang Shichuan's Nan Fu Nan Qi.
By 1915 over 600 features were produced annually in the United States. The most prolific year of U.S. feature production was 1921, with 682 releases; the lowest number of releases was in 1963, with 213. Between 1922 and 1970, the U.S. and Japan alternated as leaders in the quantity of feature film production. Since 1971, the country with the highest feature output has been India, which produces a thousand films in more than twelve Indian languages each year.
Animated Films
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods. News Films
Traditional animation (also called cel animation or hand-drawn animation) was the process used for most animated films of the 20th century. The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are photographs of drawings, which are first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it. The animators' drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent acetate sheets called cels, which are filled in with paints in assigned colors or tones on the side opposite the line drawings. The completed character cels are photographed one-by-one onto motion picture film against a painted background by a rostrum camera.
The traditional cel animation process became obsolete by the beginning of the 21st century. Today, animators' drawings and the backgrounds are either scanned into or drawn directly into a computer system. Various software programs are used to color the drawings and simulate camera movement and effects. The final animated piece is output to one of several delivery media, including traditional 35 mm film and newer media such as digital video. The "look" of traditional cel animation is still preserved, and the character animators' work has remained essentially the same over the past 70 years. Some animation producers have used the term "tradigital" to describe cel animation which makes extensive use of computer technology.
Examples of traditionally animated feature films include Pinocchio (United States, 1940), Animal Farm (United Kingdom, 1954), and Akira (Japan, 1988). Traditional animated films which were produced with the aid of computer technology include The Lion King (US, 1994) Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) (Japan, 2001), and Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003).
Computer animation
Computer animation encompasses a variety of techniques, the unifying factor being that the animation is created digitally on a computer.
2D animation
2D animation figures are created and/or edited on the computer using 2D bitmap graphics or created and edited using 2D vector graphics. This includes automated computerized versions of traditional animation techniques such as of, interpolated morphing, onion skinning and interpolated rotoscoping.
2D animation has many applications, including analog computer animation, Flash animation and PowerPoint animation. Cinemagraphs are still photographs in the form of an animated GIF file of which part is animated.
3D animation
3D animation is digitally modeled and manipulated by an animator. In order to manipulate a mesh, it is given a digital skeletal structure that can be used to control the mesh. This process is called rigging. Various other techniques can be applied, such as mathematical functions (ex. gravity, particle simulations), simulated fur or hair, effects such as fire and water and the use of motion capture to name but a few, these techniques fall under the category of 3D dynamics. Well-made 3D animations can be difficult to distinguish from live action and are commonly used as visual effects for recent movies. Toy Story (1995, USA) is the first feature-length film to be created and rendered entirely using 3D graphics.
Documentary Films
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. A "documentary film" was originally a movie shot on film stock—the only medium available—but now includes video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television program. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.
Defining documentary
In popular myth, the word documentary was coined by Scottish documentarian John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer" (a pen name for Grierson).
Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's views align with Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess", though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about documentaries containing stagings and reenactments.
In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera).
Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents.
Documentary Practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries.
There are clear connections in terms of practice with magazine and newspaper feature-writing and indeed to non-fiction literature. Many of the generic forms of documentary, for example the biopic or profile; or the observational piece. These generic forms are explored on the University of Winchester Journalism Department 'features web' where 'long form journalism' is classified by genre or content, rather than in terms of production as film, radio or 'print'.
Modern documentaries
Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Earth, March of the Penguins, and An Inconvenient Truth among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable.
The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 20 years from the cinema verité style introduced in the 1960s in which the use of portable camera and sound equipment allowed an intimate relationship between filmmaker and subject. The line blurs between documentary and narrative and some works are very personal, such as the late Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) and Black Is...Black Ain't (1995), which mix expressive, poetic, and rhetorical elements and stresses subjectivities rather than historical materials.
Historical documentaries, such as the landmark 14-hour Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1986 – Part 1 and 1989 – Part 2) by Henry Hampton, Four Little Girls (1997) by Spike Lee, and The Civil War by Ken Burns, UNESCO awarded independent film on slavery 500 Years Later, expressed not only a distinctive voice but also a perspective and point of views. Some films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me placed far more interpretive control with the director. The commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form due to problematic ontological foundations.
Historical documentaries, such as the landmark 14-hour Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1986 – Part 1 and 1989 – Part 2) by Henry Hampton, Four Little Girls (1997) by Spike Lee, and The Civil War by Ken Burns, UNESCO awarded independent film on slavery 500 Years Later, expressed not only a distinctive voice but also a perspective and point of views. Some films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me placed far more interpretive control with the director. The commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form due to problematic ontological foundations.
Although the increasing popularity of the documentary genre, and the advent of DVDs, has made documentaries financially more viable, funding for documentary film production remains elusive. Within the past decade the largest exhibition opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have become their largest funding source.
Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.
Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves.
Children’s Films
A children's film is a film aimed for children as its audience. As opposed to a family film, no special effort is made to make the film attractive for other audiences. The film may or may not be about children. In Unshrinking the Kids: Children's Cinema and the Family Film which is a chapter in In Front of the Children ed. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham BFI (1995), Cary Bazalgette and Terry Staples argue that "Children's films can be defined as offering mainly or entirely a child's point of view" p.96.
Criticism
Children's film can encourage younger members of the community to 'imitate the role models of the glamor industry'('Negative Influences of Media', Manali Oak, February 2010.)Oak argues that 'media often hypes the scintillating things about the celebrities' This may then cause children that have been exposed to this media to 'see only the negatives around them' Psychological effects are often seen in terms of 'people's outlook'. Oak concludes: 'While a certain amount of exposure to the ever-evolving media is essential for introducing ourselves to the world outside, an excessive one is detrimental to the overall well-being of society'.
Educational film
An educational film is a film or movie whose primary purpose is to educate. Educational films have been used in classrooms as an alternative to other teaching methods.
Many educational films shown in schools are part of long series - for example, films demonstrating scientific principles and experiments tend to be episodic, with each episode devoted to a specific experiment or principle.
Many schoolchildren in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s watched hundreds of episodes of British-made educational films (all very similar in style and production) over the course of their primary school careers. As a result, the delivery-style and distinctive colour-palette ("scientific" looking neutral-blue backgrounds etc.) of these films is instantly recognisable to any child of the appropriate generation. This was used to great effect by the series Look Around You which parodies these films.
Parallel Cinema
The Indian New Wave, commonly known in India as Art Cinema or Parallel Cinema as an alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema, is a specific movement in Indian cinema, known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, with a keen eye on the sociopolitical climate of the times. This movement is distinct from mainstream Bollywood cinema and began around the same time as the French New Wave and Japanese New Wave. The movement was initially led by Bengali cinema (which has produced internationally acclaimed filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, and others) and then gained prominence in the other film industries of India.
Origins
Realism in Indian cinema dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. One of the earliest examples was V. Shantaram's 1925 silent film classic Sawkari Pash (Indian Shylock), about a poor peasant (portrayed by Shantaram) who "loses his land to a greedy moneylender and is forced to migrate to the city to become a mill worker. Acclaimed as a realistic breakthrough, its shot of a howling dog near a hut, has become a milestone in the march of Indian cinema." The 1937 Shantaram film Duniya Na Mane (The Unaccepted) also critiqued the treatment of women in Indian society.
Early years
The Parallel Cinema movement began to take shape from the late 1940s to the 1960s, by pioneers such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Bimal Roy, Mrinal Sen, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Chetan Anand, Guru Dutt and V. Shantaram. This period is considered part of the 'Golden Age' of Indian cinema. Film makers of this era have collectively created a body of work known of its technical brilliance as well as artistic simplicity and thematic grandeur.
This cinema borrowed heavily from the Indian literature of the times, hence became an important study of the contemporary Indian society, and is now used by scholars and historians alike to map the changing demographics the and socio-economic as well political temperament of the Indian populace. Right from its inception, Indian cinema has had people who wanted to and did use the medium for more than entertainment. They used it to highlight prevalent issues and sometimes to throw open new issues for the public. An early example was Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946), a social realist film that won the Grand Prize at the first Cannes Film Festival. Since then, Indian independent films were frequently in competition for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, with some of them winning major prizes at the festival.
During the 1950s and the 1960s, intellectual filmmakers and story writers became frustrated with musical films. To counter this, they created a genre of films which depicted reality from an artful perspective. Most films made during this period were funded by state governments to promote an authentic art genre from the Indian film fraternity. The most famous Indian "neo-realist" was the Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, followed by Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Girish Kasaravalli. Ray's most famous films were Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959), which formed The Apu Trilogy. Produced on a shoestring budget of Rs. 150,000 ($3000), the three films won major prizes at the Cannes, Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, and are today frequently listed among the greatest films of all time.
Certain art films have also garnered commercial success, in an industry known for its surrealism or 'fantastical' movies, and successfully combined features of both art and commercial cinema. An early example of this was Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953), which was both a commercial and critical success. The film won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival and paved the way for the Indian New Wave. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, one of Hindi cinema's most successful filmmakers, was named the pioneer of 'middle cinema', and was renowned for making films that reflected the changing middle-class ethos. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Mukherjee "carved a middle path between the extravagance of mainstream cinema and the stark relism of art cinema".Another filmmaker to integrate art and commercial cinema was Guru Dutt, whose film Pyaasa (1957) featured in Time magazine's "All-TIME" 100 best movies list.
In the 1960s, the Indian government began financing independent art films based on Indian themes. Many of the directors were graduates of the FTII (Film and Television Institute of India), in Pune. The Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak was a professor at the institute and a well-known director. Unlike Ray, however, Ghatak did not gain international fame during his lifetime. For example, Ghatak's Nagarik (1952) was perhaps the earliest example of a Bengali art film, preceding Ray's Pather Panchali by three years, but was not released until after his death in 1977. His first commercial release Ajantrik (1958) was also one of the earliest films to portray an inanimate object, in this case an automobile, as a character in the story, many years before the Herbie films. The protagonist of Ajantrik, Bimal, can also be seen as an influence on the cynical cab driver Narasingh (played by Soumitra Chatterjee) in Satyajit Ray's Abhijan (1962).
During the 1970s and the 1980s, parallel cinema entered into the limelight of Hindi cinema to a much wider extent. This was led by such directors as Gulzar, Shyam Benegal and Saeed Akhtar Mirza, and later on Mahesh Bhatt and Govind Nihalani, becoming the main directors of this period's Indian art cinema. Benegal's directorial debut, Ankur (Seeding, 1974) was a major critical success, and was followed by numerous works that created another field in the movement. These filmmakers tried to promote realism in their own different styles, though many of them often accepted certain conventions of popular cinema. Parallel cinema of this time gave careers to a whole new breed of young actors, including Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Pankaj Kapoor, and even actors from commercial cinema like Rekha and Hema Malini ventured into art cinema.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan extended the Indian New Wave to Malayalam cinema with his film Swayamvaram in 1972. Long after the Golden Age of Indian cinema, Malayalam cinema experienced its own 'Golden Age' in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the most acclaimed Indian filmmakers at the time were from the Malayalam industry, including Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Padmarajan, John Abraham (director), T. V. Chandran and Shaji N. Karun.[22] Gopalakrishnan, who is often considered to be Satyajit Ray's spiritual heir,[23] directed some of his most acclaimed films during this period, including Elippathayam (1981) which won the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival, as well as Mathilukal (1989) which won major prizes at the Venice Film Festival. Shaji N. Karun's debut film Piravi (1989) won the Camera d'Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, while his second film Swaham (1994) was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival.
Girish Kasaravalli, Girish Karnad and B. V. Karanth led the way for parallel cinema in the Kannada film industry, while Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan have done the same for Tamil cinema.
Decline
By the early 1990s, the rising costs involved in film production and the commercialization of the films had a negative impact on the art films. The fact that investment returns cannot be guaranteed made art films less popular amongst filmmakers. Underworld financing, political and economic turmoil, television and piracy proved to be fatal threat to parallel cinema, as it declined.
Indian parallel cinema
Through his first film Pather Panchali (1955) Satyajit Ray became the pioneer of a genre of films latter known as the 'Indian Parallel Cinema'. Even though Ritwik Ghatak made his first film Nagarik in 1952, he became well known by his film Ajantrik (1958) and became a strong presence in parallel cinema. Mrinal Sen made his first film Raatbhor in 1955.
The first film society was founded in Bombay in 1943 and Satyajit Ray founded a film society in Calcutta in 1947. By the beginning of 1970s there existed above 150 film societies all over India. Through these societies people could see the best of Indian cinema and also they got access to the best of foreign cinema. The first International Film Festival of India was held in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta by the Films Division in 1952. Western classics like De Sica's Bicycle Thieves shown in the film festival created waves among young filmmakers who were frustrated with the mindless song-dance dramas made in India. The Film Training Institute of India (FTII - presently Film and Television Institute of India) was set up in Pune in 1961 and the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) was established in 1964. The Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was set up by the Government in 1960, with the objective of giving loans to directors who wanted to make feature films outside the commercial circuit. All these factors lead Indian Cinema to a revolutionary change, a new genre of Indian films arrived, which are often termed as the 'New Wave Indian Cinema' or the 'New Indian Cinema'.
Indian New Wave
Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969) and Mani Kaul's Uski Roti (1969), both sponsored by State owned Film Finance Corporation (FFC), inspired by the French nouvelle vague, set new film sensibility and cinematic language in India. This movement was labelled as the 'New Indian Cinema' or the 'New Wave Indian Cinema'. FTII graduates Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Saeed Mirza, Shyam Benegal and Ketan Mehta were the important names of New Wave Indian Cinema in Hindi. Mani Kaul's Ashad Ka Ek Din (1971) and Duvidha (1973), Kumar Shahni's Maya Darpan (1972) and Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1973) played important role in this new movement in Hindi during the 1970s. M S Sathyu's Garam Hawa (1973) Govind Nihilani who entered film industry as Shyam Benegal's cameraman made his directorial debut through Aakrosh (1980) he continued making socio-political films like Party (1984), Tamas (1987) and Drishti (1990). Saeed Mizra made notable political films like Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978), Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (1980), Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho! (1984) and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989).
Adoor Gopalakrishnan through his first film Swayamvaram (1972) extended the New Wave Cinema to Malayalam cinema. Aravindan through his first film Uttarayanam (1974) strengthened the movement. John Abraham, K R Mohanan and P A Backer were strong presence of the new Malayalam cinema.
Kannada was the other film industry in South India, which took over the cinema movement in South India. B V Karanth, Girish Karnad and Girish Kasaravalli spearheaded the Kannada parallel cinema. Girish Kasaravalli, graduated from the Pune Film Institute, directed his first film, Ghata Shradha in 1977, which won the National award for best film.
In Assamise, Janu Barua made his first film Aparoopa (1982). His Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Kali (1987), which achieved international recognition, dealt with social problems of rural Assam. Bhubendra Nath Sikia made his first film Sandhyarag (1977) followed by Agnisnaan (1985), Kolahal (1988), Sarothi (1991) and Abarthan (1993).
NFDC: Film censorship
National Film Development Corporation of India is the central agency established to encourage the good cinema movement in the country. The primary goal of the NFDC is to plan, promote and organize an integrated and efficient development of the Indian film industry and foster excellence in cinema. Over the years NFDC has provided a wide range of services essential to the growth of Indian cinema. The NFDC (and its predecessor the Film Finance Corporation) has so far funded / produced over 300 films. These films, in various Indian languages, have been widely acclaimed and have won many national and international awards.
The Central Board of Film Certification (popularly known as the Censor Board) is a government of India regulatory body and censorship board of India controlled by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It reviews, rates and censors motion pictures, television shows, television ads, and promotional material. It regulates the public exhibition of films in India under the provisions of The Cinematograph Act 1952. [1] Films can be publicly exhibited in India only after certification by the Board.
Film censorship becomes necessary because a film motivates thought and action and assures a high degree of attention and retention as compared to the printed word. The combination of act and speech, sight and sound in semi darkness of the theatre with elimination of all distracting ideas will have a strong impact on the minds of the viewers and can affect emotions. Therefore, it has as much potential for evil as it has for good and has an equal potential to instill or cultivate violent or good behaviour. It cannot be equated with other modes of communication. Censorship by prior restraint is, therefore, not only desirable but also necessary
Current certificates
The CBFC currently issues the following certificates.
Symbol | Name | Definition/Notes |
U | Universal | All ages admitted, there is nothing unsuitable for children. Films under this category should not upset children over 4. This rating is similar to the MPAA's G, the BBFC's U, and the OFLC's G ratings. |
U/A | Parental Guidance | All ages admitted, but certain scenes may be unsuitable for children under 12. This rating is similar to the MPAA's PG-13, the BBFC's 12A, and the OFLC's PG and M ratings. |
A | Adults Only | Only adults are admitted. Nobody younger than 18 may rent or buy an A-rated VHS, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, UMD or game, or watch a film in the cinema with this rating. Films under this category do not have limitation on the bad language that is used. Hard drugs are generally allowed, and strong violence/sex references along with non-detailed sexual activity is also allowed. This rating is similar to the MPAA's R and NC-17, the BBFC's 18, and the OFLC's MA and R ratings. |
S | Restricted to any special class of persons | This rating signifies that the film is meant for a specialised audience, such as doctors. |
Board
The Board consist of non-official members and a Chairperson (all of whom are appointed by Central Government). Bharatnatyam dancer, Leela Samson presently presides the Board after Sharmila Tagore who was the longest continuous running Chairperson in the history. Samson is now the 26th Chairperson after the Board's establishment.
The Board functions with its headquarters at Mumbai. It has nine Regional offices each at:
- Mumbai
- Kolkata
- Chennai
- Bangalore
- Thiruvananthapuram
- Hyderabad
- New Delhi
- Cuttack
- Guwahati
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