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Summary: Adapted from the authors' top-selling public speaking text, Public Speaking Handbook provides a unique, audience-centered approach in a student-friendly reference format, allowing students to access information quickly and easily. Public Speaking Handbook brings theory and practice together in an understandable and applicable manner. Its distinctive and popular approach emphasizes the importance of analyzing and considering the audience at every point along the way. ...show moreThis model of public speaking serves as a foundation as the text guides students through the step-by-step process of public speaking, focuses their attention on the importance and dynamics of diverse audiences, and narrows the gap between the classroom and the real world. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. ...show lessEdition/Copyright: 3RD 12
21 more offers below.

subset: commoncrawl


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|Name: _________________________
|Period: ___________________
This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 12 through Chapter 15.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. Why did Stilton break off his engagement?
(a) Stilton has found a new love.
(b) Stilton found out Florence loves Bertie.
(c) Stilton found out that Florence was at the night club.
(d) Stilton is fed up with Florence trying to change him.
2. What does Florence ask Bertie to do after he climbs into her room?
(a) Make friends with Stilton.
(b) Bring her a cup of tea.
(c) Kiss her.
(d) Read her some poetry.
3. How does Bertie feel about seeing Florence?
(a) Excited.
(b) Anxious.
(c) Terrified.
(d) Overwhelmed.
4. Which asset is Dahlia trying to sell to the Trotters?
(a) Her summer home.
(b) Her jewelry.
(c) Her newspaper.
(d) Her automobile.
5. What punishment does the magistrate give Bertie?
(a) Bertie must apologize to the police.
(b) Bertie must spend two days in jail.
(c) Bertie must do service at an old age home.
(d) Bertie must pay a fine.
Short Answer Questions
1. What does Florence typically do when she and Stilton break up?
2. What has Stilton sold Percy?
3. Who is Daphne Dolores Morehead?
4. What is recorded in the Junior Ganymede Club's club books?
5. What is the name of the establishment Bertie takes Florence to in Chapter 5?
This section contains 264 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page)


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Family Dollar Announces Partnership With Healthways To Improve Team Members' Health And Well-Being
Family Dollar Stores, Inc. (NYSE: FDO), one of the fastest-growing discount retail chains in the United States, announced today a new partnership with Healthways (NASDAQ: HWAY), a national leader in health and wellness solutions. This multi-year agreement offers Family Dollar's Team Members a wide-range of wellness programs to optimize their health and underscores Family Dollar's strong commitment to proactively engage in activities which encourage healthy living.
"We are proud to offer this new program to our Team Members because fostering opportunities to enhance well-being is crucial to developing a healthy corporate culture and highlights our drive to be a compelling place to work," said Howard Levine, Family Dollar's CEO. "We are pleased that, through our partnership with Healthways, our Team Members will have access to transformational technologies and services that are shaping a new age of healthy living."
As part of the agreement, Family Dollar is offering its estimated 50,000 full-time and part-time Team Members a variety of integrated services, collectively known as the Healthways Well-Being Improvement Solution. Some of these services will include Healthways Well-Being Assessments™, the Well-Being Connect™ web-based personal behavior change application, wellbeingGO™ mobile application, biometric screenings, onsite program management and engagement marketing, health risk coaching, incentive management and wellness competitions and challenges.
"The leadership of one of the country's fastest growing retailers realizes that to lift their workforce's well-being is to enhance our nation's economic productivity," said Ben R. Leedle, Jr., Healthways president and CEO. "The one proven way to improve employee health and well-being is an effective strategy that engages employees and supports them in making healthy individual lifestyle choices. Given America's obesity epidemic and increases in lifestyle-related chronic diseases, the commitment to improved well-being by innovative companies like Family Dollar is essential to reversing these trends."Healthways was chosen by Family Dollar after a lengthy competitive selection process and assumed responsibility for program management and delivery of services as of October 1.
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Click here to print the obituary below
Ray Anderson
Anderson, Ray 75, passed away February 17th at his home in Glenview. Ray was born in Chicago and graduated from Lane Tech High School. He received his Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree from the
University of Illinois
in 1960. Upon graduation he served with the U.S.
Corps of Engineers Research & Development in Fort Belvoir, VA where he was assigned to a project in Greenland. Upon his return to Chicago, he joined his father at H. Ray Anderson & Associates General Contractors, where he was President and operating manager until his retirement in 2001. Ray is survived by his wife, JoAn (nee Books), and daughter, Elizabeth Christensen (Ben). He is also survived by a sister, Carole Tervelt (Ronald), Clayton, CA.; brother, John (Joanne), Punta Gorda, FL. and brother, Earl, Chicago. Memorials may be made to the Midwest Palliative and Hospice Care Center.
Published in Pioneer Press North from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27, 2013


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Jessica Stam Gets Electrocuted
Jessica Stam isn't exactly electrocuted, although the dark shot of her below makes me think otherwise; she's actually electric and tripped out. At least that's how Russh magazine decided to title their latest editorial "Electric and Tripped Out. Take It or Leave It"Āand cover featuring the hot model. Within the 18 page spread, you get to see a range of Stam from playful and lively to raw and damaged.
Personally, I like to see Stam alive, but she portrays the dark side very well. How amazing is the contrast between her vivid image shown first compared to the shot of above? From a wide-eyed girl to eyes rolled back and bloody tears…Hmm….Do I smell a model on the cusp of turning actress? We'll have to wait and see… Until then these shots by photographerĀWill DavidsonĀare stunning and the array of emotion shown is incredibly artistic.
See the full editorial and the team behind the scene on MyFDB.
Professional Credits:
|Will Davidson
|Stevie Dance
|Fashion Editor
|Shin Arima
|Hair Stylist
|Chiho Omae
|Makeup Artist
|Jochem Sanders
|Photographer Assistant
|Scott Lyle
|Photographer Assistant
|Clare Byrne
|Assistant Stylist
|Jessica Mycock
|Assistant Stylist
|Haesther Libbey
|Assistant Stylist
|Rory McDonough
|Assistant Stylist
|Mateusz Lilpop


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Jetstar and World Vision have created StarKids to help improve the lives of some of the world's poorest children. Money raised through StarKids will fund important projects in a number of Jetstar's destinations including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and even Australia.
The aim of StarKids is to raise awareness of the causes and effects of poverty on children and their families through positive stories of hope and change, and to highlight the work World Vision is doing transforming the lives of vulnerable children.
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December 22, 2014
Kansas head coach Charlie Weis look out onto the field as his team plays against the South Dakota State in the first quarter of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Sept. 1, 2012, in Lawrence, Kan. (AP Photo/Ed Zurga)
Nov. 15, 2012
LAWRENCE, Kan. -- In an effort to send his 2012 senior class out with a fitting farewell, Kansas football head coach Charlie Weis is offering to foot the bill for all KU students seeking admittance to Saturday's 'Senior Night' game versus Iowa State.
Students must enter through the student entrance, located on the Northeast side of Memorial Stadium. A valid KU Student ID must be presented upon entrance and seats are available on a first come basis. The student gates open two hours prior to kickoff. Weis will pay for all KU students without previously purchased tickets who arrive at the student entrance between 4-6 p.m., on a first come, first serve basis.
The Jayhawks' game against the Cyclones is scheduled to kickoff at 6 p.m., at Memorial Stadium. KU will honor its 23-member senior class approximately 30 minutes prior to kick off.
Click Here to access the online Public Inspection File
Viewers with disabilities can get assistance accessing this station's FCC Public Inspection File by contacting the station with the information listed below. Questions or concerns relating to the accessibility of the FCC's online public file system should be directed to the FCC at 888-225-5322, 888-835-5322 (TTY), or firstname.lastname@example.com.


text:
At Imagine Schools, we believe that operating a successful school requires constant attention in five important areas that we call Measures of Excellence:
• Parent choice and satisfaction
• Adhering to shared values
• Academic achievement
• Positive character development
• Economic sustainability
We work hard to balance accomplishments in all of these areas, because a school that emphasizes one while ignoring another will not thrive. In addition, we add a sixth Measure of Excellence, new school development, because starting and operating new schools enables us to fulfill our mission to help more parents and guardians educate their children.
Current Openings:


text:
Spruce Up Quicksilver With New Interfaces
The oft mentioned Quicksilver from the awesome folks at Blacktree Software is arguably one of my favorite apps on my entire Leopard MacBook Pro. The sheer simplicity, intuitiveness, and function of this remarkable app allows me to work more productively than ever; launching an app, controlling something, or finding something is just a keyboard shortcut away. However, some of the built-in appearances that ship with Quicksilver when you download can leave much to be desired, especially when running on the shiny new Leopard desktop. Here's a bunch of new appearances to change that up.
The first thing to note is that Quicksilver's built-in plug in menu installation tool has a bunch of other appearances that you can easily install and get going with. However, there are more than just those standard ones that you can use and they can really make your Quicksilver installation look that much more appealing, and I'm going to show you a couple of my favorites today.
My number one interface for Quicksilver right now is BezelHUD from Julius Eckert. This incredibly clean and simple interface has a nice gradient and cool animation when you invoke and hide Quicksilver. It's just nice looking.
Another one from Julius Eckert that I really like is SilverFlow. This one has a larger window, but it has a Cover Flow-like interface to browse your items. I really like this one a lot.
The last interface I'm going to mention today is called Showcase, and it is also available from Julius Eckert. This one has a larger window, and forgoes the familiar 3 tab interface in favor of one large region with two smaller ones for the actions below it. This one is really cool looking too, and it especially looks good on darker wallpapers.
All of the themes in this post are currently freeware, but Julius does accept donations. Enjoy your more attractive Quicksilver instantly!


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Photo #: 80-G-10570
Douglas TBD-1A experimental floatplane
(Bureau # 0268)
In low-level flight during torpedo drop tests at the Newport Torpedo Station, Rhode Island, 10 October 1941.
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.
Online Image: 115KB; 740 x 620 pixels
Reproductions of this image may also be available through the National Archives photographic reproduction system.
Click on the small photograph to prompt a larger view of the same image.
If you want higher resolution reproductions than this digital image, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions."
13 February 2001


text:
Populated Place in Pickens County, South Carolina, USA.
Latitude: 34.78778 : Longitude: -82.6925 : Elevation: 1005 ft
Blogs and Websites Near Liberty, South Carolina - GeoURL
Liberty Map - Multimap
Liberty Street Map and Satellite Photo - Google Maps
Liberty Aerial Photo and Topo Map - Terraserver
Liberty Map - MSN
Environmental Hazards, Flood Area Maps, Boundaries - EPA
Liberty Area Map - MapQuest
Liberty SC Weather Forecast - National Weather Service
Weather Forecast near Liberty - Multimap
The weather forecast links don't work for all places yet.
Some random places: Msgr McClancy Memorial High School Jeep Bridge Gholar Cemetery TNT Creek Pjrto MS 1 Water Well


text:
The Porsche customer magazine Christophorus, enables our customers to keep up-to-date with news and developments from Porsche.Latest IssueRead selected articles from our latest issue. Issue 368 Issue 367 Issue 366 - Le Mans SubscriptionWhether you are subscribing to Christophorus or letting us know that you have changed address, it can all be done quickly and easily online. Imprints
© 2014 Porsche Cars North America. Legal notice. Privacy Policy.


text:
December 22, 2014
WASHINGTON, D.C. (WVLT) -- Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) doesn't want Olympic champions to have to pay taxes on their medals.
"Our Olympians deserve our praise and accolades, not more tax bills, when they win at the Olympics," said Alexander. "While we work toward broader tax reform over the next few months, we should act now to end the taxes on their honorariums and on the value of the metal in their medals."
On Thursday, the Tennessee senator signed on as a co-sponsor to Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-FL) Olympic Tax Elimination Act. The bill would exempt Olympic medal winners from having to pay taxes on the honorariums as well as the cash value of the medals they win.
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text:
|Thread Tools
|Display Modes
|16th Mar 2009, 04:30 PM
Registered User
Join Date: Mar. 30th, 2004
Posts: 45
atn - all greed player's
was setting up a botmatch for a greed server and noticed that a map i had made was on the list, so i chose it and played it with a 150 score limit greed, with titan against adept bots - and the match went a full 30 minutes with both teams fighting a pile of what was around 600 skulls mear steps away from scoring before the tide was turned... and despite the fact that both teams rained hundreds of skuls around enemy goals, the game ultimitely ended with with our team winning on time with a score of 23, 13 of which were mine.
I had already posted it on epics forums when i released it, and we worked out the bugs, and it recived it's fair share of fans (by which i mean maybe 1 or 2 besides me).
here's hoping it can garner a few more greed players, full story of the map in the epic post. - greed admins give a try-out!
Bonus - try it with greed + titan + supper Bezerk to make your pants tingle.
|18th Mar 2009, 12:01 PM
Registered User
Join Date: Mar. 30th, 2004
Posts: 45
made a demo on the map for some friends who are starting out, and figured i'd share it with everyone... i'm using titan, super bezerk, and kills slow time.
remember you need the map from the first post.
|Thread Tools
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text:
Call us toll-free:
Jump at the Opportunities!
Opportunities await you at Dakota State University. Whether you are just starting to consider college, want to further your education or need to update your skills, Dakota State has a program for you.
New! Application Checklist
Prospective students, use this handy checklist to follow all the steps in the application process.


text:
» News
Hoyer Is a Tool
He won't say the words – We Have A Spending Problem
» 12 Comments
Not only a tool, a brain dead one. Zombie anyone?+4
BUT BUUUUSH! Steny is so unimaginative and lazy. That's what happens when you become entwined with your LoFo base.+4
No, Hoyer is your garden variety shithead.+4
Steny's an evil socialist ideologue.
He will do and say anything to further his standing among the Nazis, communists, and other assorted maggots.
He's not stupid … he wants to rule in Hell.+5
Two words: Term Limits
Hoyer has been a professional douchebag for 32 years!+6
Hey! The old Bush did it response. What an original MF.+4
The only group of people who are dumber than this piece of shit, are the people of Marylands 5th District, who keep re-electing this fossil.+4
MD's 5th district was gerrymandered just so this evil fukk could be re-elected ad infinitum.
He started out as part of the PG County socialist machine. The corruption is thorough and permanent.
Montgomery, Prince George's, and Baltimore – the AXIS of evil in Maryland.+4
Heyyy. As a hijacked 5th district homegal, we do NOT like him one damned bit. It's PG Co. Baltimore and the recipients of local largesse (I'm looking at you, Barbie M) that keep the money machine rolling.
It was a real hoot when Parasite Glen-spenning tried to have 'his people' from PG double-dip on their pensions when he called them over to the state side. Who has now gone to ground under smartgrowthamerica. Bastards, all.+4
As if it were some kind of secret.
"The state has only one district more compact than the national average," McGlone said. That is the 5th Congressional District in Southern Maryland, represented by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer."
We haven't paid for our tax cuts…
Excuse me? Exactly how DO you pay for tax cuts? Think hard Steny, because you made the claim and now you have to answer.
Here's a hint: it begins with a "C" and ends with "ut spending."+3
Not as big of tools as Republicans who cower at calling this piece of garbage on his statement.
Just what is Hoyer's detailed plan to raise taxes by a cool trillion per year?+1


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NICE Introduces New Release Of NICE Inform, Enhancing Its Multimedia Incident Information Management Solution
RA'ANANA, Israel, August 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --
NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) today announced the introduction of its new release of the NICE Inform multimedia incident information management solution. The new release of NICE Inform builds on NICE's advanced capabilities by giving security control centers and Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) the ability to integrate text, video and voice recordings from third party capture platforms into holistic incident timelines. This differentiating technology reinforces NICE's support of Next Generation 9-1-1 and its commitment to meeting the challenge of external data integration for enhancing investigations and debriefings.
NICE Inform provides the complete picture for PSAPs, airports, public transportation systems, banks, and other markets that need to synchronize diverse multimedia for incident reconstructions used in investigations and debriefings. This information can also be used to improve future responses by helping organizations identify opportunities for training operators to help improve their skills.
The latest release of NICE Inform allows third party recordings from numerous sources to be imported into the NICE Inform organizer in various standard formats and then synchronized with NICE video and voice recordings and other multimedia input. This enables security operations to leverage their existing capture platforms to the fullest, and to reconstruct events exactly as they happened for more thorough investigations.For example, PSAPs can now amalgamate video from citizens' smart devices, in-car mobile video recordings, and video recordings of incidents captured on third party platforms to create comprehensive incident reconstruction timelines. A bank that uses different Video Management Systems (VMS) for ATM transactions and building security can merge video from these different systems for a complete reconstruction of any event. Mass transit systems and airports that manage surveillance video through multiple VMSs can also take advantage of this advanced technology. Using NICE Inform Version 5, they can piece together all elements into one seamless timeline, regardless of the capture platform.
Select the service that is right for you!COMPARE ALL SERVICES
Action Alerts PLUSTry it NOW
Jim Cramer and Stephanie Link actively manage a real portfolio and reveal their money management tactics while giving advanced notice before every trade.
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- Large-cap and dividend focus
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TheStreet Quant RatingsTry it NOW
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Stocks Under $10Try it NOW
David Peltier, uncovers low dollar stocks with extraordinary upside potential that are flying under Wall Street's radar.
Product Features:
- Model portfolio
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- Intraday trade alerts
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Dividend Stock AdvisorTry it NOW
Jim Cramer's protege, David Peltier, identifies the best of breed dividend stocks that will pay a reliable AND significant income stream.
Product Features:
- Diversified model portfolio of dividend stocks
- Alerts when market news affect the portfolio
- Bi-weekly updates with exact steps to take - BUY, HOLD, SELL
Real Money ProTry it NOW
All of Real Money, plus 15 more of Wall Street's sharpest minds delivering actionable trading ideas, a comprehensive look at the market, and fundamental and technical analysis.
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- Ultra-actionable trading ideas
Options ProfitsTry it NOW
Our options trading pros provide daily market commentary and over 100 monthly option trading ideas and strategies to help you become a well-seasoned trader.
Product Features:
- 100+ monthly options trading ideas
- Actionable options commentary & news
- Real-time trading community
- Options TV


text:
Create A Personalized Newspaper Using Your Twitter Stream
Ever get tagged in one of those "daily news" tweets? If you haven't, you've likely seen them tweeted at someone else. You know, it says something like "Top stories for Something Daily from @you!"
If you ever wondered about making one yourself, we're about to tell you how you can create your own "Tweeted Times" or whatever you decide to call it.


text:
The Best Movie Sequels Ever
From the silent era to Terminator 2 to (yes) Michael Bay. Fight it out in the comments.
By Calum Marsh
Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan (1982)
Nerds have argued about the relative merits of Star Trek's many film iterations for as long as they've existed, but despite the ups and downs of the series, there's one thing everyone can agree on: Nothing beats Wrath of Khan. That it improves upon Star Trek The Motion Picture goes without saying, but that it is maybe the best Star Trek-related thing ever made makes it all the more impressive.


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text:
In our previous episode, Kallweit, Heiner said: > There is a memory leak in HTAccess.c about line 690 when form_url_encode > returns a malloc'd pointer that doesn't get freed. > Insert a HT_FREE(form_encoded) as shown. As shown where? Your mail is missing the example :) I can't add it right after because the allocated string is being copied to the anchor structure. -JoseReceived on Thursday, 27 July 2000 10:03:16 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0+W3C-0.50 : Monday, 23 April 2007 18:18:37 GMT


text:
SUMMARY: Sometimes your team can agree that a website needs changes, but how it should be changed is a different story. If team members have different thoughts on the right direction, it's time run tests and dig into the data -- because no one can argue with metrics.
See the top three tests an international roommate-finding service ran to circumvent office conflict and redesign key pages. You'll find before-and-after images of all three tests, which increased memberships 8% and paid conversions 3%.
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text:
Archive for the 'Directors: Disney' Category
Beyond praise 3: Yet more DVD supplements that really tell you something
Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959)
Kristin here–
Every now and then I discuss a few DVD supplements that teachers might find useful for their classes, though they might be of interest to others as well. Previous installments can be read here and here.
Darby O'Gill and the Little People (Walt Disney Video)
Yes, you read that right. I can't claim credit for having discovered this disc's excellent supplement, "Little People, Big Effects." Shortly after the second "Beyond praise" entry, Dan Reynolds, who teaches at the University of California Santa Barbara, wrote to recommend it.
Darby O'Gill was one of the few Disney live-action films I missed when I was growing up in the 1950s. I acquired the disc and started by watching the feature. I must say that this is one weird movie.
The "little people" of the title are leprechauns, and the special effects used to make them look small are mostly achieved through forced- perspective techniques. In less than eleven minutes, this supplement demonstrates the use of glass paintings, mattes, false perspective, and even a revived Schüfftan process, most famously used for Metropolis, where scale is manipulated by shooting into an angled, partially transparent mirror. Careful calculations allow for over-sized sets in the background to be lined up precisely with normal-scale ones in the foreground, so that the foreground person looks much larger then the background one. Since the two characters, here Darby and King Brian, are supposed to be conversing face-to-face, a manipulation of eyelines, a term we use a lot in Film Art, is necessary. (Despite what my spell-check keeps trying to tell me, "eyeline" is one word in the movie business, as demonstrated above.) In explaining how the actors knew where to look in the shot illustrated at the top, the film shows that "station points" were placed on the floor so that the characters' eyelines would seem to match up (below). These days actors alone against blue or green screens often have to look at tennis balls to make the direction of their gaze match correctly.)
Clearly some behind-the-scenes footage was made during the production of Darby O'Gill, and this is incorporated into a documentary that includes interviews with master effects expert Peter Ellenshaw, who died in 2007. Ellenshaw worked as a matte painter on half the British classics of the 1930s and 1940s, including Black Narcissus (which has perhaps the greatest matte paintings ever). He then moved to Hollywood in 1950 and began a string of films with Disney that won him an Oscar for Mary Poppins. It's good to have even these short clips of him demonstrating and discussing his work.
"Little People, Big Effects" should give students (and just about anyone else) a better grasp of perspective and its importance in the representation of depth on a flat screen. I would definitely show it as part of a study of cinematography. If a fifty-year-old film seems a bit out of date, point out to students that, as the narrator mentions, exactly the same techniques were used in many scenes of The Lord of the Rings to make the hobbits and dwarves look small. Similar demonstrations are provided in the supplements to the extended DVD version of The Fellowship of the Ring (Disc 1, "Visual Effects: Scale").
Elijah Wood sits further from the camera than Ian McKellen in order to make him appear as small as a hobbit
Zodiac ("2-Disc Director's Cut," Paramount)
At the end of my first "Beyond praise" entry, I complained about the lack of supplements on the initial DVD release of Zodiac. Then, after the two-disc set with the supplements appeared in early 2008, I forgot to include it in the second entry. Better late than never, so I'm tackling it here. (The supplements are apparently the same for the Blu-ray set.)
As the "DVD Talk" review says. "The self-congratulatory praise is kept to a minimum."
The main supplement is a 53-minute film called "Deciphering Zodiac." It's a good, objective, chronological summary of the film's production. A lot of talking heads are included, such as the producer, scriptwriter, set decorator. That's usually a good sign, since it shows that care was taken with the making-of and that enough of the crew members are participating that the account will probably be rounded. There's a 15-minute making-of specifically on "The Visual Effects of Zodiac."
Zodiac was primarily shot on professional-level digital cameras, apart from the slow-motion shots, which still need to be done on 35mm due to limitations of the digital technology. Hence there's a lot of information here on digital techniques. Most of these techniques are used in ways that aren't necessarily obvious to the viewer. If you want to show students some material on digital effects, this might be a good choice, since it avoids the flashy, obvious effects that so many fantasy and sci-fi DVD supplements concentrate on.
"Deciphering Zodiac" has shots showing the digital camera attached to an elaborate rig around a car, which was used to follow moving cars, including the famous opening tracking shot along a suburban street. The video-assist monitor is often visible in the shots.
One change that digital filming has made in production has been the frequent use of "digital dailies" rather than dailies on film. (Dailies are the unedited takes just as they come from the camera(s); directors and other key creative people typically watch them at the end of each day.) Several scenes of the "Deciphering" documentary show raw shots and are labeled as digital dailies, something which doesn't seem to be a common feature of supplements. It's pretty obvious that the shot of Jake Gyllenhaal below would need to be manipulated in post-production. There's also informative coverage of the methods used to match location and studio-shot footage, particularly for the scene where the killer shoots a taxi driver.
The visual effects documentary has good explanations of the early shot of a rapid move across the bay toward San Francisco as it looked in the period when the film's action begins, a shot that was done entirely digitally.
Now that so many best-lists for the decade have included Zodiac, it seems to be an official modern classic. Perhaps a somewhat more dignified way of teaching special effects than using a Transformers movie.
The Dark Knight (Two-Disc Special Edition, Warner Home Video)
The supplements for The Dark Knight make a nice contrast with those for Zodiac. Here the makers of a spectacular action movie avoided digital special effects to a surprising extent. Instead they used practical effects, that is, effects accomplished via physical means while shooting rather than those done in post-production via laboratory or digital manipulation. Digital technology was used, of course, but often for rather modest tasks in planning and in erasure of unwanted elements. It's also interesting as the first 35mm fiction feature to be shot partially on Imax cameras.
The main supplement is "Gotham Uncovered." It begins by showing how the Imax camera was initially tested on a single action scene shot on location in Chicago. The results led to additional Imax scenes being added to the film. The advantages of Imax—primarily a huge gain in visual quality due to the larger size of the individual frames—are shown to be balanced against the camera's limitations. The camera is much larger, making handheld shots difficult. It holds only three minutes of film and has a shallower depth of field. While interesting, this first section is surprisingly lacking in actual footage of the filming, often depending on still photos. We tend to assume that in this day and age, the making-of is taken into account from early on in a production. It's surprising how often that turns out not to be the case.
A five-minute segment, "The Sound of Anarchy," shows Hans Zimmer sitting at a computer and talking about the modernist, dissonant music for the Joker character. It's mildly informative.
"The Chase" is perhaps the most useful section of the making-of. The decision was made to shoot the scene on Lower Wacker in Chicago. Here digital effects were kept to a minimum, with multiple cameras mounted on vehicles like the motorcycle below. These were special smaller Imax cameras. Only four such cameras existed at the time, though an accident reduced that to three!
One big moment in the chase has the Batmobile crashing into a garbage truck. Again, rather than resorting to digital effects, the crew built miniatures of the two vehicles and the set. The decision was also made to shoot a crash of an 18-wheeler on LaSalle Street using a real truck on location, and the scenes showing the practice sessions for this reveal the kind of planning that goes into the big action scenes that are so common in films these days.
A multi-vehicle crash scene was done with several cameras, which is common practice for unrepeatable actions. (Even on a big-budget film like this, no one would want to crash more than one Lamborghini.) The cameras often show up in each other's shots, and the supplement shows the resulting footage and how CGI is later used to erase them—again, a very common use of digital tools. Here a camera on a crane is visible at the center left in the original footage of the crash:
In one scene, the Joker walks out of a hospital, which explodes behind him. A prime candidate for digital effects, one would think. Instead, the filmmakers opted to have a demolition company destroy a real building. CGI was used to plan the scene:
A shorter supplement, "The Evolution of the Knight," deals mostly with the design process for Batman's suit and the Batpod. Again the emphasis is on bringing reality into the filming. It's pointed out that while much of Batman Returns was shot on sound stages, the team decided to try and shoot the sequel in the city streets as much as possible.
Beware of these
I have to admit, one reason that this series appears so rarely is that for every DVD with useful supplements that I find, there are two or three uninformative ones that I have to sit through–or at least sample. In addition to recommendations, let me warn you away from some of the ones I switched off.
I had expected the Slumdog Millionaire DVD extras to be interesting, given the mixture of digital and 35mm shooting, the location work, and so on. But obviously the filmmakers had no idea that the film would be a success, so they seem to have done little behind-the-scenes shooting as they made it. The result is a not terribly informative, bare-bones 18-minute making-of.
Supplements as praise-fests have not gone away. Musicals seem especially to bring them out. "Get Aboard! The Band Wagon" provides 36 minutes of mutual admiration. In "From Stage to Screen: The History of Chicago," Chita Rivera unintentionally achieves a parody of the gushing movie star who lauds everyone she worked with.
David and I just watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I had liked it when I saw it in first run, and predictably, David enjoyed it, too. It's a clever, well-scripted, well-animated film. We hoped to learn something from its supplements, but the making-of seems to be aimed at children, and young ones at that. The co-directors and some of the other filmmakers look distinctly embarrassed to be participating, partly because a lame comparison of making a film to mashing food together forms a running motif. A pity, since the movie deserves better. As reviewers keep pointing out, the best animated films these days are made for adults as much as for children.
A welcome INFLUENZA
DB here:
Kristin and I are en route to the Vancouver International Film Festival, after a few days in Seattle visiting Sanjeev and Megan, nephew and niece-in-law. We were completely awestruck by the vast holdings of Scarecrow Video, where even the Warner Archives special-order DVDs can be rented. We also had a good long talk over JaK steaks with Jim Emerson, impresario of the superb website Scanners. Not to mention catching a screening of the lively Walt & El Grupo at the Seattle International Film Festival theatre. As a big fan of Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros, I was thrilled to learn the background story, as well as to watch gorgeous 16mm Kodachrome footage.
Last year's trip to Vancouver put us on the road for thirteen days, encountering movie-related stuff (and Obama) in surprising places. This time we took the plane—faster but less relaxing. To get a better look at the landscape, we'll be taking a train up to Vancouver.
One of the films I'm most looking forward to at Vancouver is Bong Joon-ho's Mother, brought to this year's event by Tony Rayns. Alas, Bong himself will not be joining us. I enjoyed meeting him at my first Vancouver visit in 2006, when this blog was in swaddling clothes. He's completely frank and unpretentious.
Even before meeting him, I had followed Bong's career with keen interest. I think he's one of the best Korean directors, though he probably doesn't get as much attention as some others. Like the Japanese Kore-eda Hirokazu, Bong is the sort of quiet genre-hopper who's hard to pin down. His first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is a charming romantic comedy that also offers a portrait of neighborhood life. The mordant Memories of Murder (2003) quietly bends the conventions of the city-cop-in-a-village movie, mixing comedy into a serial-killer tale. Bong's biggest commercial success came with The Host (2006), a monster movie in the grand tradition that manages to be at once scary, funny, and socially critical. Seeing it again this summer, I was struck by its compact elegance. Bong makes complex narrative and stylistic twists look easy.
Bong has also made some acute short films; he seems to understand that they require the snappy impact of a well-wrought short story. Probably his best-known short is the "Shaking Tokyo" segment of the omnibus movie Tokyo (2008). It focuses on a hikikomori, a young man who has withdrawn from social contact and lives wholly through the TV monitor and the computer screen. Bong's hero tidily stacks empty pizza boxes along his walls like installation art. Only an encounter with a delivery woman makes him question his robotic seclusion. The ending, which lures our hero outside, provides a Twilight-Zoneish twist.
More single-minded, though, is a short I've just seen, the little-known Influenza (2004). There are several movies based on surveillance-camera footage; one of the most lyrical, Optical Vacuum, I reviewed here. Bong went instead for narrative. He staged a story in locales covered by surveillance cameras, and then retrieved the footage from the hours of material. Cut together, the shots follow Mr. Cho, a failed salesman who turns to petty theft and violent crime.
We discover Mr. Cho in men's rooms, car parks, and ATM stations. The scenes, each shot in a single take, run through various spycam techniques: fixed high angle, black and white imagery, stuttering motion, mechanical scanning of the scene (sometimes leaving the main action behind). We see wide-angles, telephoto shots, barely legible long-shots, and split-screen imagery picking out opposite points of view.
Everything we see is staged, I think. Unrehearsed events seldom look this cogent and poised. Yet sometimes, especially during the climactic crowd scene, some of the action seems to have been left to luck.
Short but not sweet—mostly sour—Influenza shows what an ingenious filmmaker can do by setting himself a single, precise problem. Crossing the border between commercial fiction and avant-garde experimentation, the film deserves wider circulation.
As for Mother, Derek Elley's Variety review promises the trademark Bong blend of gentle comedy and unsettling drama. And Vancouverites have an extra bit of luck: A program of shorts by Bong and his colleagues from the Korean Academy of Film Arts graces the festival this year. Bong's next planned project, about the wretched survivors of a new Ice Age, shows him to be as unpredictable and unclassifiable as ever.
Thanks to Bong Joon-ho for his help in preparing this entry. The trailer for Walt & El Grupo is here. And there's a poignant story of the founding and near-demise of Scarecrow Video here.
The Host.
But what kind of art?
From DB:
We don't have to think of film as an art form. A historian can treat a movie as a document of its time and place. A war buff could scrutinize Eastwood's Iwo Jima movies for their accuracy, and a chess expert could sieve through Looking for Bobby Fischer to discover, move by move, what matches were dramatized. But most of the time we assume that cinema is an art of some sort.
Not necessarily high art. Cinema is often a popular art, or in Noël Carroll's phrase, a mass art. From this angle, there's no split between art and entertainment. Popular songs are undeniably music, and best-selling novels are instances of literature. Similarly, megaplex movies are as much a part of the art of film as are the most esoteric experiments. Whether those movies, or the experiments, are good cinema is another story, but cinema they remain.
So, at least, is our position in Film Art: An Introduction. We draw our examples from documentaries, animated films, avant-garde films, mainstream entertainment vehicles, and films aimed at narrower audiences. In other writing, Kristin has done research on high-art movements like German Expressionism and Soviet Montage (she wrote her dissertation on Ivan the Terrible), but she's also written about popular cinema from Doug Fairbanks to The Lord of the Rings. I've indulged my admiration for Hou and Dreyer but also I've tried to tease out the aesthetics of Hong Kong action pictures and contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. Ozu gives us the best of both worlds: one of cinema's most accomplished artists, he was also a popular commercial filmmaker.
Still, people who look upon cinema as an art don't necessarily share the same conceptions of what kind of art it is. We have different conceptions of cinema's artistic dimensions, and we won't find unanimity of opinion among filmmakers, critics, academics, or audiences.
When we study film theory, this sort of question comes to the fore, and so today's blog will be a bit more theoretical than most. Don't let that scare you off, though; I'm trying for clarity, not murk.
People have tended to think of cinema as an art by means of rough analogies to the other arts. After all, film came along at a point when virtually all the other arts had been around for milennia. It's commonly said that film is the only artform whose historical origins we can determine. So it's been natural for people to compare this new medium with older arts.
Here are the dimensions that come to my mind:
*Film is a photographic art.
*Film is a narrative art.
*Film is a performing art.
*Film is a pictorial art.
*Film is an audiovisual art.
Let me say off the bat that I think that film is a synthetic medium, in the sense that all these features and more can be found in it. It's like opera, which is at once narrative, performative, musical, and even pictorial. I mark out these dimensions simply to show some emphases in people's thinking about cinema. As we'll see, these ideas can be mixed together in various ways.
Film as a photographic art.
La petite fille et son chat (1900).
For many early filmmakers, such as the Lumière brothers (above), cinema was a means of capturing reality, documenting the visible world. Movies were moving photographs. Naturally, this conception of cinema leads us to treat documentary as the central mode of filmmaking.
It's an appealing idea. G.W. Bush reading "My Pet Goat" wouldn't be as revelatory presented as a painting or a theatre performance. On film we can see the event as it occurred and judge it as if we were in the same room. Even in fictional cinema, you can argue, the physicality of the actors, the tangibility of the setting, and the details–a train's pistons, wind rustling through grass–could not be rendered, or even imagined, so powerfully in a non-photographic medium. In addition, consider Jackie Chan. His stunts are astonishing partly because we know he really did them and the camera photographed them. In an animated film, or a CGI-based one, a character's acrobatics or brushes with death aren't so thrilling.
The great film theorist André Bazin claimed that cinema's photographic basis made it very different from the more traditional arts. By recording the world in all its immediacy, giving us slices of actual space and true duration, film puts us in a position to discover our link to primordial experience. Other arts rely on conventions, Bazin thought, but cinema goes beyond convention to reacquaint us with the concrete reality that surrounds us but that we seldom notice.
I think that Bazin's idea lies behind our sense that long takes and a static camera are putting us in touch with reality and inviting us to notice details that we usually overlook in everyday life. (I try out this line of argument in relation to the tactility of Sátántangó here.) Moreover, you can argue that in treating cinema as a photographic art the filmmaker surrenders a degree of control over what we see and how we see it. Bazin made this claim about the Italian neorealists and Jean Renoir: creation becomes a matter of an existential collaboration between humans and the concrete world around us.
An example I used in my book Figures Traced in Light pertains to a moment in Hou Hsiao-hsien's Summer at Grandfather's, when a tiny toy fan falls between railroad tracks as a locomotive roars past. The fan's blades stop, then spin in the opposite direction as the train thunders over it. The blades reverse again when the train has gone. (This detail might not be visible on video.) Did Hou know how the fan would behave? Isn't it just as likely he simply discovered it after the fact, making his shot a kind of experiment in the behavior of things? Conceived as a species of photography, cinema can yield visual discoveries that no other art can.
Interestingly, cinema didn't have to be photographic. Many early experiments with moving images were made with strips of drawings, such as the Belgian Émile Reynaud's Praxinoscope. You can argue that recording glimpses of the world photographically simply proved to be the easiest way to obtain a long string of slightly different images that could generate the illusion of movement. Some filmmakers, such as George Lucas, hold that filmmakers are no longer tied to photography, and that the digital revolution will allow cinema to finally realize itself as a painterly art. More on that below.
Film as a narrative art.
This is at the core of Hollywood's explicit concerns. Producers, directors, crew, and of course screenwriters will agree that Without a good story, the movie fails. Our Indie and Indiewood filmmakers say they're trying to find fresh stories, the ones that "haven't been told yet." Overseas filmmakers dominated by Hollywood tell us, "We have our own stories to tell." Even the most celebrated arthouse filmmakers often say they're interested in character as revealed through action. Resnais, Rivette, Fassbinder, Haneke, and all the rest may have told unusual stories, but still they told 'em.
Likewise, many viewers will say that they go to the movies to experience a story. Reviewers online and in the popular press, if they do nothing else, are obliged to sketch out the film's plot, though they mustn't give away the ending. Even in academia, most discussions of films focus on what happens in the narrative.
When we consider film genres, we're usually concentrating on the narrative aspects of them. Most genres display typical characters and plot patterns. The backstage musical features aging stars and young hopefuls, caught up in the process of putting on a show. The horror film typically centers on a monster's attack on humans, who must fight back. One type of science fiction shows us an overweening scientist striving to go beyond "what is proper for humans to know." Both fans and scholars discuss other aspects of genre films, but narrative is often central to their concerns.
Historians have traced in great detail how filmmakers employed cinema as a narrative art, but we're making more discoveries all the time. How, for instance, have films signaled flashbacks? How do they let us know we're in a character's mind, or attached to his or her optical point of view? How have they structured their plots? Can we pick out distinct approaches to narrative–in various periods, or genres, or national cinemas? How have narrative conventions changed over the years? Some of the answers Kristin and I have proposed can be found elsewhere on this site, and in our books and articles.
Film as a performing art.
The Marrying Kind.
In the West, since Plato and Aristotle we've distinguished between verbal storytelling and dramatic presentation, or performance. Films may be stories, but they're not exactly told: they're enacted. At Oscar time, we're especially conscious of this analogy, for the Actor/ Actress nominees usually garner the most public attention.
Hollywood acknowledged cinema as a performing art in the 1910s, when it created the star system. The Star reminds us that film acting isn't exactly the same as theatre acting, since an elusive charisma puts the performance across. John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Keanu Reeves, and many other "axioms of the cinema" aren't good actors by stagebound standards, but once they show up on screen, you can't take your eyes off them. This notion intersects with the photographic premise: we say that the camera seems to love them.
You can argue that Andy Warhol revamped this idea. His superstars weren't photogenic by ordinary standards but their almost clinical narcissism and exhibitionism, captured by the camera, made them as mesmerizing as any matinee idols. Warhol films like Paul Swann create rather disturbing emotions by putting us in the presence of an awkward performer.
Reviewers place a premium on a movie's performance dimension. After they've told us a bit of the plot , they appraise the job the actors did. Some ambitious critics have written wonderful appreciative essays on acting, as in Andrew Sarris's "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet" and the collection OK You Mugs. See also the two collections of articles by Gary Giddins, which I discuss in an earlier blog.
Academic film studies has been slow to study acting systematically, partly because of a bias against considering cinema as a theatrical art, and partly because acting is very hard to analyze. But Charles Affron, Jim Naremore, Roberta Pearson, and Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have greatly helped us understand performance practices. They show, among other things, that it isn't just a matter of the face or the voice: a fluttered hand or a willowy stance can be as powerful as a frown or a line reading.
Film as a pictorial art.
Ohayu (Good Morning).
Progressive opinion in the silent era tended to deny that film was a performing art, since that would make it a form of theatre. No, film had unique capacities. Cinema was essentially moving pictures.
It was a visual art that unfolded in time, so a movie was neither quite the same as a painting (frozen in time) or as a stage play (not pictures but three-dimensional reality). The coming of sound somewhat reduced the appeal of this line of argument, but to a very great extent, students of film technique still emphasize cinema as a visual art.
Theorists argued that the film frame was a pictorial field, not a proscenium stage. Action unfolded in the frame in ways that dynamized space. The choice of angle, camera distance, camera movement, and the like created a visual fluidity that had no equivalent on stage or in other graphic arts. Even cinematic staging was quite different from blocking in a theatrical space. Add to this the ability to join one strip of pictures to another via editing, and we have a unique pictorial artform.
The theorists of the silent era, like Rudolf Arnheim and the Russian montagists, gave us a vocabulary and an orientation to studying visual style, but their legacy hasn't been fully developed. Journalistic reviewers typically don't pay that much attention to the way movies look. Nor, surprisingly, do academics. Film studies departments seldom pursue research into visual style and structure.
Here the professors are out of sync with the people whose work they study. Manuals and film schools teach composition, lighting, cutting, camera placement and the like. Professional filmmakers all over the world often think in pictures; they prepare shot lists and storyboards and care very much about the color values and editing patterns of the finished work. We can see their interest in visuals in DVD commentaries and supplements, and as viewers start to absorb bonus materials, perhaps their interest will be whetted too.
Needless to say, a number of avant-garde filmmakers, from Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttmann to Deren, Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, James Benning, and Nathaniel Dorsky, have also thought of cinema as having the power to refresh, even redeem, our vision. But many of the most important directors aiming at broader audiences are also renowned for their visual styles. To mention just a few: Griffith, Feuillade, Sjostrom, Keaton, De Mille, Murnau, Lang, Dreyer, Lubitsch, and Dovzhenko; Ford, Hitchcock, and von Sternberg; Renoir, Ozu (above), Mizoguchi, and Ophuls; early Bergman, Antonioni, Jancsó, Resnais, Angelopoulos, Tarr, Tarkovsky, Kieślowski, Kiarostami, and Makhmalbaf; Scorsese, Spielberg, Michael Mann, and Tim Burton. Some, like Oshima, Sokurov, and Johnnie To, have been polystylistic, exploring many different visual pathways.
Film as an audiovisual art.
In the 1920s, many theorists feared the coming of synchronized sound, since that would thrust film back toward theatre. The "talkies" would sacrifice visual artistry to Broadway dialogue. This worry was mistaken, but I can sympathize. Probably the mandatory silence of early film pushed filmmakers to find means of visual expression. Would we have Chaplin and the other clowns if they could have spoken at the start?
Yet a great deal of sound cinema wasn't canned theatre. Film became a synthetic medium blending imagery, the spoken word, sound effects, and music into something that was neither painting nor theatre nor illustrated radio.
Though he's thought of as the premiere theorist of editing, Eisenstein actually developed this idea of audio-visual synthesis. He was fascinated by the ways in which images and music worked together, creating an idea or feeling that couldn't be expressed by either one. If shot A followed by shot B gave us something that wasn't present in either one, then why couldn't shot A and sound B yield the same results? He believed that Disney's 1930s films were the strongest efforts in this direction, as when a peacock fanned out his tail to a rippling melody. Eisenstein called it "synchronization of senses."
Eisenstein sometimes pushed this idea pretty far. His remarkable analysis of one sequence in Alexander Nevsky (sample above) tried to show how the movement of the viewer's eye across a suite of shots actually mimicked the movement of the music. He made the case tough for himself because the shots contain almost no movement within them: Eisenstein claimed that we read the compositions from left to right, in time with the musical chords!
Not only Disney but many filmmakers of the 1930s experimented with audiovisual fusion–Kozintsev and Trauberg in Alone, Pudovkin in Deserter, Mamoulian in Love Me Tonight, Renoir in the final danse macabre of Rules of the Game, and Busby Berkeley's Warners and MGM musicals. Welles made Citizen Kane a feast of audio-visual echoes, as when the wobbly descent of Susan's singing voice is matched by the flickering of a stage light that finally goes out.
With magnetic and multichannel recording in the 1940s and 1950s, filmmakers could compose very complex sound mixes, and later improvements offered still more possibilities. After Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we expected a movie to be an immersive audiovisual experience, like the light show at a rock concert. Scorsese, especially in Raging Bull and Goodfellas, created powerful mergers of music, sound effects, camera movement, and character movement. So did the Hong Kong kung-fu films of the 1970s and early 1980s. The spellbinding languor of Wong Kar-wai's films stems largely, I think, from their synchronization of color, slow motion, drifting camerawork, and evocative music.
The avant-garde has pursued more elusive synchronizations of sense modes.The idea of synthesis was floated in the silent era, when experimenters like Oskar Fischinger used musical pieces to anchor their abstract imagery. This tendency has resurfaced in music videos, some of which (Michel Gondry's in particular) have clear links to the experimental tradition. So too do the shorts and features of Peter Greenaway, especially in his collaborations with composer Michael Nyman. In a film like Prospero's Books, Greenaway seems to follow Eisenstein in imagining a Wagnerian synthesis of writing, image, and sound.
By contrast, Godard explores all manner of unpredictable junctures between image and sound, with the tracks teasing us but always avoiding a complete coordination. Somewhat similar are the disjunctive image/sound juxtapositions in Peter Kubelka's Unsere Afrikareise and Bruce Connor's Report, or the inverse and retrograde organizations of Structural Film soundtracks like Michael Snow's Wavelength and J. J. Murphy's Print Generation.
Film academics have begun to analyze image/ sound juxtapositions, studying the development of early talkies and more recent Dolby technology. Arguably, film researchers now pay more attention to music than they pay to imagery. By contrast, most journalistic critics ignore a film's soundtrack, except occasionally to comment on line readings and pop tunes. As for ordinary audiences, perhaps DVD and home theatre technology have made people more aware of how movies can saturate our senses with audiovisual correspondences.
Three waivers
1. Once I floated these distinctions in a seminar discussion, and a participant mentioned that cinema was also an emotional art. I'd agree that a lot of cinema aims at arousing feelings, but this idea can be found in all the dimensions I traced. Each conception of film favors different means of stirring up emotion.
For example, the photographic approach holds that recording and revealing the world is the most effective way to move spectators, while the narrative approach favors stories as the means to that end. The performance-based approach trusts that we'll react empathetically to the emotional states displayed by our fellow humans, but the visual-art approach says that cinema can arouse feeling by manipulating pictures in time and space, perhaps even pictures that don't show any people at all. Eisenstein argued that synchronization of senses was the most powerful form of emotional stimulation, creating in the viewer an "ecstasy" comparable to religious fervor. Beyond these general considerations, it would be worthwhile to tease out the different sorts of emotion that each perspective tends to emphasize.
2. Someone else might ask: What about other analogies? Filmmakers and critics have sometimes compared cinema to music or poetry. Shouldn't those arts be added to the list?
I think that these comparisons show up principally within the broad idea of film as a pictorial art. The French Impressionist directors of the silent era thought that they were making "visual music," and Brakhage and Deren's conceptions of the "film lyric" were mainly pictorial. (See girishshambu for thoughts on the latter.) I'd suggest that filmmakers in the pictorial-art camp have looked to these adjacent arts for models of patterning (meter, rhythm, motif development) and imagery (metaphor and subjective states in lyric verse). Filmmakers are also attracted to the idea that music and poetry tend to be suggestive rather than explicit, conveying powerful feelings in elusive and open-ended ways.
Polemically, filmmakers often conjure up these musical and literary analogies to counter the mainstream cinema's emphasis on narrative and performance. If we think of film as lyric or rhapsody, story seems less important. The same thing goes, I think, for thinking of film as moving architecture or kinetic sculpture; the analogy again targets film's pictorial dimension and its non-narrative potential.
3. To think of film as having an affinity with another art form isn't to say that they're identical. Thinking of cinema as a performance-based art, for example, doesn't commit you to saying that film acting is the same as theatrical acting. Instead, thinking along these lines seems to create a first approximation, an initial comparison that lets you move on to notice differences. Once you consider film as a pictorial art, you can then ask in what ways it differs from other pictorial arts, or in what ways this particular movie transforms or reworks the techniques of painting. Ballet Mécanique, which we analyze in Film Art (pp. 358-366), owes a lot to cubism, but its imagery isn't identical to what Picasso, Braque, and Gris came up with on canvas. All of these analogies seem to work best as frameworks for sensitizing us to both similarities and differences between film and other arts.
And . . . so?
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
Each conception of film art harbors a good portion of truth. Each may fail to cover all of cinema, but for certain types of film, or particular movies, some are likely to be more helpful than others.
For example, it's useful to consider David Lynch as making audiovisual works, in which blinking lights or grooves in pine planks seem uncannily synchronized with throbs and hums and Julee Cruise vibrato. Very often story and acting seem to precipitate out of an enveloping pictorial/auditory atmosphere. This isn't to say that you couldn't study narrative or performance in Lynch films; it's just that taking up the audiovisual-mix perspective will throw certain aspects into sharper relief.
You could also argue that the Hollywood studio era blended many of these appeals into a single strong tradition. Story was important, but so was performance. Visual style was often striking, but so too was an expressive soundtrack that went beyond simply recording the dialogue. Sound effects, musical scores, and verbal hooks between scenes created imaginative resonances with the image track. Contrariwise, we can see some avant-garde traditions as taking a purist tack. In several of his films, Brakhage reduces narrative, purges performance, and bans sound: we have to engage wholly and solely with a pictorial experience.
Just as we can distinguish film traditions along these dimensions, we can contrast writers and thinkers. Some critics are very good in pinning down performance qualities, others excel at plot dissection or visual analysis. Arnheim is sensitive to pictorial values but he has little to contribute to understanding storytelling.
Bazin and Eisenstein are attuned to several of the dimensions I've traced out. Bazin's interest in cinema's photographic basis also alerted him to pictorial possibilities, like deep-focus and camera movement. Eisenstein, famous for his ideas on cinema's visual dimension, was as I've said interested in sound as well. He was no less concerned with film performance, which he conceived as expressive movement (to be synchronized with properties of the image and the soundtrack). But he voiced almost no interest in narrative or photography.
I warned you that this blog would be theoretical, but I hope the takeaway message is clear. Cinema is teeming with artistic possibilities, and each of these frameworks can illuminate certain areas of choice and control. We don't need to pick a single creed to live by, but we deepen our understanding of film by being sensitive to as many as we can manage.
Homage to Mme. Edelhaus
Why are Americans polarized between francophobia and francophilia? Some people mock the French for liking Jerry Lewis, when most French people probably don't even know who he is. Others think that France is the repository of world culture and represents the finest in writing about the arts, even though the Parisian intelligentsia can be pretentious and hermetic.
But we must face facts. When it comes to cinephilia, the French have no equals. They grant film a respect that it wins nowhere else. Spend a year, or even a month, in Paris, and you will feel like a Renaissance prince. This is a city where one lonely screen can run tattered prints of One from the Heart and Hellzapoppin!, once a week, indefinitely.
My first trip was too brief, only a week in 1970, but my second one—four weeks of dissertation research in 1973—left me exhausted. Reading Pariscope on the way in from the airport, I learned about a Tex Avery festival. I checked into my hotel and Métro'd to the theatre, where I and a bunch of moms and kids gazed in rapture upon King-Size Canary. Another time, also coming in from the airport, Kristin and I passed a marquee for King Hu's Raining in the Mountain. Next stop, Raining in the Mountain. My memories of The Naked Spur, Ministry of Fear, Liebelei, Tati's Traffic, and Vertov's Stride Soviet! are inextricable from the Parisian venues in which I saw them.
Sound like a lament for days gone by? Nope. You can find the same variety on offer today. Of course the two monthlies, Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, have to take a lot of credit for this. Add Traffic, Cinéma, and several other ambitious journals, and you get a film culture unrivalled in the world.
Critics from Louis Delluc onward have led thousands of readers toward appreciating the seventh art. Historians like Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry, Laurent Mannoni, Francis Lacassin, and others have enlightened us for decades. Academic film analysis would not be what it is without Raymond Bellour, Noel Burch, Marie-Claire Ropars, Jacques Aumont, and a host of other scholars. Above all stands André Bazin, the greatest theorist-critic we have had.
And the books! Arts-and-sciences publishing receives government subsidies; the French understand that books contribute to the public good. There are plenty of worse ways to spend tax dollars (e.g., trumped-up military invasions). The French, like the Italians, have created an ardent translation culture too. If you can't read something in Russian or German, there's a good chance it's available in French.
I was reminded of the glories of Gallic film publishing when the mailman tottered to my door this week with twenty-two pounds worth of recent items I'd ordered. I haven't even read them yet; otherwise, they'd be filed with Book Reports. Instead I want to spend today's blog celebrating them as fruits of an ambition that has no counterpart in English-language publishing. All are grand and gorgeous and informative to boot.
Daniel Taillé, Léonce Perret Cinématographiste. Association Cinémathèque en Deux-Sèvres, 2006. 2.5 lbs.
A biographical study of a Gaumont director still too little known. Perret was second only to Feuillade at Gaumont, and he performed as a fine comedian as well. His shorts are charming, and his longer works, like L'enfant de Paris (1913), remain remarkable for their complex staging and cutting. After a thriving career in France, Perret came to make films in America, including Twin Pawns (1919), a lively Wilkie Collins adaptation. He returned to France and was directing up to his death in 1935.
Although the text seems a bit cut-and-paste, Taillé has included many lovely posters and letters, along with a detailed filmography, full endnotes, and a vast bibliography. It compares only to that deluxe career survey of the silent films of Raoul Walsh, published by Knopf. . . .Oh, wait, there's no such book. . . .Think there ever will be?
Il était une fois Walt Disney: Aux sources de l'art des studios Disney. Galéries nationales du Grand Palais, 2006. 4 lbs.
A luscious catalogue of an exposition tracing visual sources of Disney's animation. Illustrated with sketches, concept paintings, and character designs from the Disney archives, this volume shows how much the cartoon studio owed to painting traditions from the Middle Ages onward. It includes articles on the training schools that shaped the studio's look, on European sources of Disney's style and iconography, on architecture, on relations with Dalí, and on appropriations by Pop Artists. There's also a filmography and a valuable biographical dictionary of studio animators.
Some of the affinities seem far-fetched, but after Neil Gabler's unadventurous biography, a little stretching is welcome. This exhibition (headed to Montreal next month) answers my hopes for serious treatment of the pictorial ambitions of the world's most powerful cartoon factory. The catalogue is about to appear in English–from a German publisher.
Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas. Orson Welles au travail. Cahiers du cinéma, 2006. 4 lbs.
The authors of a lengthy study of Citizen Kane now take us through the production process of each of Welles' works. They have stuffed their book with script excerpts, storyboards, charts, timelines, and uncommon production stills.
The text, on my cursory sampling, will seem largely familiar to Welles aficionados; the frames from the actual films betray their DVD origins; and I would like to have seen more depth on certain stylistic matters. (The authors' account of the pre-Kane Hollywood style, for instance, is oversimplified.) Yet the sheer luxury of the presentation overwhelms my reservations. A colossal filmmaker, in several senses, deserves a colossal book like this.
Alain Bergala. Godard au travail: Les années 60. Cahiers du cinéma. 2006. 5 lbs.
In the same series as the Welles volume, even more imposing. If you want to know the shooting schedule for Alphaville or check the retake report for La Chinoise (these are eminently reasonable desires), here is the place to look. Detailed background on the production of every 1960s Godard movie, with many discussions of the creative choices at each stage. Once more, stunningly mounted, with lots of color to show off posters and production stills.
Anybody who thinks that Godard just made it up as he went along will be surprised to find a great degree of detailed planning. (After all, the guy is Swiss.) Yet the scripts leave plenty of room to wiggle. "The first shot of this sequence," begins one scene of the Contempt screenplay, "is also the last shot of the previous sequence." Soon we learn that "This sequence will last around 20-30 minutes. It's difficult to recount what happens exactly and chronologically."
Emrik Gouneau and Léonard Amara. Encyclopédie du cinéma du Hong Kong. Les Belles Lettres, 2006. 6.5 lbs.
The avoirdupois champ of my batch. The French were early admirers of modern Hong Kong cinema, but their reference works lagged behind those of Italy, Germany, and the US. (Most notable of the last is John Charles' Hong Kong Filmography, 1977-1997.) More recently the French have weighed in, literally. 2005 gave us Christophe Genet's Encyclopédie du cinéma d'arts martiaux, a substantial (2 lbs.) list of films and personalities, with plots, credits, and French release dates.
Newer and niftier, the Gouneau/ Amara volume covers much more than martial arts, and so it strikes my tabletop like a Shaolin monk's fist. There are lovely posters in color and plenty of photos of actors that help you identify recurring bit players. Yet this is more than a pretty coffee-table book. It offers genre analysis, history, critical commentary, biographical entries, surveys of music, comments on television production, and much more. It has abbreviated lists of terms and top box-office titles, as well as a surprisingly detailed chronology.
Above all—and worth the 62-euro price tag in itself—the volume provides a chronological list of all domestically made films released in the colony from 1913 to 2006! Running to over 200 big-format pages, the list enters films by their English titles and it indicates language (Mandarin, Cantonese, or other), release date, director, genre, and major stars. Until the Hong Kong Film Archive completes its vast filmography of local productions, this will remain indispensable for all researchers.
Mme. Edelhaus was my high school French teacher. A stout lady always in a black dress, she looked like the dowager at the piano during the danse macabre of Rules of the Game. She was mysterious. She occasionally let slip what it was like to live under Nazi occupation, telling us how German soldiers seeded parks and playgrounds with explosives before they left Paris. When I asked her what avant-garde meant, she replied that it was the artistic force that led into unknown regions and invited others to follow–pause–"in the unlikely event that they will choose to do so."
For three years Mme. Edelhaus suffered my execrable pronunciation. When I tried to make light of my bungling, she would ask, "Dah-veed, why must you always play the fool?"
I suppose I'm still at it. But thanks largely to her I'm able to read these books as well as look at them. She opened a path that's still providing me vistas onto the splendors of cinema.


text:
1day until Winter Camp
Historic Trails Award - San Antonio Missions -Sept 25-26, 2004
2004 Goshen Scout Reservation
2004 Twin Valley District Camporee (Theme Scouting Renaissance)
2003 National Camping Award
2003 Camp Parsons' Awards
O/A Camp Participation Award
Awarded to Troops who have at least 60 percent of their Scouts attend Boy Scout Summer Camp together.
2003 Camp Parsons Brinnon, WA. Chief Seattle Council
2003 Tomahawk District Camporee (Theme: Leave No Trace)
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Madame Defarge
|This article does not cite any references or sources. (December 2010)
Madame Thérèse Defarge is a fictional character in the book A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. She is a tricoteuse, a tireless worker for the French Revolution, and the wife of Ernest Defarge.
She is arguably the main villain of the novel, obsessed with revenge against the Evrémondes. She ruthlessly seeks revenge against the Evrémondes, including Charles Darnay, his wife Lucie Manette and their child, for crimes a prior generation of the Evrémonde family had committed. These crimes include the deaths of her sister, brother, and father. She refuses to accept the reality that Charles Darnay's father changed his ways by intending to renounce his title to the lands to give them to the peasants who worked on them, and his son Charles renounces his title to the lands, however Charles' arrogant and snobbish uncle becomes the Marquis St. Evrémonde, and his arrogance and cause of the death of an innocent child makes him hated, and helps legitimize Defarge's rage.
Defarge symbolizes several themes. She represents one aspect of the Fates. The Moirai (the Fates as represented in Greek mythology) used yarn to measure out the life of a man, and cut it to end it; Defarge knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Defarge also symbolizes the nature of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution in which radical Jacobins engaged in mass political persecution of all real or supposed enemies of the Revolution who were executed on grounds of sedition to the new republic through the guillotine, particularly targeting people with aristocratic heritage.
Cinematic and Theatrical Portrayals[edit]
In the 1935 film A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is played by Blanche Yurka.
In the 1958 film A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is played by Rosalie Crutchley.
In the 1980 TV movie A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is played by Billie Whitelaw.
In the 1981 Mel Brooks parody film, History of the World, Part I, Madame Defarge (played by Cloris Leachman) is the chief conspirator in the plot to overthrow King Louis XVI. She has become so poor, she has run out of wool, simply rubbing her knitting needles together.
In the 2008 Broadway musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is played by Natalie Toro.
|This article about a character from a novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.