Tài liệu miễn phí Sân khấu điện ảnh
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For about the first ten years of its existence, cinema in the United
States and elsewhere was mainly a trick and a gadget. Before 1896 the
coin-operated Kinematograph of Edison was present at many fairs and in
many entertainment venues. Spectators had to throw a coin in the
machine and peek through glasses to see the film. The first projections,
from 1896 onwards, attracted large audiences. Lumière had a group of
operators who travelled around the world with the cinematograph, and
showed the pictures in theatres. After a few years, around 1900, films
became a part of the program in...
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The emergence of fixed cinemas coincided which a huge
growth phase in the business in general; film production increased
greatly, and film distribution developed into a special activity, often
managed by large film producers. However, until about 1914, besides the
cinemas, films also continued to be combined with live entertainment in
vaudeville and other theatres (Musser 1990; Allen 1980).
We can thus place the take-off of the cinema industry between
1905 and 1907. In these years it developed its own retail outlets and did
not depend exclusively on theatres and travelling showmen. From this
time onwards the business also came...
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During the interval in which time series overlap, the British and
French negative length was growing at roughly the same rates as the US
one, until 1914. That war year constitutes a great discontinuity, and from
then on European growth rates are different and far lower than US ones.
At the same time, the average film length increased considerably,
from eighty feet in 1897 to seven hundred feet in 1910 to three thousand
feet in 1920. As a result, the total released length, which is the best
indicator of production, increases more rapidly than the number released,
in...
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Representative audience surveys on early motion picture
audiences are lacking, and modern market research was not yet done by
the emerging movie companies (Bakker 2003). The only information
available is from the press and trade press and from company sources.
Before the era of fixed cinemas emerged, probably a dual audience
existed. At the high end was the upper middle class, who saw the first
shows of Lumière’s cinematograph probably in a legitimate theatre, as a
special event, and later on between the live-acts in big-time vaudeville. At
the other end, a more mixed social cross-section of local communities
came...
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In the US, once the Nickelodeons had emerged between 1905 and
1907, their audience seems to have been mixed. Women and children
probably constituted about half of the audiences and they might even
have been the majority of visitors. Richard Abel relates, for example, that
in New York, women often went with their children to the Nickelodeon
after or during shopping, as these venues were handily located in the
shopping districts (Abel 1999: 48). A substantial difference between
cinema and many other entertainments was that cinema was consumed
by members of both sexes, while football, other sports, drinking and
music...
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The price of cinema was probably an important factor for the kind of
audience it interested. Before the Nickelodeon prices varied, from a dollar
or more for the first special Lumière events, to a few cents to fifty cents
for a travelling showman (Musser 1990: 299). But in general, the market
was in too turbulent a condition to put a reliable average price on motion
picture watching. This even harder because they were often part of live
entertainment.
The prices the Nickelodeon charged were between five and ten
cents, which often enabled the spectator to stay...
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In the short-run, however, substantial differences existed. During
the First World War entertainment expenditure moved in opposite
directions in France and Britain and remained stable in the US. During the
great depression US real entertainment expenditure shrunk substantially,
while European levels remained stable. The French expenditure level was
substantially lower than in the other two countries, about a fifth in 1938
using exchange rates, although the difference is difficult to quantify
because of devaluation of the franc and purchasing power parity issues.
French expenditure also fluctuated more in the short term. ...
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Most fundamentally, the term Hollywood refers to three interrelated
aspects of American cinema: the industrial, the institutional, and the
formal-aesthetic. As an industry, Hollywood is a vast, integrated com-
mercial enterprise with specific business practices and standard operat-
ing procedures geared primarily to producing and distributing
feature-length films (“Hollywood movies”). The film industry, like most
capital-intensive entertainment and media enterprises, has always tended
toward an oligopoly structure—that is, a system whereby a few compa-
nies control a particular industry. This invokes the institutional aspect,
in that the film industry has been dominated from the outset by a hand-
ful of movie studios—Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros.—many of which
still operate and still...
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The studios adapted and survived, and
since the 1970s, they have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence and have
reasserted their collective control of the so-called New Hollywood.
Now the studios’ film divisions produce far more than simply feature
films, however, and the studios themselves are all subsidiaries of massive,
transnational multimedia conglomerates such as Sony, Viacom, News
Corp, and TimeWarner. But even as subsidiaries, the studios represent the
“core assets” of these media conglomerates due to the enormous popu-
larity of Hollywood movies in the global entertainment marketplace....
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The widespread appeal of Hollywood movies is due not only to
the studios’ economic power and marketing prowess but also to the
formal-aesthetic qualities of the films themselves. This third aspect
of the term Hollywood has changed somewhat less than the industrial
and institutional aspects, in that the cinematic style and narrative struc-
ture of Hollywood movies have persisted over the decades, despite the
obvious need for novelty and innovation. In other words, what we call
a “Hollywood movie” is much the same artifact today as it was in the
late teens and early 1920s. Recent changes in Hollywood’s industrial
and institutional operations threaten this formal-aesthetic stability,
however, due to...
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But another crucial aspect of the New Hollywood, and one that may
help maintain the formal-aesthetic integrity of its movies, is the parallel
development of independent films and filmmaking. Throughout the
1980s and 1990s, the studios’ blockbuster mentality has been offset
by an unprecedented “indie boom.” Consequently, the film industry
has been increasingly split between big-budget, franchise-spawning,
global-marketed blockbusters and low-budget “specialty films”
designed for carefully targeted niche markets. Although these so-called
independent films generally are produced outside the direct control
of the Hollywood studios, the studios often provide financing and
distribution. Thus, most indie films are scarcely independent of the
Hollywood system. And in terms of style and content, independent
films...
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As the entertainment industry has become an increasingly global
enterprise in recent years, Hollywood continues to occupy the central
role in the production and commercialization of culture. Just as classi-
cal Hollywood’s domination of the movie industry a half-century ago
induced critic Gilbert Seldes (1978) to say that “the movies come from
America,” so might one argue today that “entertainment comes from
America”—and, more specifically, from Hollywood. And when one
considers the widespread appeal of Hollywood movies and thus the col-
onization of cultural consciousness on a global scale, it is worth noting
that the term Hollywood becomes increasingly conflated with the
notion of “Americanization” (Seldes, 1978)....
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As even these preliminary comments should indicate, Hollywood has
experienced a rich and dynamic history. The aim of this chapter is to
chart that history in more detail and also to trace the efforts of film crit-
ics and scholars to make sense of it. Journalistic film criticism dates
back to Hollywood’s earliest years, and the film industry always has
been subject to heavy coverage in both the trade and popular press. But
the systematic scholarly study of Hollywood did not really take hold,
interestingly enough, until after Hollywood’s postwar collapse. Not
until the studio system and classical era were pronounced dead, in other
words, were scholars and academics...
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Experience transmitted by media is sometimes a functional equivalent for
experience gained in the real world. American movies have influenced the
image of legal procedure a great deal – and not just in the United States of
America. An English legal expert told us about seeing a young barrister try to
proceed before an English court in a manner that is possible only in the United
States. A Spanish anthropologist who had filmed legal procedures in
California carried her camera into a Spanish courtroom and was shocked to
discover that everything was done differently from how it was done in the
United States. German defendants and lay assessors...
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The effect of movies on the appearance of children as witnesses in German
courts is particularly noticeable. Children, juveniles, and adults were asked by
Petra Wolf what they knew about courts.
The source of information they
most often mentioned was movies, especially American crime movies and
courtroom dramas. A group of psychologists from Kiel who published a book
for the preparation of children as witnesses found out that, even after seeing
pictures of a German courtroom, children still believed that the judge would
have a gavel or at least wear a wig.
3
In the new edition, the authors explain to
children that there will be no gavel or wig, both...
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Addiction and recovery have been topics of Hollywood films
and movies of the week and are increasingly integrated into
mainstream television shows through the inclusion of addicted
characters. Now the producers of reality shows have entered
the field with the new American television show Intervention,
on the A&E channel. Intervention follows addicts (broadly
defined to include substance abuse, as well as shopping and
other addictive behaviors) through the progression of their
addiction, and then confronts them with a choice between
treatment or expulsion from the lives of their loved ones....
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Although there are myriad possible moral and clinical
objections to such a show. Intervention seems to be the next
step in a growing wave of media products using addiction and
recovery as plot devices. Several recent American television
shows, such as The Sopranos, Dawson's Creek, and Law and
Order, include central characters seeking recovery from
substance abuse through clinical treatment and support groups.
Although new to the small screen, such television story lines
tap into a narrative about institutional treatment that has been
developing in Hollywood for the past several decades....
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Addiction has appeared on the movie screen since Edison's
earliest films (Starks, 1982); however, the now familiar
images of modem institutional treatment did not appear until
the late 1980s. After a decade of American cultural backlash
against addicts and drug treatment during the years of the
Reagan administration, public opinion seemed to shift
throughout the 1990s toward encouraging people with
substance-abuse problems to get help (White, 1998). Since
that time, Hollywood has released several works with
narratives focused on institutional treatment of addiction....
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Through their representations of addicts, substance abuse,
treatment centers and the experience of recovery, these films
help construct for their audiences a common cultural
understanding of addiction. They can be viewed as a
discourse in a Foucaultian sense—creating meaning and
marking off the boundaries of how filmgoers should view and
understand treatment.
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The representation of drug treatment in America can affect
society in several ways, including stigmatization. Elizabeth
Hirschman (1992), in her study of cocaine use in films, argues
that motion pictures which focus upon addiction can serve as
instructive, semiotically-rich texts for communicating cultural
knowledge about addiction (p. 428). This communication is
not simply one-way, though; it exists as a continual feedback
loop, with movies both reflect[ing] and shape[ing] individual
and societal values, attitudes, and behavior (Wedding, 2000,
p. 3). Thus representations from cinema can become received
knowledge, which is incorporated into societal views. These
shifts may then be mirrored and reinforced in subsequent
movies. Obviously, films are no magic bullet with the...
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Films can speak to society as a whole, but they can also be
instructive for individual groups. Previous research found that
movies featuring substance abuse provide a strong point of
identification for addicts (Hirschman & McGriff, 1995;
Lalander, 2002). Films are part of a learning process about
addiction, and the movie screen might be one of the few
places where addicts can see their filmic counterparts
receiving help.
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This study compares the depicted reality the films present to
audiences with previous addiction cinema and with real-world
economic and cultural conditions. Since films privilege certain
viewpoints through representational strategies and by leaving
out alternatives, I also examine the ideologies of the films and
issues of textual silence. The study offers a critique of these
issues in the spirit of other well-known ideological film
studies, such as Ryan and Kellner's (1988) Camera Politica....
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After researching literature on addiction and film,
I chose the films for the study and viewed each one many
times, specifically looking for socioeconomic representations
of characters, treatment of different races, sexes, and sexual
preferences, methods of production as they relate to addicted
characters and drug usage, and the depiction of treatment/
self-help groups. I then outlined the narrative of each film
and compared the uses and meanings brought to addicts,
addiction, and substances. I found that these movies construct
a fairly unified image of treatment. In the films, 12-step-
based substance abuse treatment is readily available to
middle-class, non-minority addicts. The economic realities of
treatment are ignored, as are alternative paths...
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Popular American films penetrate nearly every aspect of contemporaryWestern life, and to
an only somewhat lesser degreemost all cultures of the world. Historically, there are powerful
sociological, cultural, economic, and even political reasons for this, but we would also argue
thatHollywood-style filmhas evolved so that filmmakers havemore control over the attention
of filmgoers (Smith 2006) and, in essence, the humanmind. One source of evidence concerns
the changing pattern of shot lengths. These patterns have incrementally approached the
fluctuations of human attention as demonstrated in the laboratory (Cutting et al 2010; Gilden
2001). That is, human attention over time, as revealed by a series of reaction times (RTs)...
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Nonetheless, film did not start out well meshed with human perceptual and cognitive
systems. Instead, it has evolved slowly over the last 120 years. Early in the 20th century,
frame presentation rates were increased to make the flicker of the successive images less
aversive. At the same time cuts, dissolves, and fades were used to denote shots within the
same scene, across scenes, and across larger filmsegments (acts), respectively. But later the
use of dissolves and fades as visual cues to filmstructure was found to be largely unnecessary.
Since the 1970s almost 99% of all transitions between shots in popular film are now cuts
(Cutting et al...
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Given all these changes, we think itmakes sense to speak of an evolution for Hollywood
film, one that increasingly makes presentational aspects of film either closer to what we
perceive in the natural world (color, surrounding sound, enlarged images, etc) or aspects that
capitalize on what has been discovered to be perceptually and cognitively acceptable (cuts,
shot-reverse-shot composition and point-of-view editing, the optics of cameramovements
without feedback fromeyemovements, etc). This evolution would also appear to reflect a
goal of Hollywood filmmakers: to increase their control over viewers’ attention, and possibly
to increase viewer engagement. If true, some long-termresults of filmmakers’ explorations
exercising this control should be found in...
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In this article we track four such trends over time. First, and following filmscholars (eg,
Bordwell 2006; Bordwell and Thompson 2004; Salt 2006; 2009), we measure the average shot
lengths of films and find that the changes seen in our filmsample are consistent with what
they have reported. Second, we review and add to the data of Cutting et al (2011b) on the
increase in the amount of motion and movement in films. Third, we measure the motion
andmovement within shots of different lengths and find a reliable change in pattern. And
finally, we measure the luminance of each film. In all four cases we find...
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Previously, we (Cutting et al 2010; 2011a; 2011b) amassed 150 films for cinemetric analysis.
We chose ten films fromfifteen release years at five-year intervals from1935 to 2005. All were
English-language films, 139 were at least partlymade in the United States, and 124 were in
color. Films were selected from among those with the highest box-office gross for their given
year or, before these statistics were systematically kept (beginning in 1977), from among the
most rated films on the InternetMovie Database (http://www.imdb.com). They were also
selected to represent five genres—action films, adventure films, animations, comedies, and
dramas....
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Three physical measures of the 160 films are used in the analyses below, and one
interaction between them. First, the average shot lengths (ASLs) of each filmwere determined.
Segmenting films into shots has been a tedious and ongoing process, starting with the
measurements by Cutting et al (2010). Subsequently, each filmhas been gone over several
times by several individuals both with computer assistance and by hand. Although we
occasionally find additional transitions previously missed, we are confident that we have
found greater than 99% of themin each film....
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Second, the median amount of motion and movement is reported, as determined by
Cutting et al (2011b).Motion is the optical change created bymoving objects, people, and
shadows; movement is that change created by camera motion or gradual lens change (a
zoom; see Gibson 1954).We calculated their combination by correlating next-adjacent frames
along the length of each film—frames 1&3,2&4,3&5, . . . ,40377&40379, . . . , and so forth.We
avoided adjacent frames (eg, 1&2, 2&3) because a number of the DVDs we obtained for these
films were imperfectly digitized (the 24 frames/s rate in the analog filmwas not synchronized
to the sampling rate of the DVD), creating...
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