How to Watch a Movie

 

Chapter 2 of Moving Pictures goes deeper into the mechanics behind the production of a movie. The main points within this chapter were Cinematic Language and also Explicit and Implicit meaning. These are the two that I will be focusing on mainly today. Before I start I wanted to state that I felt the title of the chapter was a little misleading, as the chapter only starts off with a short description of how to watch a movie. This only includes three steps and I feel like they were really basic, and the only thing that really stuck out from them were how scientific they got.

Anyways, I wanted to start off by talking a little bit about the cinematic language that is used during the production of a movie. One of the first and probably the most important terms is a shot. Shots are a capture of a take taken by a camera. This can either be short and take a couple of minutes or even last up to a couple of hours as a continuous shot. This all happens within a frame or otherwise known as the borders of a camera. All these terms fall within the film makers language known as cinematic language. In the chapter they say it is a set of rules used to communicate to the viewer. The other most important term within this chapter in my opinion was the visual lexicon. This is a culmination of a bunch of different visual effects that communicate to the viewer in order to give us a certain feel for the movie. Examples that film makers use are things such as low or high angle shots that can either make something look huge or miniature. There were many other examples of cinematic language that is used as a visual lexicon for us, but I wanted to mention one thing that stood out to me for this section. That is that we are technically not supposed to notice the visual lexicon at first. A good movie will create these effects and enhance the film without making you think about it. Which will probably make you want to rewatch the film in order to notice those details.

 The last thing I wanted to express about the chapter was the explicit and implicit part of this clip in particular. Kubrick's One-Point Perspective left me with a lot to talk about but I mainly want to mention the movie that stuck out to me when looking at all the clips included. "The Shining" had a lot of one point perspective clips within this video and I think that it had some of the most powerful examples of explicit and implicit meaning. Explicitly you can see the colorful and rustic details of the hotel that is used within the filming of the movie. But also it shows the ends of long corridors as the focus point of the shot, this gives you the idea that the hallway is longer than it actually is. This then brings me to the implicit meaning behind shots like this in his films. Focusing on "The Shining", whenever there was a long hallway shot I always felt a sense of uneasiness come over me. I felt uncertain about the characters going down that way. It suited the horror part of the film extremely well. It fully came into effect when the chase scenes started. It made it feel like the characters were endlessly running to their doom. It creates an anxiety level for the audience, questioning themselves "when will it end?" or "how will it end?". This is what I really enjoy about visual effects created by the camera, and this chapter was able to really explain that well.