Gordon Willis is an American Cinematographer born in 1931 in New York. He is often attributed as the most influential cinematographer in American filmmaking during the 1970s and 80s, mainly for his unprecedented lighting style and his vision with the long shot in film. His most notable works include The Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall, Manhattan, All the President's Men, and Zelig, among several others. Throughout his career he collaborated with well-known directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Alan Pakula, Woody Allen and Hal Ashby.
Willis, began his career in film working cameras for documentaries and commercials, a combination of self-teaching and learning from experience and peers on projects. In the 1970s, he received his first tasks with feature films. Willis himself expresses that his getting started on major features was mostly luck, but he “took advantage of that luck.” Willis outwardly supported the increased creative role of cinematographers in the collaborative art of filmmaking, an idea generally foreign to cinematography at the time. Willis maintains that the whole process is a collaboration; before even reading the script he prefers to discuss the film with the director if at all possible. Then, after reading over the script two or three times, he is able to begin visualising the film in his head. However, the true structure of the film cannot come together without input from the actors themselves and a relationship with the director. Willis believes in the “organic” feel of a movie, focusing less on sitting behind monitors and more with interacting directly with the other collaborators or relying too much on technology to control the direction of a film. Art is about visualising and then having the ability to exe...
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... throughout his career and served him well.
Surprisingly enough for the depth of his approach to cinematography, Willis proclaims himself to be a minimalist. A film is merely single shots put together, so take each shot one at a time, make each of them the best they can be, and then string the shots together; there is no reason to complicate the process, he says, and complexity is not favorable to simplicity in the filmmaking process. Beauty is defined by simplicity. The job of the cinematographer is not only to visualise the movie in his head shot by shot, but to visualise the effect of the shot on the story on screen and relay that vision to the director. Overall color of the film to describe the mood of the scene, shot length, and even the format the movie is shot on are all aspects Willis took into consideration with a skill perhaps unprecedented to this day.
That’s the very meaning of Griffith’s practicality, the formation of a filmic style that accompaniments to this very day, in many different ways. The changes and alterations, and that reflect the creator’s sureness that cinematic symbols, ...
...t have an ultimate goal to express something they care about on film. They must not only express this in their script, but carry through on it by directing, producing and pulling together many other aspects of the film by themselves. Three filmmakers that fit this description to a “t” are Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock. These three men all went out with the same goal: To express their views of life in extraordinary films. They all went above and beyond their call of duty and are now ranked among the top filmmakers of history, the rank of film auteurs.
In cinema, lighting, blocking and panning drastically influence what an audience will notice and take away from a scene. Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane has numerous examples of effectively using these aspects within mise-en-scène, cinematography and editing to portray the importance of specific events and items in the film. The scene where Kane writes and then publishes his “Declaration of Principles” (37:42-39:42) in the New York Daily Inquirer after buying them focuses on important elements of the film, aiding the audience by combining lighting, blocking and panning to define significant roles and objects that further the movie as a whole.
Beginning roughly with the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Bomb in 1964, and continuing for about the next decade, the “Sixties” era of filmmaking made many lasting impressions on the motion picture industry. Although editing and pacing styles varied greatly from Martin Scorcesse’s hyperactive pace, to Kubrick’s slow methodical pace, there were many uniform contributions made by some of the era’s seminal directors. In particular, the “Sixties” saw the return of the auteur, as people like Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick wrote and directed their own screenplays, while Woody Allen wrote, directed and starred in his own films. Kubrick, Coppola and Allen each experimented with characterization, narrative and editing techniques. By examining the major works of these important directors, their contributions become more apparent.
Auteurism is a very important aspect to analyzing film. When a director is an auteur, he not only has films that are easily recognized as his, but also he has left his mark on film history. Three important auteurs are Frederico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, and Alfred Hitchcock. All three of these directors have specific styles and recurring themes that they have made their trademark.
Bordwell David and Thompson, Kristen. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
John Ford was an American motion-picture director. Winner of four Academy Awards, and is known as one of America’s great film directors. He began his career in the film industry around 1913. According to Ellis, Ford’s style is evident in both the themes he is drawn toward and the visual treatment of those themes, in his direction of the camera and in what’s in front of it. Although he began his career in the silent film area and continued to work fruitfully for decades after the thirties, Ford reached creative maturity in the thirties. Ford, unlike other directors continued to do some of his finest work after the nineteen thirties. Nevertheless, he shaped his art into personal and full expression during those precedent-setting years. (Pg.200)
My grandfather has always talked about how much movies have changed in such a short amount of time. His favorite movie, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, is an example of how editing and special effects have changed drastically since only 1982 and even from the early 1900s. Watching a movie from this year compared to a movie from the 1930s, the viewer would notice many differences ranging from effects, transitions and especially quality. When film started in the late 1800s, there was no digital technology to edit films. There have been many contributors in the film industry that have helped evolve film to its digital age of today. Edwin Porter was the first person in film history to create a narrative film. Lev Kuleshov created a technique gives films certain moods to it and can affect a person’s emotions just by the way images are juxtaposed and edited together. Danny Boyle is an example of a modern day director that developed a set of guidelines that a director should reciprocate while filming. Film editing has revolutionized and developed so much since the early 1900s to now because of important contributors throughout its history that developed new technology and techniques.
...successful collaboration of sound, colour, camera positioning and lighting are instrumental in portraying these themes. The techniques used heighten the suspense, drama and mood of each scene and enhance the film in order to convey to the spectator the intended messages.
Think about your favorite movie. When watching that movie, was there anything about the style of the movie that makes it your favorite? Have you ever thought about why that movie is just so darn good? The answer is because of the the Auteur. An Auteur is the artists behind the movie. They have and individual style and control over all elements of production, which make their movies exclusively unique. If you could put a finger on who the director of a movie is without even seeing the whole film, then the person that made the movie is most likely an auteur director. They have a unique stamp on each of their movies. This essay will be covering Martin Scorsese, you will soon find out that he is one of the best auteur directors in the film industry. This paper will include, but is not limited to two of his movies, Good Fellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street. We will also cover the details on what makes Martin Scorsese's movies unique, such as the common themes, recurring motifs, and filming practices found in their work. Then on
Perhaps one of the greatest if not the greatest director/producer in American film history is Steven Allan Spielberg. Spielberg is a three-time Academy Award winner and is the highest grossing filmmaker of all time; his films having made nearly $8 billion internationally. As of 2006, Premiere listed him as the most powerful and influential figure in the motion picture industry. TIME magazine named him in the '100 Greatest People of the Century'. At the end of the 20th century LIFE named him the most influential person of his generation.
With many different genres and types of filmmaking, it can result in a large variety of stories and conflicts. Nevertheless, film has always brought people together as a society. If there is one thing everyone can notice about films is the achievement in style and directing. The three directors talked about in this paper are the most successful at delivering a breathtaking style and direction to their films. Baz Luhrmann, Wes Anderson, and Martin Scorsese have produced and directed films over decades and each film as impacted not only the United States but worldwide. With the unmistakable trademarks that each director has, it is very easy to feel sucked into the world in which they are shaping around you and the story. Because of these three directors, the film world and industry has been revolutionized for many centuries to come.
Through materialism, Kane became a self-invested individual. The highly acclaimed Citizen Kane creates drama and suspense for the viewer. Orson Welles designed this film to enhance the viewer’s opinion about light and darkness, staging, proxemics, personal theme development, and materialism. Creating one of the most astounding films in the cinematography world, Welles conveys many stylistic features as well as fundamentals of cinematography. It is an amazing film and will have an everlasting impact on the world of film.
Offering the unique ability to visually and audibly convey a story, films remain a cornerstone in modern society. Combined with a viewer’s desire to escape the everyday parameters of life, and the excitement of enthralling themselves deep into another world, many people enjoy what films stand to offer. With the rising popularity of films across the world, the amount of film makers increases every day. Many technological innovations mark the advancement of film making, but the essential process remains the same. Pre-production accounts for everything taken place before any shooting occurs, followed by the actual production of the film, post-production will then consist of piecing the film together, and finally the film must reach an audience. Each step of this process contributes to the final product, and does so in a unique right. The process of film making will now start chronologically, stemming from the idea of the story, producing that story into a film, editing that footage together, and finally delivering that story to its viewers.
David Wark Griffith revolutionized both the film industry and filmmaking itself and is undoubtedly the “single most important individual in the development of film as an art” (Drew). He built the film industry up from the ground, “reshaped the very language of film”(Drew), and shook the country with his film The Birth of a Nation which fueled the rise of one of the largest and most influential domestic terrorist organizations ever (Niderost). D.W. Griffith and his films have transformed the way films are made and have greatly impacted the film industry not only in the United States but throughout the world.