Bestimmtheit in Short Film :: Movies History Time D.W. Griffith Papers

Bestimmtheit in Short FilmShort drive has been around for longer than many of us think. The very commencement photographic films make in the early 1910s were not feature-length by any stretch of the imagination, and never much than 15 minutes long. D. W. Griffith, well-known for experimentation in filming, was the premier director to venture into films longer than 15 minutes. These first films were short films (or con), these pioneer directors experimenting with what they could or could not do with a moving camera. premature shorts involved filming people boarding a train, or some similar mundane act. People reacted to this, and flocked to watch these movies, simply because of the transition of watching reflections, instead of shadows, on screen. But as the audience got more sophisticated, filmmakers began to see the need to innovate. In the 1920s, experiments in surrealism occurred, with people, such as Salvadore Dali, dabbling in the new art of filmmaking (Cooper, ii). Des pite great advances made in the firmament of technological expertise and film technique, short films of today still capture from the same limitation that their predecessors had time. For a single narrative to be smashed within 15 minutes, the director and scriptwriter have to be sure that every(prenominal) single object within the mise-en-scne is of absolute relevance, thus maximise the use of screen-time (also known as story-time, or histoire).This essay uses a contemporaneous short film and an 18th century text to discuss Chatmans awe of bestimmtheit in films. I hope to address certain concerns such as the extent to which a film can specify a bad-tempered object and what this specification does with regards to our understanding of the text. In addition, I depart doctor the compression of information into imagery to the limitations of time, given that a short film has a limit of 15 minutes. To do this, I shall analyse the cinematography of the short film, and show how rel evant they are in bringing out(a) certain scenarios described in Defoes text. The short film in school principal is The Periwig-Maker, a clay-animated film directed by Stephen Schaeffler and narrated by actor Kenneth Brannagh, and it will be analysed with relation to the text it is based on, A Journal of the molest Year by Daniel Defoe.To clarify certain misconceptions regarding the origin of The Periwig-Maker, let me first add a disclaimer. Stephen Schaeffler had based the events that