As we head in to the second and third exercises of Understanding Cinema we will be asking some of our participants to act. Acting is an extraordinary thing. You pretend to be someone else, when it’s in fact clear that you are you and not that other person. You have to invite the audience to…
We constantly encounter a core sense of duality in films. Events, places, characters, entire storylines are both literal – in that they represent a representation of reality, of something that we are told is happening in a ‘real’ space and time- and metaphorical, in that they are simultaneously expressive, poetic, and play a role in…
A great video essay that touches upon the long take, but also points out the differences between a Hollywood made film and its original European version. As the final words state: “to ask ‘what is neorealism?’ is to ask, ‘what is cinema?’”
The history of the long take in documentary goes all the way back to the beginning of cinema. As we see in the first films from the Lumiere Brothers, all of early cinema involved the filming of ‘real life’. And for the most part, the scenes that were being filmed were shot using a whole…
The focus of this year’s Understanding Cinema project is ‘the long take’ and the long take is perfect for dance on film. By ‘dance on film’ I mean creating dance specifically for the camera rather than simply filming a performance of dance on a stage. I first became interested in dance on film when I…
Understanding Cinema 