Film - CLEP Humanities

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane pioneered a variety of filmmaking approaches and techniques, marking it out as a landmark of cinema. In particular, Welles used overlapping dialogue, with characters talking over each other; a soundtrack of incidental and background noises; deep focus shots that placed entire shots of different depths completely into focus; and a story that unfolded in a nonlinear fashion, by using flashbacks, unreliable narrators, and contradictory facts.

Silent films, by their very nature, were unable to use dialogue or sound to convey information to the audience. While many actors were able to provide lots of content through pantomime and action, crucial elements would still be missed. Therefore, intertitles, screen shots of writing that gave dialogue or information, were used to flesh out the stories of silent films.

In 1927, Al Jolson, a notable vaudeville star, starred in a semi-autobiographical film called The Jazz Singer, which was most notable for Jolson turning to the camera and telling the audience, "You ain't heard nothing yet!" This was the first recorded sound to feature prominently in a movie. The Jazz Singer ushered in the era of talkies, and largely spelled the doom of silent films.

The Lumière brothers were Frenchmen who ran a family photographic business in Lyon, France at the end of the nineteenth century. They were some of the first people to figure out how to connect individual images to create moving pictures, and they essentially invented the modern process of filmmaking. Their first film, from 1895, was a forty-five-second reel depicting workers leaving their factory.

Walt Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was considered a folly while Disney was making it, as no one had made a full length animated feature before. Financed entirely on his own, and with considerable debt accrued, Disney's film was released under great suspicion. The film ended up being a success, with the Academy Awards giving seven small special Oscars to Disney for his film.

The Japanes director Akira Kurosawa became internationally famous for his samurai films, which were sweeping epics that reflected a wide range of philosophical issues. Many of his films were remade around the world in different genres. Most notable among these was the 1960 Western film The Magnificent Seven, by John Sturges, which followed a similar story to that of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

Alfred Hitchcock was a British director who began directing films in America in the late 1930s and became one of the most well known and popular filmakers in Hollywood for the next two decades. Among his works were Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and Vertigo. Raging Bull was a 1980 film directed by Martin Scorsese.

Sergio Leone was an Italian filmmaker who made his name by directing Westerns, which were originally called "Spaghetti Westerns" due to being made, performed, and produced by Italians. Leone eventually made Westerns in America, notable working with Clint Eastwood on the films A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More,and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Leone helped revitalize the Western as a genre and move it into the realm of modern cinema.

The film Birth of a Nation was a massive success, becoming the first film ever shown at the White House. However, its heroic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan and virulent depiction of African-Americans caused criticism to be launched at its director, D.W. Griffith. In response, Griffith's next film, Intolerance, told the story of five civilizations who were ruined by their various forms of intolerance.

The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini was one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, and his work proved highly influential around the world. Beginning in the Italian Neo-realist genre, Fellini began moving into a more surrealist and fantastical mode with his 1954 film La Strada. With 1960's La Dolce Vita, Fellini explored non-linear narrative, and with 1964's 8 1/2, Fellini began exploring dreams and fantasies in his work more explicitly.

The French New Wave was a label applied to a group of French filmmakers in the 1960s who all sought to create narrative ambiguity, a realistic shooting style, and modern stories. Among the New Wave directors were figures such as Éric Rohmer, André Bazin, François Truffaut, and Jean Luc Godard. One of their chief influences was the earlier filmmaker Jean Renoir.

The Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo, began their career in the vaudeville era, and translated their success there into Broadway success as zany comedians. As soon as sound entered pictures, the Marx Brothers started making films, which were among the first commercially successful comedies, including 1930's Animal Crackers, 1932's Horse Feathers, and 1933's Duck Soup.

Martin Scorsese is considered one of the key figures of the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s, which broke from the conventions of the studio system from the 1930s-1940s. Unlike his contemporaries, Scorsese's films, including Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Raging Bull, were usually set in his native New York, with characters similar to the Italian and Irish working class people he grew up around.

The Godfather, based on a book by Mario Puzo, was released to great acclaim in 1972, and propelled its director Francis Ford Coppola and its stars Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and Robert Duvall to fame. The Godfather films were all influential in moving the "gangster film" out of B-movie limbo into being considered a type of great film. The first two parts of the trilogy are considered among the greatest films of all time.

Luis Buñuel was a Spanish-born director who was an important early Surrealist painter and filmmaker. He had to leave Spain when Francisco Franco took control of the government in 1938. Buñuel eventually moved to Hollywood, and then to Mexico, and afterward, to France. In 1972, he made his most well-known and landmark film, Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie. Covering the attempts of upper-middle-class people trying to get dinner together, the surrealist film is one of the classic surrealist and inventive films.

Charlie Chaplin was perhaps the biggest star of the silent film era, writing, directing, and starring in films starring his character of "The Tramp." Featuring Chaplin's trademark bowler hat, cane, and toothbrush mustache, films like The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931) helped pioneer comedic tropes and gags in film. Chaplin adapted poorly to using sound in film and also had a controversial personal life which saw his star diminish in the 1930s.

The film Metropolis was a technical marvel upon its release in 1927, being the first full length science fiction film and featuring camera and set work that was inventive and new. The work was not a commercial success, however, as the film had a controversial take on big business. Later film scholars would celebrate Fritz Lang's masterpiece, but too late to save the costly film from being a commercial flop.

Billy Wilder was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1906, but had to flee the Nazis' rise in the early 1930s. Arriving in Hollywood in 1933, Wilder first gained note as a screenwriter, but had a hit with his third directorial effort, 1944's Double Indemnity. That film noir set a mark for Wilder in its success, but stylistically he took many chances, from 1950's sweeping drama Sunset Boulevard to the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959).

Jean-Luc Godard was the leading filmmaker of the French New Wave in the 1960s. His films like Breathless, from 1960, and Masculine, Feminine, from 1966, are simultaneously deeply imbued with politics and philosophy, while also being deep homages to his favorite filmmakers. Godard has been one of the most influential filmmakers from any country and in any genre.