Film as Literature Flashcards
Grade 12 · English · Flashcards
Essential cinematic terms, landmark films, directors, and analytical concepts for studying film through a literary lens.
Flashcards
- Mise-en-scène
- All visual elements within the frame: set design, lighting, costume, actor positioning, and props—the director's equivalent of a novelist's descriptive prose.
- Montage (Eisenstein)
- Soviet editing theory: juxtaposing two shots creates meaning beyond either shot alone; the collision of images produces intellectual or emotional concepts.
- Cinematography
- The craft of camera composition, movement, and shot selection; includes shot size (close-up to extreme wide), angle (high/low/Dutch), and movement (pan/tilt/dolly/handheld).
- Diegetic vs. Non-diegetic Sound
- Diegetic: sounds characters can hear (dialogue, ambient sound). Non-diegetic: sounds only the audience hears (film score, narration)—functions like authorial voice.
- Auteur Theory
- The director as primary creative author whose personal style and thematic preoccupations define a film, analogous to how a novelist's voice unifies their body of work.
- Deep Focus
- Cinematographic technique (associated with Gregg Toland and *Citizen Kane*) keeping foreground and background simultaneously sharp, enabling complex visual storytelling within a single shot.
- The Rashomon Effect
- Named after Kurosawa's 1950 film; describes irreconcilably subjective witness accounts of the same event—now used in psychology, law, and narrative theory.
- Visual Metaphor
- A recurring image or object in film carrying symbolic meaning; e.g., the green light in *The Great Gatsby* (film and novel) or Rosebud in *Citizen Kane*.
- Film Noir
- 1940s-50s Hollywood style characterized by low-key chiaroscuro lighting, moral ambiguity, cynical worldview, and femme fatales; literary roots in hard-boiled fiction.
- Close-Up Shot
- A shot tightly framing a face or object; conveys intimacy, emotion, or significance—the cinematic equivalent of a prose close-up on interiority or a metaphorically charged detail.
- Citizen Kane (1941)
- Orson Welles's debut; considered the greatest film ever made by many critics; pioneered deep focus, non-linear flashback structure, and complex characterization.
- French New Wave
- Late 1950s-60s French cinema movement (Godard, Truffaut, Varda); broke classical conventions with jump cuts, handheld cameras, improvisation, and auteur-theory self-consciousness.
- Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
- Korean film exploring class inequality through genre-blending; first non-English film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture; analyzed for its spatial symbolism (basement/house/penthouse).
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