FST-3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Cinematic Techniques, Melodrama, Mimesis
Document Summary
Decorum (or use of a style that is appropriate to a subject, situation, speaker, and audience) Bound by rules that limit individual innovation (based upon traditional and long-established form or style of films) is characterized by formal unity. Purports to be realistic, strives to be comprehensible and unambiguous. End equilibrium (order is restored and loose ends are tied up) Three act structure is the most widely used technique to plan out and implement screenplays in narrative fiction. Act ii: confrontation (rising action, the stakes get higher) Act iii: resolution (crisis then falling action) During the primitive period, "films appealed to audiences primarily through simple comedy or melodrama, topical subjects, exotic scenery, trick effects, and the sheer novelty of photographed movement" (thompson, 1985, p. 157). The classical cinema resulted from a major shift to assumptions about the relation of spectator to film and the relation of a film"s form to its style" (thompson, 1985, p. 158).
