Film Studies Daily Log

Monday, March 16

Students received the assignment sheet for the first Outside Viewing assignment, due Friday, March 27, and borrowed films to analyze. The assignment is to closely analyze a single scene from the film, explaining how it uses techniques such as camera movement, lighting, film editing, mise en scene, pictorial composition and sound editing to express atheme or create an effect.

Students then took notes while Mr. Potratz lectured on how Birth of a Nation influenced (A) American history and (B) the subsequent development of film and especially Sergei Eisenstein and other early Russian (Soviet) filmmakers. We reviewed what we learned from The Cutting Edge about Soviet Montage, Kuleshov's famous experiment, and the like. We also looked at several of the photomontage stills of the German artist John Heartfield.

Students received a handout with an excerpt from Eisenstein's essay "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Today," and we read the very beginning of it together.

HW due Wednesday:
Read the Eisenstein handout and come to class prepared to answer questions about it.
Also, begin work on the outside viewing essay.