Film Studies Daily Log

Tuesday, October 27

We watched the opening of a "media awareness" video ("Reading Between the Frames") from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Entitled "Time is not what it seems," the segment discusses the distortion of time in film for emotional effect and uses a clip from The Fast and the Furious. We then compared that scene to the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin with its time distortions.

After that we discussed questions of realism (or illusionism) and propaganda in films ranging from Birth of a Nation to Potemkin to 300.