ENTRY #2

Firts Lecture. Week 1, part 1 of 5.

In the first lecture the teacher explained some basic terms that he pointed out as basics to start this course and sketch a few aspects in which we are going to work through the course. First of all, he said language was a way of doing things, shared by filmmakers and audiences; in this respect he clarified he was just referring only to Hollywood by that he meant he was talking about the American Film Industry. Then he highlighted that Hollywood was focused on telling stories that emotionally involved audience with the main objective of getting money. Not by showing a stoning picture or by demonstrating the abstract qualities of cinema, but by giving the audience a very personal but at the same tame communal experience of identification with the story and the characters. In this regard he pointed out that we were going to study the mechanisms of making films that we could "feel". The third concept he illustrated was Film Style, as the way images and color were used in films. After that he elucidated Classical Hollywood Cinema, a very general style that filmmakers engaged with between 1917 and 1960. This cinema followed some similar stylistic rules, they skipped over time in between scenes, and the story was about heroes overcoming obstacles to reach their goal. Although there is a style of everything, there exists something called The Style of a Filmmaker, the unique creation of a distinctive world. In addition he mentioned the relation between Storytelling and the viewers’ part in this respect completing the story from its own perspective. Finally, he refers to the two units that divided the class, sound and color as elements that constituted new tools that served to move audiences meanwhile they produced new challenges. 

Some of the aims of the class are:

- To understand why specific choices were made by certain filmmakers

- Whether technology can help moving audiences

- Distinguish the continuities and changes in film art and viewer experiences in the transitions from no sound/no color to sound and color.