Dustin Johnson's Mid-Term Post

Title: Cinematography: A Language Without Words

Abstract:I am focusing on the little studied art of cinematography in critical studies. Any given film has a rich and complex text of its own that can be drawn upon by simply isolating the visuals. Cinematography is a complex semiotic language using such elements as color, grain, exposure, latitude, contrast, composition, shot angles, and depth of field to tell a story or create an emotion. This symbolism can come in the form of a specific motif in a given film, or can become a part of the conventions and iconography of a genre. Because cinematography has been so tied to ceaseless technical innovation from its beginnings, a given implementation of the visual language of cinematography may actually be tied to an era of technical development and experimentation.

First, I wish to expose and decode this language and its complexity to the student, lay-person, or even scholar not already willing to actually materialize the subconscious interpretations of the text on their own. Secondly, I wish to show how this encoded language appears throughout other media in specific relation to a given text. I plan to do so by choosing at least one film from within the last decade with significant use of the elements that I will define, and tracking both the influences that that film has had on films and other media since its release, as well as backtracking to as many of the influences on it as possible, back to the influences on its influences, and so forth.

One example could be the extremely unique style of Tony Scott's film, Man On Fire, as it is clearly influenced by the Director of Photography's experiments on the BMW film Beat the Devil which can be seen as an extension of the styles used in Swordfish and Gone in Sixty Seconds, which are arguably influenced by the type of standout cinematography seen in Traffic, which not surprisingly came shortly after Three Kings, one of the more notable uses of the now well known “skip bleach” process. After Man on Fire came works like Last King of Scotland, Jarhead, and even Babel that used similar styles, influenced likely by the most recent as well as that which influenced the most recent and so forth. The similarities in style will, in the actual project, be broken down into more specific elements, and definitive examples of each element being compared will be given as each connection is drawn.

The project will be pedagogical in that it teaches its users how to look at cinematography as a cultural art. The concept explores the layered effects of the influences on the subject film and the film's influences on other media, therefore is also multi-layered. The interface design will combine still photos (screen shots) with video clips, and with text as various means of exploring the concepts, therefore it is also comparative. The project is interactive to the extent that the user decides how he or she wishes to explore the multi-layered content through the interface. The project is visualization both in how it shows the material of the subject media, as well as visualizes the theories. In a straight forward way, the project is also annotation, as it combines images and moving images with textual explanations.I will probably do the entire project in Flash (a program in which I can call my self a fully competent designer, if not a programmer) and allow the user to navigate it.

Methodology:I am going to solve the scholar's conundrum of discussing cinematography as a critical and theoretical aspect of film. Often we study the cinematography of one film, or even of certain genres, but never in depth, and never are those concepts of cinematographic theory applied to the entire study of film. I hope to take cinematography from a film to film context into the broader context by connecting cinematography among different films, and perhaps even among other cultural products that relate such as advertising, commercials, print design, web design, music videos, book covers, etc. If this is going too far, it is enough for me to just bring out patterns and contexts among films for distinct styles of cinematography that are weakly discussed and defined as of yet. The use of an interactive multimedia platform like Flash will allow the user to explore at their own pace the information that I can present to them, and hopefully it will be in the order that makes the most sense to them and that best satisfies their curiosity.

Media Presentation and Justification:Because the terminology that exists to describe cinematographic theory is so limited and or so poorly known, using media to visualize and exemplify every part of the thesis will no doubt make possible what would otherwise be a tedious and confusing mixture of description and definition. So rather than writing a paper that would force the reader to look up information to figure out what the author is talking about, using a multimedia interface, the author can provide that information as he goes.