Glossary
180-degree rule From one cut to another, the camera may not cross an imaginary line drawn behind the characters.
90-degree rule The camera may never be placed 90 degrees facing the subject, but rather set off the center to give an illusion of depth.
actualités Events filmed as they were happening, events that would be happening even if the camera weren’t there.
ambient sound See room tone and world tone below: the sound added to a sequence to provide aural atmosphere.
anamorphic process The camera lens “squeezes” an image onto the film. When unsqueezed by the projector lens, the ratio of the image is 1:2.35. Panavision was the most common proprietary anamorphic process.
aspect ratio The relationship of screen width to height. There are four ratios. “Standard” ratio existed from the early 1930s through the early 1950s and is 1:1.3. Two wide-screen ratios are 1:1.6 and 1:1.85. Anamorphic wide screen (CinemaScope, Panavision) is 1:2.35.
aura Critic Walter Benjamin’s term for the uniqueness of a work of art which is lost when, as in film, it is mechanically reproduced.
auteur Originally French but now a universal term for the film director who realizes a personal style in his or her films.
auteur theory This analyzes film based on the idea that the director is the creative force.
automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) A method, largely digital, of dubbing in dialogue after the film is completed. See also looping.
avant-garde Often used to explain works of artists that are personal, experimental, and not aimed at a wide audience.
backlighting Lights behind the characters that set them off from the background.
back story Filling out the plot with a related story or action; filling in a character’s background.
bandwidth This measures the amount of information or data that flows across the Internet.
Bollywood Loosely applied to the vast number of films produced yearly, mainly in Mumbai, featuring extravagant production numbers, but also serious drama.
captivity narrative One of the major dominant fictions of the United States, expressing its fear of being dominated. Articulated in film, it is realized by showing women in distress, held by vicious men, and in need of rescue by a strong hero.
CGI (computer-generated imagery) The variety of backgrounds, foregrounds, digital animations, and effects created on the computer and transferred to film.
chiaroscuro A term from art history that refers to the use of deep shadow in the mise-en-scène.
CinemaScope Developed in 1926, introduced by 20th Century Fox in 1953, one of the first modern anamorphic processes that squeezed a wide image onto 35-mm film, which was then unsqueezed by the projector to a ratio of 1:2.35.
cinéma vérité A version of documentary developed by the French in the late 1950s and 1960s that attempted to capture the ongoingness of everyday life without narration.
cinematographer See director of photography.
Cinerama A wide-screen process that originally used three cameras to capture the enormous width of the image on a curved screen, with a ratio of 1:2.65.
classical Hollywood style or classical narrative style The classical Hollywood or narrative style refers to a complex collection of formal and thematic elements that became basic to Hollywood filmmaking by the early 1920s. Continuity cutting—including shot/reverse shot and over-theshoulder cutting—the 180-degree rule, happy endings, psychologically motivated characters, villains getting punished, women becoming wives and mothers are all associated with the classical Hollywood style. The continuity style or cutting is a subset of the classical Hollywood style.
close-up The actor’s face or an object fills the screen. Also, medium close-up, where the actor is seen from the shoulders up.
coding Conventions that telegraph a lot of information economically, as in older films where the way a coffee cup was held or a cigarette smoked told the audience much about a character. A storm or the dying embers of a fireplace might indicate sexual intercourse.
compilation film A film made by editing footage from other films.
composition The arrangement of characters and surroundings within the boundaries of the screen frame.
continuity style/continuity editing Smooth, seamless editing that links shots so that the cuts appear invisible to the viewer.
coverage Filming enough variations of a scene to allow the editor to put it together with perfect continuity.
crane An apparatus that can lift the camera into the air and is therefore responsible for a crane shot.
cross cutting Editing shots that represent different places, to give the illusion of simultaneity. Also called parallel editing.
cross tracking A variation of shot/reverse shot in which what a character in motion sees is also shown in motion. Often used by Alfred Hitchcock.
cultural studies A wide-ranging critical approach to works of imagination that examines them in light of the cultures they are part of and that create them.
culture The sum total of the intricate ways in which we relate to ourselves, our peers, our community, our country, world, and universe.
cut Another word for edit, indicating the cutting and splicing together of two shots.
deep focus In deep-focus cinematography, all objects from front to rear of the composition are in sharp focus.
digital colorist He or she works with the director and cinematographer to achieve the desired colors on the digital intermediate.
digital intermediate Film is turned into digital files for color correction and editing.
direct cut One shot follows another without any optical transition like a dissolve.
director The individual responsible for translating the script to screen. The director can be the driving imaginative force of the film. See auteur.
director of photography or cinematographer Working with a film’s director, the cinematographer lights the scene, chooses the appropriate lenses and film stock, and therefore carries a large responsibility for determining the look of a film.
dissolve One shot fades out and another fades in. Usually the two occur simultaneously and we see one shot fading out as the other fades in. In this case we have lap dissolve.
docudrama A film that mixes historical truth with a fictional narrative.
documentary A film that records actual events, often creating dramatic impact through editing.
dolly An apparatus that holds the camera but can, itself, move in, out, or from side to side. A dolly-in or dolly-out refers to a movement toward or away from a figure.
dominant fiction The templates or blueprints of the stories a culture wants to hear about itself and that partake of the ideological structure of the culture. They are made concrete in the various genres of film.
edit The cutting of a piece of film or the joining together of two pieces of film.
editing The process of cutting film footage and assembling the pieces into an expressive, narrative structure.
editor The person who assembles the shots of a film into its final shape.
establishing shot Before a cutting pattern can begin, there must be a shot that establishes the whole space. Examples of establishing shots are the initial two-shot of characters in a dialogue sequence, or the image of an entire roomful of people, or of the city in which the film takes place.
eye line match Continuity editing dictates that, if a character is looking in a certain direction in one shot, she should be looking in the same direction in the following shot. This is crucial in the over-the-shoulder pattern, where the characters must seem to be looking at one another (even if both actors are not physically present at the same time when the shots are made).
fill lighting Lights that fill in the scene, creating accents, removing or adding shadow.
film noir A genre of film developed in the 1940s. Noir has a literary heritage in the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and the novels of James M. Cain. Its cinematic lineage is German Expressionism, French poetic realism, and Welles’s Citizen Kane. It is marked by a mise-en-scène of heavy shadow and narratives of weak men destroyed by predatory women.
final cut The version of the film released for distribution.
flashback When we see something a character remembers.
flat wide screen A non-anamorphic process in which the film is matted top and bottom to create the illusion of wide screen, usually 1:1.66 or 1:1.88.
flow A notion developed by the British cultural scholar Raymond Williams to define the ways in which disparate and incoherent elements, commercials, promotions, and the shows themselves move together seamlessly on television.
foley Foley design and the foley artist create the sound effects of a film. The name comes from a sound effects pioneer, Jack Foley.
frame The borders of the screen that, along with the composition of the shot, determine the limits of what we see. A single image on an actual strip of film is referred to as the frame.
Frankfurt school Short for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded in Germany in 1924, devoted in particular to the study of popular culture and its productions.
French New Wave A group of young film critics who turned to filmmaking in the late 1950s and changed the language of cinema. Among the group were François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette.
genre A “kind” of story or narrative, made up of character types, plot lines, and settings common to all its members. Science fiction films and Westerns are genres, for example.
German Expressionism An artistic movement in film, painting, and theater in post-World War I Germany, where the mise-en-scène expressed the exaggerated, agitated psychological state of the characters. Now it is used to refer to a mise-en-scène that is dark, distorted, and menacing.
green screen Characters are photographed against a green screen; the background is photographed or digitally rendered separately. The two (or more) parts are then joined digitally or photographically as the green background is dropped out to create the illusion of a complete image.
high-key lighting This creates a bright, evenly lit scene.
image track As opposed to the soundtrack, the series of images that contain the film’s visual content.
intertextuality The way in which texts are interwoven or refer to each other in film, music, and the other arts. “Sampling” in rap is a kind of intertextuality.
iris shot Shrinking or expanding the frame by a dynamic, circular black mask. Mostly used in the silent period.
jump cut The result of editing out unnecessary transitions so that continuity is replaced by rapid changes in space.
key light The main overhead light that lights faces and is reflected in the eyes.
location A place filmed outside the studio—such as a city street, the desert, an actual house or apartment.
logline A very short summary of the filmscript.
long take In an average film, shots last six to nine seconds. A long take may last sixty seconds or more and contain rich narrative and visual information.
looping An older term meaning the post-dubbing of dialogue. A section of film was looped over and over again to allow the actors to synchronize their voice to the lip movements in the shot.
master shot The entire scene shot without cutting.
matte painting A detailed, photo-realistic painting of a background over which images of characters in the film are placed.
matte shot A method of shooting characters against a painted or colored—usually blue or green— backdrop. Then, other elements are added to the shot. If a blue or green screen is used, these elements replace the colored background.
mediation All of the events—visual, political, personal, conventional, cultural—that stand between ourselves and the world. We, in fact, do not know the world directly. Every perception is mediated.
medium close-up A character is shown from the shoulders up.
medium shot A character is shown from the waist up.
melodrama With comedy, this is the major genre of film, providing large arcs of emotion, often spilling into the music and mise-en-scène, and ending with the death of a beloved character or a closure in redemption.
mise-en-scène The use of space within the frame: the placement of actors and props, the relationship of the camera to the space in front of it, camera movement, the use of color or black and white, lighting, the size of the screen frame itself.
mismatched cut The shots on either side of the cut don’t match—the movement may be out of sync, the characters may be in the wrong place, etc.
montage A style of editing that juxtaposes shots to build dramatic tension. Sergei Eisenstein used montage as the basic structure of his films.
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) One of the most powerful political lobbyists, it is also responsible for the various ratings—NC17, PG, R, etc.—that are intended to tell audiences what kind of sexual or violent content a film has.
moviola For many years the standard machine for editing, now largely replaced by digital editing.
music cue The short pieces of music written for specific sequences.
narrative The construction of a film’s story, the way in which a story is told by the film.
neorealism Developed by Italian directors at the end of World War II, a genre that defied studio conventions by filming on the streets, using nonprofessional or semi-professional actors to define a working class ruined by the war.
one-shot A shot in which a single character is shown, often inserted into the over-the-shoulder cutting pattern.
optical printer A synchronized projector and camera that allows exposed film to be recorded on another piece of unexposed film to create a process shot.
optical soundtrack An “image” of the sound waves that, converted and amplified, reproduces the recorded sound of the film.
over-the-shoulder cutting pattern A major component of the classical Hollywood style. A dialogue sequence (two people talking to each other) begins with a two-shot of the participants and then proceeds to cut from over the shoulder of one speaker to over the shoulder of the other. Occasionally a shot of one of the participants talking or listening will be cut into the pattern.
pan The camera pivots on its tripod or dolly, side to side.
panned and scanned The only way to show the entire width of a wide-screen film on pre-flat screen television was to matte the top and bottom of the screen with black bars (the process is called letter-box format). Because many people believe they are seeing less of the film in this format (they are actually seeing more), television broadcasters and videotape distributors blow up the image to a square and move the focus around in that image to find what they think are the important elements.
parallel editing Two scenes occurring at different places shown one after the other, creating the illusion of simultaneity. See also cross cutting.
point of view Simply, the representation of what a character sees. But it also refers to the dominant “voice” of the film, the teller of the tale, similar to third-person point of view in fiction.
post-studio period The current state where many films are independent from the major studios or only codependent on them for financing and distribution.
process shot Any shot, some of whose elements are added optically or digitally after the initial shot is made.
producer The individual who administers the making of an entire film and often puts together its financing.
producer system Put in place in the early 1920s, this gave the producer control over the film from inception to release.
product placement Advertising embedded in a film.
Production Code Starting in the early 1930s, a strict set of guidelines that set out for filmmakers what could and could not be shown on screen. The code died in the early 1960s, to be replaced by the MPAA ratings.
production designer The person who conceives and elaborates the film’s rooms and exteriors that help give a film its visual texture.
reaction shot A cut is made to the response or reaction of a character to what has just occurred.
rear-screen projection The background of a scene is projected on a screen from the back, while the actors play their roles in front of the screen. Actors and the projection are photographed by a camera in front of them and the screen.
release print A print made by the film distributor to send out to theaters.
reverse shot Cutting to the opposite side of the previous shot. In a dialogue scene, a reverse shot occurs when a cut is made from over the shoulder of one character to over the shoulder of the other character. If a character is seen looking at something and a cut is made to what she is looking at, that is a reverse shot.
room tone A sound effect that creates ambient sounds of people talking or just a low volume sound in the background of an enclosed space. See also world tone.
rotoscope A method in traditional or digital animation in which live action is drawn over to create an animated effect. Rotoscoping has become a major tool in live action film, as a computer traces the movement of a figure that is then animated.
scene A unit of action or a segment of a film narrative.
scopophilia Literally “love of looking.”
screwball comedy A film of the 1930s in which both members of a romantic— often married— couple carry equal weight with dialogue of wit, strength, and self-possession.
second unit A small crew that is sent out to shoot locations that will be intercut with the studio footage or as part of a process shot.
sequence Sometimes used interchangeably with scene, it can often mean a related series of scenes and shots.
shallow focus Figures in the foreground are in focus; the background is very soft.
shot An unedited, or uncut, length of film.
shot/reverse shot Any pair of shots in which the second shot reveals what is on the other side of the previous shot. If, for example, the first shot is a character looking at something and the second shot is a hat, the hat constitutes the reverse shot and we assume that the character is looking at the hat.
silent era From the beginning of film to the late 1920s, there was no recorded sound accompanying the image. Nonetheless, films were rarely shown without sound. A piano or, in a big movie palace, an entire symphony orchestra played a score that was often created especially for a particular film.
soft focus This occurs in any shot in which elements—including the figure in close-up—are not in perfect focus.
soundtrack Either an optical or a magnetic strip along the side of the film that contains the recorded sound for the film.
Steadicam A gyroscopic mechanism that allows the camera operator to strap the camera to his body and create steady tracking shots.
stop action The camera is shut off, elements of the scene changed, and the camera restarted, creating trick effects. Stop motion refers to photographing an object one or a few frames at a time, used when creating pre-CGI animation.
storyboarding Sketching out the shots before production. These days called previsualization and rendered on the computer.
studio system Beginning in the early 1920s, the film studios developed a production process— with the producer at the head on any given film—and a style of shooting and editing that, despite many variations, remains to this day.
subgenre Films that use major elements of an established genre along with other conventions belong to a subgenre. The heist film is a subgenre of the gangster film, as are many road movies and even some films noir.
suture effect A critical theory that addresses the way the viewer is “stitched” into the fabric of a film’s narrative.
take A shot made during the production of a film. A scene in a film is the result of editorial choices made from many differing takes.
Technicolor A proprietary color process that used three strips of black and white film, each one exposed to either red, or blue, or green light. These strips were then used to transfer color dye to impart a rich color to film that did not fade with age.
three-point lighting The basic lighting pattern of key light for the face, back light to separate the figure from the background, and fill light to create the appropriate shadow and bright spots in the frame.
track The camera moves on a transport mechanism like a tripod or dolly. This mechanism is put on rails so that the camera will move smoothly. A lateral track moves horizontally. The result is a tracking shot.
trailer An industry term for “coming attractions.”
two-shot A shot composed of two people.
VistaVision Paramount’s response to CinemaScope, a non-anamorphic wide-screen process that originates on 70-mm film moving horizontally through the camera and is then printed vertically for the 35-mm release print.
voice-over narration Either a character in the film or a voice not associated with a character tells some of the story and fills in some of the blanks. In the hands of some directors, notably Stanley Kubrick, the voice-over narrator is not dependable.
wide shot A shot that takes in a large amount of space, often created with a wide-angle lens.
wipe An editing device, now defunct, in which one shot is removed and a second one introduced by a diagonal line sweeping it off the screen.
world tone A sound effect of traffic and other street sounds to accompany a sequence taking place outside.
zoom Changing the focal length of lenses by moving them while the camera is stationary, creating the impression of movement from near to far or the reverse.