Pulp Fiction

• Pulp Fiction (1994, Tarantino, USA) 18, 148mins
• Mise-en-scène


  Everything within the frame which includes setting, props, staging, costume and makeup, figure expression and movement and off-screen space
• Shot types


  • Long shot, wide shot, medium shot, close-up, extreme close up, point of view, over-the-shoulder, two shot, establishing shot
• Angles


  • High angle, low angle, eyeline match, bird's eye view, point of view, canted, Dutch
• Movements


  • Pan, tilt, track, dolly, zoom, handheld/steadicam, crane shots, whip pan
• Focus


  Shallow, deep, depth-of-field, pull focus
• Lighting


  • Background, cameo, flood, high key, key, low key, mood, Rembrandt, chiaroscuro, stage, soft, fill, lens flare
• Other cinematography techniques


  • Multiple-camera, arc shot, bridging shot, money shot, freeze-frame, forced perspective, handheld, locked down, library, matte, top
• Meisner Technique


  Based around the concept of "truthful acting", encouraging actors to act on their emotional impulses
• Stanislavski's System


  Requires an actor to recall past experiences and memories and bring them into any given scene or character
• Lee Strasberg's Method


  Actors should intensify their connections to the work by imitating their character's experiences within the context of their real lives
• Atlantic's Practical Aesthetics


  Focused on script analysis, understanding the story and given circumstances, and then choosing an action and making specific choices to create a character
• Basics of performance


  • Physical expression
  • Vocal delivery
  • Interaction between performers
  • Blocking within a scene
  • Portrayal of thoughts, feelings and emotions
• Editing techniques


  • Cut
  • Continuity editing
  • Continuity errors
  • Cross cutting
  • Dissolve
  • Editing
  • Establishing shot
  • Eyeline match
  • Fade
  • Final cut
  • Iris
  • Jump cut
  • Matched cut
  • Montage
  • Rough cut
  • Sequence shot
  • Shot/reverse shot cutting
  • Wipe
• Sound types


  • Diegetic sound
  • Non-diegetic sound
  • Parallel sound
  • Contrapuntal sound
  • Sound bridges
  • Synchronous sound
  • Sonic flashback
  • Foley sound
  • Incidental
  • Tempo/key
  • Instrumentation
• Brief history of film

  • Peter Mark Roget's 'Persistence of Vision' theory (1824)
  • Eadward Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope illusion of 'The Horse in Motion' (1878)
  • Ting Huan - Zoetrope (180AD)
  • The Magic Lantern – light projected imagery (17th century Europe/US)
  • Camera obscura – 3rd century AD pinhole camera – later developed by Ibn Al-Haitham
  • Daguerreotype (1839) – Daguerre/Niepce
  • Calotype Process (1835)
  • The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895, dir: Lumiere Brothers)
  • A Trip to the Moon (1902, dir: Georges Melies)
  • The Great Train Robbery (1903, dir: Edwin S.Porter)
  • The Birth of a Nation (1915, dir: D.W. Griffith)
• Zoopraxiscope


  Camera invented after Muybridge's 'The Horse in Motion' that took single shots in quick succession
• Kinetograph


  Invented by William Kennedy Dickson and Thomas Edison in 1890 to fully capture motion picture

  
• Kinetoscope


  Invented by Thomas Edison in 1891 to view motion picture
• Edison's movie studio


  Shack-like, films no longer than cell reels, focused on 'peep shows'
• Lumiere Brothers' Cinematographe


  Launched the dawn of modern cinema, uniting technology with creativity
• Early silent cinema films

  • The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895, dir: Lumiere Brothers)
  • A Trip to the Moon (1902, dir: Georges Melies)
  • The Great Train Robbery (1903, dir: Edwin S.Porter)
  • The Birth of a Nation (1915, dir: D.W. Griffith)
• Innovations of silent cinema

  • Battleship Potemkin (1925, dir: Sergei Eisenstein)
  • The Kid (1921, dir: Charlie Chaplin)
  • The General (1927, dir: Buster Keaton)
  • Safety Last! (1923, dir: H. Lloyd)
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, dir: Carl Theodore Dreyer)
  • The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari (1919, dir: Robert Wiene)
  • Metropolis (1927, dir: Fritz Lang)
  • A Man With A Movie Camera (1929, dir: Dziga Vertov)
  • Pandora's Box (1929, G.W. Pabst)
• After the birth of narrative with The Great Train Robbery (1903) and the controversial epic of D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), cinematic inventiveness erupted
• It took until 1927 for the first talkie 'The Jazz Singer', so the 1910s and 1920s were filled with experimental silent films
• Stars of the silent era included Mae West, Louise Brooks, Douglas Fairbanks and Greta Garbo
• French New Wave


  New cinematic movement developed by a group of critics from the Cahiers du Cinema journal, characterised by jump cuts, post-modernism and a self-reflexive style
• 70s Rebels


  Scorsese, Coppola, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Polanski - directors who broke through as auteurs after the disintegration of the Hays Production Code and the Studio System, making adult films reflecting society's anti-authoritarian, rebellious, hippie attitude
• European auteurs


  Fellini, Bergman, Bertolucci, Tarkvosky - Italian, Scandinavian and Russian directors whose cinema was thriving
• The Big Five


  • Paramount
  • Universal
  • Loews (MGM)
  • Fox
  • Warner
• The Little Three


  • Columbia
  • United Artists
  • RKO
• Vertical integration


  Hollywood companies' method to control and dominate the film industry with a high output vertical integration model, dictating terms to employees/stars and ensuring which films were played
• Hays Production Code


  Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 that enforced censorship
• Classic Hollywood films


  • Bringing Up Baby (1938, dir: Howard Hawks)
  • Citizen Kane (1941, dir: Orson Welles)
  • Casablanca (1942, dir: Michael Curtiz)
  • Gone With The Wind (1939, dir: V. Fleming)
• Counter-cultural auteur films


  • Breathless (1960, dir: Francois Truffaut)
  • Taxi Driver (1976, dir: Martin Scorsese)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir: S Kubrick)
  • The Godfather (1972. dir: Francis Ford Coppola)
• Spielberg formula


  Three act structure, delayed cause/effect to develop tension, the protagonist heroically overcoming insurmountable obstacles and an epic scale with an otherworldly/monstrous antagonist
• Cameron formula


  CGI money shot, epic scale and grandeur of a concept with big budgets and big box-office intake, pioneering new technology such as 3D
• Bay formula


  Alpha male masculine persona, objectification of women, special effects overwhelming the screen
• Franchise formula


  Comic books, science-fiction, fantasy world, MI5 and CIA agents, children's book adaptations and fast car action flicks
• Disney Pixar formula


  Extended metaphors, satirical nuances and motifs in children's films