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motion picture: [noun] a series of pictures projected on a screen in rapid succession with objects shown in successive positions slightly changed so as to produce the optical effect of a continuous picture in which the objects move.
- Overview
- Essential characteristics of film
A film, also called a movie or a motion picture, is a series of still photographs on film projected onto a screen using light in rapid succession. The optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement.
What are the different types of films?
Films can be classified as documentaries, experimental films, animated films, and fictional genres such as westerns, comedies, thrillers, and musicals, among many others.
What are some of the major film festivals?
Some of the world's major film festivals are the Berlin International Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Czech Republic), the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, the Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, the Telluride Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival.
What awards are given for films?
In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that seemed fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound. It exists today in styles that differ significantly from country to country and in forms as diverse as the documentary created by one person with a handheld camera and the multimillion-dollar epic involving hundreds of performers and technicians.
A number of factors immediately come to mind in connection with the film experience. For one thing, there is something mildly hypnotic about the illusion of movement that holds the attention and may even lower critical resistance. The accuracy of the film image is compelling because it is made by a nonhuman, scientific process. In addition, the motion picture gives what has been called a strong sense of being present; the film image always appears to be in the present tense. There is also the concrete nature of film; it appears to show actual people and things.
No less important than any of the above are the conditions under which the motion picture ideally is seen, where everything helps to dominate the spectators. They are taken from their everyday environment, partially isolated from others, and comfortably seated in a dark auditorium. The darkness concentrates their attention and prevents comparison of the image on the screen with surrounding objects or people. For a while, spectators live in the world the motion picture unfolds before them.
Still, the escape into the world of the film is not complete. Only rarely does the audience react as if the events on the screen are real—for instance, by ducking before an onrushing locomotive in a special three-dimensional effect. Moreover, such effects are considered to be a relatively low form of the art of motion pictures. Much more often, viewers expect a film to be truer to certain unwritten conventions than to the real world. Although spectators may sometimes expect exact realism in details of dress or locale, just as often they expect the film to escape from the real world and make them exercise their imagination, a demand made by great works of art in all forms.
The sense of reality most films strive for results from a set of codes, or rules, that are implicitly accepted by viewers and confirmed through habitual filmgoing. The use of brownish lighting, filters, and props, for example, has come to signify the past in films about American life in the early 20th century (as in The Godfather [1972] and Days of Heaven [1978]). The brownish tinge that is associated with such films is a visual code intended to evoke a viewer’s perceptions of an earlier era, when photographs were printed in sepia, or brown, tones. Storytelling codes are even more conspicuous in their manipulation of actual reality to achieve an effect of reality. Audiences are prepared to skip over huge expanses of time in order to reach the dramatic moments of a story. La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers), for example, begins in a torture chamber where a captured Algerian rebel has just given away the location of his cohorts. In a matter of seconds that location is attacked, and the drive of the search-and-destroy mission pushes the audience to believe in the fantastic speed and precision of the operation. Furthermore, the audience readily accepts shots from impossible points of view if other aspects of the film signal the shot as real. For example, the rebels in The Battle of Algiers are shown inside a walled-up hiding place, yet this unrealistic view seems authentic because the film’s grainy photography plays on the spectator’s unconscious association of poor black-and-white images with newsreels.
Fidelity in the reproduction of details is much less important than the appeal made by the story to an emotional response, an appeal based on innate characteristics of the motion-picture medium. These essential characteristics can be divided into those that pertain primarily to the motion-picture image, those that pertain to motion pictures as a unique medium for works of art, and those that derive from the experience of viewing motion pictures.
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Mar 14, 2024 · shooting angle. (Show more) cinematography, the art and technology of motion-picture photography. It involves such techniques as the general composition of a scene; the lighting of the set or location; the choice of cameras, lenses, filters, and film stock; the camera angle and movements; and the integration of any special effects.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 7, 2023 · The film is 6 centimeters wide and comes in 6×4.5, 6×6, 6×7, and panoramic 6×13. Whereas 35mm film comes in a convenient cartridge that’s pretty easy to load into your camera, 120 film comes ...
Jan 22, 2023 · What is cinematography? Cinematography is the art and craft of making motion pictures by capturing a story visually. Though, technically, cinematography is the art and the science of recording light either electronically onto an image sensor or chemically onto film. Taken from the Greek for "writing with movement," cinematography is the ...
Motion picture definition: a sequence of consecutive still images photographed in a series by a specially designed camera (motion-picture camera ) and thrown on a screen by a projector (motion-picture projector ) in such rapid succession as to give the illusion of natural movement.
In 1890 Dickson unveiled the Kinetograph, a primitive motion picture camera. In 1892 he announced the invention of the Kinestoscope, a machine that could project the moving images onto a screen ...
