Sg's Assignment.docx

Summary

Session (10.00 am to 1.30 pm)

Wednesday (06-02-2019)

The session started with an interactive discussion. The participants, from varied disciplines introduced themselves and listed their reasons for joining the course. After the introduction, Mr. Pankaj Sexena continued with the power point presentation and said that film is a powerful medium that uses pictures which makes it powerful. According to him, pictures are beautiful, arresting and charming. Then there are pictures which are cute, poignant and inspirational. Pictures can be symbolic also, e.g. the picture of pro-democratic movement in China is symbolic of human spirit to stand against ruthless power. There are pictures which can be intriguing and can even depict concepts such as the concept – ‘anger is not good’. They can at times play games and reveal societies as the picture of Donald Trump’s face on the urinals. Pictures have, further, the ability to raise dilemmas also, e.g. the picture of a child dying of malnutrition captured by the South African photojournalist, Kevin Carter. A picture is thus, worth 10,000 words. Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than words and retain visuals longer in memory. Films also use moving pictures and sounds. The spoken word is life like, easy to comprehend and has a lasting impression. Sounds thus go beyond spoken word. A clip from the movie ‘Citylight’ and the famous shower scene from ‘Psycho’ emphasised the importance of sound sequencing in movies. Both the clips were first played without sounds to underscore the relevance of appropriate background sounds. After the discussion on the above series, it was observed that theatre is an actor’s medium while cinema is a director’s medium. The Kuleshov’s experiment illustrates the mental phenomenon by which viewers derive meaning from the interaction of different sequential shots from an isolated shot. So cinema can be studied academically also and it stands apart in this regard.

Poonam Jain

1

Summary

Session (10.00 am to 1.30 pm)

Thursday (07-02-2019)

The session began with the discussion of Charlie Chaplin’s movie ‘Kid’ (1921) which was shown the previous day. Charlie played the role of a tramp in most of his movie and did justice to the role. It was because of his social and economic background which he had experienced for around 17-18 years of his life. He did not gain success overnight and that he did many odd jobs before getting a role in a film. Chaplin’s talent knew no bounds because he always succeeded in adding a new flavour to the character of the tramp. The discussion let the exchange of views of the participants. Then there was a discussion on the history of world cinema with various technical developments that occurred during its course. This started with the important contributions of Georg Melies, who later discovered various camera tricks like double exposure and slow motion. Then a clip from Martin Scorsese’s film ‘Hugo’ depicting the life of the film maker, was shown. The cameras and projectors were hand operated at that time. Edvin S. Porter, another significant film maker developed cinematic language in the domain of world cinema. The technique of parallel editing and the panning in the movie was highlighted through a clip from Porter’s movie ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903). There was a marked difference between the techniques of the films made in 1902 and 1903. These historical aspects of cinematic developments really helped the participants to study films academically. Afterwards, the history of Indian cinema was told through the slideshow. In India the cinema came into existence in 1896 when Maurice Sester of Lumiere brought six films to India. There was phase of Silent Era from 1897 to 1902 when large number of film companies employed variety of devices. But the saddest part in the history of Indian cinema is that most of films and even their clippings in parts are not available as no effort was done to preserve them.

Poonam Jain

2